A succession of record-breaking natural disasters have swept the globe in recent weeks. There have been serious floods in China and western Europe, heatwaves and drought in North America and wildfires in the sub-Arctic. 

Germany and Belgium were the worst-hit countries by the extreme rainfall on July 14 and July 15, with authorities reporting more than 200 people to have died as floods engulfed entire villages.  German chancellor Angela Merkel said the events of the last week have been “characterised by fear, by despair, by suffering”, pledging to victims of the catastrophic floods that the government “will not leave you alone in this difficult, terrible hour”. 

London also experienced flash flooding earlier this week, when “nearly three inches of rain hit the capital in 90 minutes” on Monday night. Reports of “flooded streets, basement flats, Tube stations and high streets” were shared from across the city, the i reports, with the flooding mainly hitting areas in the southwest, north and northwest of the capital. 

In China, scores died in the floods across Henan province, some of them in subway trains and road tunnels that remained open long after meteorologists issued a red-alert warning of lethal weather. 

In Canada, the trends are worrying. This summer, various parts of British Columbia saw temperature records broken during the heatwave in June, notably the town of Lytton, which set the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada at 49.6 C — a remarkable 5.2 C increase over Lytton's previous heat record (which was also a record for B.C.) in 1941. 

Some scientists are beginning to worry they might have underestimated how quickly the climate will change. Or have we just misunderstood extreme weather events and how our warming climate will influence them?

Floods and wildfires are not discrete events: they are the result of numerous interconnections and feedback loops in the climate system. Take the mid-July flash floods in London. These were caused by summer rainstorms, which were in turn driven by warm air rising from the Earth’s surface that built up during the preceding heatwave, stacking the deck for the downpours that were to follow. The wildfires raging in the western US, meanwhile, are a catastrophe whose stage was set by long-term drought. 

We are used to treating each natural hazard independently from another. But it takes more than rain to create a flood, and more than a spark to start a wildfire. All of the elements of our climate system – and the hazards it produces – are connected in one way or another. 

And as our climate continues to warm, its baseline is shifting. How these hazards and their causes interact is therefore also changing fast, challenging the very definition of extreme weather events. 

An international group of climate scientists are now warning that there is "mounting evidence that we are nearing or have already crossed tipping points associated with critical parts of the Earth system." In a paper published in the journal BioScience on July 28, researchers pointed to the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, warm-water coral reefs, and the Amazon rainforest as climate systems that were possibly nearing or had already reached their tipping point. 

The interconnections between extreme weather events have, until recently, been largely overlooked by the science community. But there is now growing international research tasked with mapping these complex relationships. 

Sources / More:: cbc.ca, the conversation, the economist, theweek.co.uk 

Pray:

God of life, 

Help us to see that your gifts are meant to be shared by all, not just exploited by a few. 

Lead us to take action to make a change not just for ourselves, but for all creation. 

We ask this through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen. 

Adapted from the Global Catholic Climate Movement. 

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