CNN
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is playing out like an apocalypse movie: a tale of heat, floods and fire. But scientists warn this may only be a preview of the unpredictable chaos to come if the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution.
Just over halfway through July and already a slew of extreme weather records has been broken.
A prolonged, unrelenting heat wave has scorched large parts of the South and Southwest United States. Temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, have hit at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3C) for a record-breaking 19 consecutive days, and emergency departments are flooded with heat-related illness.
Southern Europe is experiencing one of its most extreme heat waves on record, with wildfires raging in Greece, Spain and Switzerland. And in Asia, temperatures have pushed above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in China, while parts of South Korea, Japan and northern India are experiencing deadly flooding.
In a statement on Tuesday, Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, called this relentless cascade of extreme weather “the new normal.”
But some scientists now baulk at that framing.
“When I hear it, I get a bit crazy because it’s not really the new normal,” said Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Reading in the UK. “Until we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere we have no idea what the future looks like.”
She is one of many scientists who warn that, while this summer is very bad, it’s only just the beginning. As long as global temperature continues to rise, they said, the world should brace for escalating impacts.
Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist and distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania, prefers to describe the weather we are seeing as “the new abnormal.”
The new normal “wrongly conveys the idea that we’ve simply arrived in some new climate state and that we simply have to adapt to it,” he told CNN.
“But it’s much worse than that. The impacts become worse and worse as fossil fuel burning and warming continues. It’s a shifting baseline of ever-more devastating impacts as long as the Earth continues to warm.”
For scientists like Mann and Cloke, this year’s extreme weather has largely not been surprising. The development of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that has a global warming impact, layered on top of longterm, human-caused global warming, was expected to have a big impact.
But regionally, there have been “some remarkable anomalies,” said Mann, who pointed to record-low levels of winter sea ice in Antarctica and “off the charts” heat in the North Atlantic. “They are a reminder that we can not only expect to see records broken, but shattered, if we continue burning fossil fuels.”
