How extreme weather batters the wealthy world
Disasters drive home the fact that the world is neither prepared to slow down climate change nor live with it
Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.
Only days before in the northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.
The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas - activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
Dying from extreme weather
“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save people’s lives.”
The floods in Europe have killed at least 165 people, most of them in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. Across Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, hundreds have been reported as missing, which suggests the death toll could rise. Questions are now being raised about whether authorities adequately warned the public about risks.
The bigger question is whether the mounting disasters in the developed world will have a bearing on what the world’s most influential countries and companies will do to reduce their own emissions of planet-warming gases. They come a few months before United Nations-led climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, effectively a moment of reckoning for whether the nations of the world will be able to agree on ways to rein in emissions enough to avert the worst effects of climate change.
Funding to manage climate change
Disasters magnified by global warming have left a long trail of death and loss across much of the developing world, after all, wiping out crops in Bangladesh, leveling villages in Honduras and threatening the very existence of small island nations. Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines in the run-up to climate talks in 2013, which prompted developing-country representatives to press for funding to deal with loss and damage they face over time for climate-induced disasters that they were not responsible for. That was rejected by richer countries, including the United States and Europe.
“Extreme weather events in developing countries often cause great death and destruction - but these are seen as our responsibility, not something made worse by more than a hundred years of greenhouse gases emitted by industrialized countries,” said Ulka Kelkar, climate director at the India office of the World Resources Institute. These intensifying disasters now striking richer countries, she said, show that developing countries seeking the world’s help to fight climate change “have not been crying wolf.”
Indeed, even since the 2015 Paris Agreement was negotiated, with the goal of averting the worst effects of climate change, global emissions have kept increasing. China is the world’s biggest emitter today. Emissions have been steadily declining in both the United States and Europe, but not at the pace required to limit global temperature rise.
A reminder of the shared costs came from Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, an island nation at acute risk from sea level rise. “While not all are affected equally, this tragic event is a reminder that, in the climate emergency, no one is safe, whether they live on a small island nation like mine or a developed Western European state,” Nasheed said in a statement on behalf of a group of countries that call themselves the Climate Vulnerable Forum.
Ferocity of disasters
The ferocity of these disasters is as notable as their timing, coming before the global talks in Glasgow to try to reach agreement on fighting climate change. The world has a poor track record on cooperation so far, and this month new diplomatic tensions emerged. Among major economies, the European Commission last week introduced the most ambitious road map for change. It proposed laws to ban the sale of gas and diesel cars by 2035, require most industries to pay for the emissions they produce and, most significantly, impose a tax on imports from countries with less stringent climate policies.
Vigorous objections
But those proposals are widely expected to meet vigorous objections both from within Europe and from other countries whose businesses could be threatened by the proposed carbon border tax.
The events of this summer come after decades of neglect of science. An exhaustive scientific assessment in 2018 warned that a failure to keep the average global temperature from rising past 1.5C could usher in catastrophic results.
The report offered world leaders a practical, albeit narrow path out of chaos. It required the world as a whole to halve emissions by 2030. Since then, however, global emissions have continued rising, so much so that global average temperature has increased by more than one degree Celsius since 1880, narrowing the path to keep the increase below the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold.
Our world is changing. It is getting warmer and weather events are becoming more extreme. And for those who doubt the science of climate change, then they need look no farther than at the devastation across much of northwestern Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Severe summer thunderstorms — a month’s rain fell in a little over 12 hours, inundating flood systems, flooding entire towns and villages, submerging communities and simply washing away defences that had been in place for decades. And so far, close to 200 people are dead, many more missing and people across the region simply aghast at the loss of life and property.
Nothing like this has happened before and nothing could have prepared them for the destructive deluge. But the reality now is that such extreme weather events will become the norm as our planet heats up because of our dependence of fossil fuels and releasing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into our planet’s atmosphere.
As our planet heats up, air becomes warmer. And warm air traps moisture that has to fall. Given that the Gulf Stream’s normal flow patterns have been disrupted and diverted this summer, a vicious cycle of warm air centred over the region washing away homes and houses, people and property. In the southern Mediterranean, temperatures are soaring to record levels. To the east, in Siberia, temperatures at all-time highs, with much of the vast region burning under dozens of forest fires. In the coming days, the northwestern US states and western Canada will endure their fourth heatwave in five weeks. Together, all of these events are connected by the undeniable reality of climate change. For decades we have been warned that we must act.
For decades, nations have ignored warnings. And now, the peril is real. We are losing the ability to predict the real effects of our weather events as they become more severe, extreme and prolonged. And our traditional methods of living, our flood and storm management techniques, our civil engineering, cannot cope. If ever there was a time to act on climate change, it is now. The clock has run down, the sand has fallen to the bottom of the hourglass. And the grains of mistruths offered by climate deniers are clear for all to see. We need to cut our carbon emissions. We need agreed targets. We have to act. And it has to happen now.