Do recurring natural disasters mark the first tipping point for the climate?

Joshua CaruzzoMarch 9, 2023

A couple of weeks ago I visited an experiment in a forest in the south of England, where young trees were tried to age prematurely. While there, I saw the aftermath of the events of a year ago, when three consecutive named Atlantic storms hit the UK in just a few days. One of the victims of this triple blow was a large beech in the forest, felled by a branch torn from a neighbor.

The arrival of three major storms in less than a week is called a complex disaster—extremes occur either simultaneously or quickly one after the other, before recovery from the previous one (or more) can occur. It was also a cascading disaster, where one extreme event triggers others. Storm Eunice, which made landfall in the UK on 18 February 2022 – the day after Hurricane Dudley – caused extended power outages in more than a million homes, closed schools and businesses and disrupted the UK transport system for several days. When Storm Franklin arrived three days later, it interfered with the cleanup operation from Eunice and resulted in significant flooding.

Globally, complex and cascading disasters are becoming more common as the climate warms. Eastern Australia has been battling a string of devastating floods over the past two years, following record-breaking drought, heat waves and wildfires in 2019 and 2020. In New Zealand, the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabriel last month was exacerbated by more heavy rain a few days later. In 2021, parts of Louisiana in the US were hit by two hurricanes, Ida and Nicholas, within just over two weeks. The list goes on.

Composite and cascading disasters are certainly not new. In 1954, before climate change really took its toll, two hurricanes, Carol and Edna, hit the northeast coast of the United States, causing 80 deaths, flooding, and damage estimated at half a billion dollars within 12 days. . . However, they are becoming more and more frequent.

There is a school of thought that argues that complex and cascading disasters trigger mental health crises.

Such disasters “are the new normal,” said Susan Cutter of the University of South Carolina in her keynote address at a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) meeting on the topic. A subsequent report described the “new normal” in strong terms, arguing that “most disasters do not occur as isolated events but instead seem to build on each other, disaster after disaster, often bringing new devastation to the community before it caused damage.” chance for recovery.”

Not all of them are climate related. All of the recent examples have taken place against the backdrop of another catastrophe, the covid-19 pandemic. Some of them are related to natural disasters and vulnerable infrastructure, such as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami in Japan that flooded the Fukushima nuclear power plant, causing an accident there.

We can expect more. A recent newspaper reported that hurricanes hitting one after another for 15 days in the same place are becoming more frequent on the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States. What used to happen once a century, by the end of this century will happen every two years or so.

Another future risk is an event called a “tropical cyclone with a lethal thermal junction,” where a cyclone or hurricane cuts off power and is quickly followed by a heat wave. The air conditioners don’t work and millions of people are exposed to potentially lethal heat above 40°C (104°F). According to Tom Matthews of King’s College London, such events have previously been “vanishingly rare”. Only four have been recorded between 1979 and 2017, all in Australia’s sparsely populated northwest. But climate models suggest they will become much more common, with warming below 2°C every three years, putting millions of people at risk.

To me, this smacks of a tipping point, an irreversible shift in Earth’s natural systems caused by climate change. If so, this is probably the first one we’ve crossed, although many others are close. This is also very influential. Disasters, by definition, affect people; compound and cascading have more impact than any of their elements taken separately. There is even a new school of thought that claims that complex and cascading disasters trigger mental health crises because people experience these events with little to no recovery time.

What if what can we do? Short of keeping warming at current levels – which won’t happen – not much. NAS says there are two options: make disaster response systems work harder and faster, or completely redesign them to deal with such events, although it didn’t say how that could be achieved. But we don’t have much time to waste. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the new norm is “an unacceptable situation.” Storm clouds have gathered.