Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “heat dome.” Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history.
The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since.
This doesn’t surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives.
“Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California.
While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them.
“Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,” Swain said. “There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,” he added.
Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7% with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Swain said.
“There is no weather that’s happening outside of climate,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author of the book “Human Nature.”
“This is stuff that’s manifesting in the real world,” she said, citing catastrophes such as Hurricane Helene.
According to Swain, scientists have yet to come to a universal understanding of these events, in part because the infrequent nature of outliers makes them difficult to study.
And as warming has intensified, so have the impacts on vulnerable regions of the planet such as the Arctic and Antarctic, making previously rare or hidden consequences more apparent. Scientists are fine-tuning their models to understand the behavior of the vast ice sheets in such places to match the rapid changes they’re observing.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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