The world inches toward catastrophic climate events: 'Bigger shocks are on the way — Phys.org

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

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Add as preferred source In the opening scene of American writer Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future," a heat wave combined with a breakdown of the electrical grid in India kills 20 million people. The devastation causes the world's nations to unite to combat climate change.

Scientists have long warned that the world will experience more intense extreme weather events like heat waves, storms, floods and droughts. But what once seemed like the realm of fiction is now discussed as a possibility, even an inevitability.

Warning about an "extreme of extremes" or the "Other Big One," a play off the California reference of a big future earthquake, can be fraught. After all, nobody can say for sure when a weather catastrophe may happen. But in the last few years, the planetary ingredients needed for a massive disturbance have been building. And alarm is growing.

"The risk is that people just think you are exaggerating," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources. "It's the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' problem. Sometimes wolves are real. If it's outside the door, wouldn't you want to know?"

In the 1850s, while living in Seneca Falls, New York, amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote did a series of experiments that put different substances, including carbon dioxide and moist air, inside glass cylinders and left them in the sun. What she found was extraordinary: cylinders with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is released when coal, gas or oil is burned, heated up faster and took longer to cool after the sun went down.

Fast-forward: Today, Earth is being heated by massive amounts of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere, leading to a gradual rise in average global temperature. That increase, 1.44 degrees Celsius (2.59 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer in 2025 compared to the early 1800s, leads to more frequent, and more intense, extreme weather events.

The country that has released the most greenhouse gas, and thus contributed most to climate change, is the United States. But don't expect recognition of that, much less major government-led efforts to combat it, as the country marks its 250th birthday. President Donald Trump has called climate change "the greatest con job ever," referred to climate policies as a "Green New Scam" and said U.N. climate predictions were made by "stupid people."

At any given time there are numerous extreme weather events happening around the globe. Indeed, some have already been so big that we have arguably entered an age of extremes.

Consider Australia's "Black Summer" of wildfires in 2019 and 2020, when 19 million hectares (over 46 million acres) were scorched. Or Pakistan in 2022, when flooding left a third of the country under water . Or Hurricanes Milton and Helene in 2024, which ravaged parts of the southern United States. That is to say nothing of periodic smaller disasters, such as last year's Texas floods that engulfed young campers; the Los Angeles wildfires that chewed through entire neighborhoods; and Typhoon Kalmaegi, which walloped Vietnam and the Philippines.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at Australian National University, says she had a "come to Jesus moment" when she realized that constant extreme weather events wouldn't stop even if the world could immediately reach net zero, the point when as much greenhouse gas is taken out of the atmosphere as released into it. Many countries and major companies have net-zero targets for 2050 or beyond.

Because carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and so much has already built up, the damage could take centuries to reverse. And we keep adding more.

"It's the issue of the frog in the boiling water," said Perkins-Kirkpatrick. "If we get used to bracing ourselves, are we going to notice?"

What's clear is that no country is truly prepared for a major climate disaster, and the risks are changing.

Robinson, whose book was published in 2020, says if he were writing today he would include a chapter on wildfires, which have become larger and more destructive. And while the potential heat disaster he writes about in India would arguably be less likely today, thanks to less reliance on the grid and use of solar power, Robinson believes the risks of catastrophe have increased.

The book, he says, "still has a purpose."

It's basic psychology to avoid talking about uncomfortable things. Climate change, depressing and overwhelming, falls into that category.

Instead of taking action by radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or updating our infrastructure to live in a world altered by extreme weather events, a common response, from governments to individuals has largely been to ignore it. Part of the challenge is the care scientists must take when discussing extreme events.

It's impossible to say, for example, that a disaster will happen in a certain year or even decade. But modeling improves every year, and the amount of time between extreme events is shrinking.

Sonia Seneviratne is a Swiss climatologist who vice chairs a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top U.N. body of climate scientists. Seneviratne likens the risk to smoking and lung cancer. People who smoke won't necessarily get lung cancer, but the chances are higher and doctors should say that. Similarly, the risk of massive extreme events rises with every tenth of a degree.

"If such an event happened, I could already see the criticism of people saying, 'Climate scientists didn't tell us,'" Seneviratne said. "But we did."

While earthquakes are not connected to climate change, the way many cities in earthquake-prone California have prepared for a potential Big One is as an example of what's possible. Central to that effort has be...

The world inches toward catastrophic climate events: 'Bigger shocks are on the way — Phys.org | AIPROPX