As 2020 begins, Australia is on fire, leaving dozens dead and thousands displaced. Meanwhile, just a thousand miles to the north, Indonesia is dealing with record flooding that has left … dozens dead and tens of thousands displaced. Both of these disasters are driven by the same factor: global warming causing the human-created climate crisis.
Australia isn’t alone in seeing record levels of wildfire, and Indonesia is far from alone in experiencing flooding. It’s only been a matter of months since wildfires devastated areas of California and flooding drowned Midwestern towns. Neither of those areas was itself unique, as fires ranged up into Alaska, and flooding ranged through the whole central portion of the United States. Though it has to be said that the scale of what’s happening in Australia is nearly unbelievable. In 2019, about 247,000 acres burned in California. So far, this wildfire season is still getting started in Australia, and already 14.6 million acres have burned.
Of course, wildfires and floods aren’t the limit of the disasters brought on by the climate crisis. There are also storms such as the typhoon that smashed the Philippines over the holidays, or the unbelievable fury that Hurricane Dorian unleashed in its slow path across the Bahamas. And all of that was just in 2019.
That year came at the end of the hottest decade on record. That was the decade in which human beings entered into a climate that’s not only different from any that’s been experienced in recorded history, but is now sporting higher levels of CO2 than any time since before the first creature that could be called human evolved in Africa. This is literally a new world.
As The Washington Post reports, what we saw in the last decade gives us a preview of what that world will be like, and what we can expect as the climate crisis brings us a planet rapidly shifting away from the one we have known.
One of the things that the Post’s study shows is that while the world has in fact seen a net semi-regular increase in temperatures, as researchers have been predicting for decades, how that change applies to any given area in any given year varies widely. Alaska has seen huge, steady increases in temperature that have left areas of the coastline free of ice for the first time in millennia, sent glaciers roaring into reverse, and turned areas of permafrost into far-from-permanent seas of mud. Meanwhile, the middle of the North American continent has seen a kind of tick-tock progression, with years of well-above-average temperatures followed by regular dips that fall below even the 20th-century average. Those cycles are closely connected to ocean currents that are being heavily rerouted by the growing heat stored deep in the sea, and to polar circulations that are being destabilized by growing warmth at the top of the world.
It may seem counterintuitive, but as the planet warms, some of the circulations that were locked into regular forms have started to “wobble,” like a toy top wobbling wildly as it slows. The result has been cold air spilled in polar vortexes and disruptions of the normal patterns of deep-water currents.
The tick-tock pattern and growing incidence of extreme weather of all sorts are actually helpful to climate change deniers. After all, they can point at 2019 and declare that it was actually colder than 2010! For a part of the country. For most of the year. But on a global basis, that claim is absolutely not true. In fact, it’s unlikely that any year going forward will be cooler than 2010. Or 2019. Because the planet is getting warmer—getting warmer in a way that, no matter what claims deniers make, closely matches the predictions of climate models, some of them decades old.
That warming may bring weather that allows a Republican to toss a snowball across the Senate now and then. But it will also bring more fires, more floods, more storms, and, in general, more heat.
It will also bring something that Australia and Indonesia are showcasing right now: climate refugees. The Post article doesn’t mention them, but the 2010s were the decade in which we first saw definitively just how disruptive climate refugees can be, because many of those now sitting in camps around the Mediterranean are there, directly or indirectly, because of the climate crisis. Likewise, all the neofascist flowers that have bloomed around the world in response to expanded immigration are also the indirect result of the climate crisis.
What does the climate crisis look like? It looks like fires in Australia that are driving both people and an ecosystem to the brink. It looks like floods in the Midwest that are washing away crops, and farms, and whole towns. It looks like tent cities on the borders of Syria, and desperately overloaded boats trying to reach a Europe determined to push them away. It looks like tired people leading their children along highways toward a walled-off United States. It looks like Brexit. It looks like Trump.
And it gets worse from here.