There’s no escaping climate change as extreme weather events abound

Ishaan Tharoor Columnist

July 14, 2023 at 12:00 a.m. EDT

A man walks down a flooded street in Montpelier, Vt., on Tuesday. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

One can grow numb to the temperature records that keep ascending around the world. For months across the Northern Hemisphere, we have seen heat wave after heat wave spike thermometers, melt roads and devastate crops. This week alone, we may see all-time temperature highs across the world, including parts of the southwest United States and southern Europe. At the same time, other parts of the planet, such as north India and New England, are experiencing record rainfall.

Readers of Today’s WorldView are likely accustomed to the periodic missive about these snowballing, extreme weather events, and their inescapable link to a planet that is warming from man-made emissions. But the recent grim climate superlatives bear consideration: According to the U.N’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), last week was the hottest on record for the planet. It came swiftly on the heels of the hottest June on record, as measured by multiple U.S. government agencies. Ocean temperatures in parts of the Atlantic were the hottest they have been in close to two centuries, and that’s before the onset of typically hotter marine surface temperatures in the later months of summer.

“The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing,” my colleague Sarah Kaplan wrote.

You can hear the alarm in the widespread flooding in north India, a part of the world that is on the front lines of climate change, buffeted by heat waves, torrential rains and the growing consequences of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Last week, New Delhi experienced its wettest day in decades as rain flooded the old city and triggered deadly flash floods in states nearby.

You can hear the alarm in the skyrocketing price of olive oil, as record droughts and extended heat waves in countries like Spain wreck crops. You can hear it in the epic wildfires that blazed through Canada and sent plumes of smoke as far away as Europe. And you can hear it in the parched citizens of Uruguay’s capital Montevideo, where residents are now finding salty water in their taps after an extended drought has depleted aquifers and led to a national crisis.

And you can certainly hear it in the United States — even though the scale of the climate disaster has taken long to register in the American imagination. “Americans suffer from a longstanding delusion, a hangover of sorts from the Manifest Destiny era, that there will always be some corner of our vast country to escape to,” wrote independent journalist Jonathan Mingle in the New York Times.

From coast to coast this week, the ravages of climate change were clear. In leafy Vermont, historic rainfall led to the submersion of whole towns. “This, to me, is almost as classic a signal of climate change as warm temperatures,” Art DeGaetano, a professor at Cornell University, told my colleagues. “In a warmer world, this is what you would expect.”

As temperatures soared, some third of all Americans faced combined heat and humidity conditions that posed an immediate public health risk. “We’re seeing temperatures exceed those that can support life. Certain places are becoming uninhabitable,” Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said to my colleagues.

The weather is being exacerbated by the El Niño phenomenon, brewing in the Pacific. “We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,” Christopher Hewitt, WMO director of climate services, told reporters Monday.

For those tracking climate change, the implications are obvious and stark. Kaplan pointed to the link between climate change and weather disasters. “When the planet’s average temperature is higher, heat waves can reach previously unheard of extremes.”

Kaplan also wrote about the hardening scientific consensus surrounding the advent of the “Anthropocene,” a new geological age where “human activity has had a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems, via increased fossil fuel consumption, nuclear weapons tests and deforestation.”

And yet the politics of this epoch fail to grapple with its scientific reality. In the United States, as much of the country baked under stifling heat, Republicans circulated a memo advising colleagues in the Senate to reject the Biden administration’s efforts across agencies to focus on and fund climate resilience and environmental justice efforts. Pessimism hangs over the next major global climate summit, dubbed COP 28, to be held in the United Arab Emirates toward the end of the year.

While governments and companies have made commitments to slash emissions, scientists still insist more needs to be done and faster, citing, with growing alarm, the ways in which we may have already breached dangerous climactic tipping points.

“This is not the new normal,” Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College London, told Kaplan. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”

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