‘Things Don’t Always Change in a Nice, Gradual Way’
Climate change feels more real now than ever.
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the overlapping climate disasters. In Phoenix, Arizona, the temperature has broken 110 degrees for nearly two weeks running. The waters off the Florida coast are approaching hot-tub hot, and before long, marine heat waves may cover half the world’s oceans. Up north, Canada’s worst wildfire season on record burns on and continues to suffocate American cities with sporadic smoke, which may not clear for good until October. In the Northeast, floods have put towns underwater, erased entire roadways, and left train tracks eerily suspended 100 feet in the air. Also, the sea ice in Antarctica—which should be expanding rapidly right now, because, remember, it’s winter down there—may be losing mass.
In one sense, this pile-up of crises is exactly what climate scientists expected. Global temperatures are rising at pretty much the anticipated rate, Simon Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, told me, and natural disasters are corollaries to that fact. There will be some year-to-year variation in what happens—and this one may clock in with slightly worse conditions, overall, than trend lines would predict. But the fact is, climate change is implicated at least to some extent in all of these disasters. It makes the hot days hotter. It makes rainstorms more intense. It dries out landscapes and primes them for ignition. “We don’t need to do a specific attribution study anymore” to make such assertions, Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “We’ve been doing this for 20 years now … This is so far from rocket science.”
But when it comes to climate science, what researchers “expect” can be a sketchy concept. “We know the overall path we’re on,” Alex Ruane, a climate scientist at NASA, told me, but “things don’t always change in a nice, gradual way.” Although the global situation is deteriorating at about the rate that leading models would predict, more specific, local changes may come as a surprise. Climate change is, at its core, a destabilizing force: Think of its effects as being predictably unpredictable. The total surface area of the Antarctic sea ice, for example, is currently more than four standard deviations smaller than the average for this time of year. That’s not just breaking the record since measurements began in the 1970s; that’s shattering the record. Why exactly this has happened now—and whether it will end up as a terrifying blip or a permanent state—is still an open question. Likewise, scientists do not yet fully understand how climate change affects the way that weather systems move across the globe. A storm may be diverted from a drought-stricken region to an already sodden town, or a scorching atmosphere may stall out in a single place, as we’re seeing with the heat dome that has settled over Phoenix.
Even if those disasters do play out exactly as expected, the scientists I spoke with said they’ve noticed shifts in how Americans are discussing them. “People are no longer talking about climate change in the future tense,” Ruane said. “They’re talking about climate change in the present tense.” More and more of them have personal tales of climate woe. Disasters are no longer framed as harbingers; they’re simply understood to be the way things are. “These are not canaries in the coal mine,” Schmidt said. “The canaries died a long time ago.”
Back when he worked at The Atlantic, my former colleague Robinson Meyer would end his weekly newsletter with a section called “Someone Else’s Weather,” because, as he put it, “the climate is someone else’s weather.” I always took this to mean that the abstraction we refer to as the climate is a concrete, imminent reality for someone, somewhere. It’s the sky above their head, the earth beneath their feet, the feeling of the air around them.
This year’s accumulating catastrophes reinforce this formulation, but they also take it one step further. The heat and the fires and the melting and the floods all contribute to a growing sense that climate change is happening right here and now—that the climate truly has become the weather. We stay in because it’s hot. We take a different route to work because the roads have been washed out. We adjust our plans because of wildfire smoke in the same way that we’ve always done for bouts of lightning and rain. More and more, the climate is not someone else’s weather. It’s our own.
Hanna Rosin speaks with the climate writer Emma Pattee on how extreme heat is already changing our kids' summers. Listen to Radio Atlantic:
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