Climate change came for Maui; the rest of us are next
Climate change, as scientists have long anticipated, is making the weather more extreme and unpredictable. This summer, we’re being taught the tragic lesson that we all need to prepare for “unlikely” disasters as well as familiar ones, and to look for risk in new places.
The deadly wildfires on Maui are the most horrifying example. One culprit in the death and devastation in the historic, now-gutted Hawaiian town of Lahaina: The surrounding hillsides were covered with nonnative, invasive grasses — originally planted on the island by humans — which burned explosively.
Those grasses were so dry and flammable because the island, especially the area around Lahaina, is experiencing a “flash drought.” In late May, none of the island was unusually dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Today, the whole island is either abnormally dry or experiencing moderate to severe drought. Scientists have warned that flash droughts will occur more frequently because of climate change.
The Maui fires were greatly intensified by high winds, caused by the combination of a strong high-pressure system to the north of the island and the powerful Hurricane Dora to the south. Those atmospheric forces worked together like an eggbeater, whipping winds with gusts of up to 80 mph. Climate change has been predicted to intensify both high-pressure heat domes and tropical storms such as Dora.
Any of these things in isolation — the drought, the winds from the high-pressure system, the passing hurricane — could have created a problem for Maui. Happening all at once, they created what climate scientist Michael Mann, the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, called “a ‘compound’ climate catastrophe.”
One lesson we must learn from Maui is that combinations of circumstances that we think of as unlikely might no longer be unlikely at all. And bad luck won’t be confined to small islands far away.
By now, there’s ample evidence of the danger and force of extreme heat alone. Globally, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this past June was the hottest one recorded on the planet — and July was the hottest month since record-keeping began 174 years ago, with average temperatures
worldwide being 1.8 degrees above the long-term average.
The city of Phoenix saw a record 31 consecutive days with high temperatures at or above 110 degrees; the string was finally broken by a day when the high was only 108. Punishing heat domes parked over much of the southern half of the country for much of the summer. Extreme heat and drought also plagued parts of Europe, North Africa and western China.
Maui is just the latest place to ignite. Canada is in the midst of its worst fire season in history, during which infernos generated smoke that choked cities in the United States. Thousands of tourists and residents had to be evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in July because of raging wildfires.
And rain might bring additional suffering instead of relief. In China, extreme heat was followed by two typhoons that made landfall, bringing the heaviest rainfall in Beijing in 140 years and causing floods that killed at least 62 people.
What most of us haven’t adequately internalized yet is that this is how it’s going to be. We have changed the climate, which has changed the weather. We need to stop making things worse, which means
switching from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. And we need to face the new reality we have forged.
The insurance industry is already making an adjustment that we all soon will feel. A report last week by the reinsurance giant Swiss Re calculated that severe thunderstorms in the United States accounted for 68% of insured natural catastrophe losses worldwide in the first half of this year. Reinsurance companies will pass along those costs to the primary insurers who cover your home and your car. Primary insurers will eventually pass along those costs to you — though imagine facing the random violence of extreme weather without insurance at all.
As individuals and as communities, we need to think more about worst-case scenarios and actively plan for them. We have an old hemlock tree in front of our house that’s near the end of its life span. I love it, but we’re going to have to take it down and plant a replacement — before a storm brings it down.
Climate change is personal. Act accordingly.