Do recent disasters indicate that the first climate tipping moment has arrived?

 

The frequency of compound and cascading disasters, like two cyclones hitting within days, is rising. Graham Lawton wonders if this means we have already passed the first climate tipping point, which would cause an irreversible change in Earth's natural processes.

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I went to a woodland in the south of England to observe an experiment that aims to prematurely age young trees. While I was there, I witnessed what happened after the UK was devastated by three named Atlantic hurricanes in a matter of days a year ago. A big beech tree in the forest was one of the victims of that triple whammy; it was felled by a branch that was torn off its neighbour.

Compound disasters are extreme events that happen either simultaneously or rapidly one after the other, before recovery from the prior one (or ones) can take place. An example of this would be the arrival of three violent storms in less than a week. Additionally, it was a cascading catastrophe, in which one severe event sets off another. More than a million homes experienced prolonged power outages due to Storm Eunice, which made landfall in the UK on February 18, 2022, one day after Storm Dudley. Schools and businesses were also shuttered, and the UK's transportation system was severely affected. Three days later, Storm Franklin arrived, hampering the cleanup effort from Eunice and causing major flooding.

Compound and cascading catastrophes are happening more frequently all over the world as the climate warms. Eastern Australia has been dealing with a string of disastrous floods for the past two years. These floods followed record-breaking drought, heat, and bushfire conditions in 2019 and 2020. In New Zealand, additional torrential rain that fell a few days later added to the damage caused by Cyclone Gabrielle last month. Two cyclones, Ida and Nicholas, struck portions of Louisiana in the US in 2021, a period of just over two weeks. The collection continues.

Compound and cascading disasters aren’t new, of course. In 1954, previously environment transformation had actually recoiled in, the north-eastern coast of the US was hit by two tornadoes, Carol and Edna, in the space of 12 days, murder 80 people and instigating overflowing and injury predictable at half a billion dollars. Still, they are receiving more common.

According to one school of thought, multiple, simultaneous catastrophes are triggering a mental health crisis.

According to Susan Cutter of the University of South Carolina, these catastrophes "are the new normal" in her keynote speech to a recent US National Academies of Science (NAS) meeting on the subject. The report that followed characterised the "new normal" in stark terms, stating that "most disasters do not occur as isolated events and instead seem to pile on one another, disaster after disaster, often unleashing new devastation on a community before it has had a chance to recover".

Not all are caused by the environment. The latest instances all occurred in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, another catastrophe. Some involve the collision of natural disasters with weak infrastructure, such as the 2011 Thoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which inundated the Fukushima nuclear facility and caused a meltdown.

We can anticipate more. According to a recent paper, the US east coast and Gulf coast are seeing an increase in the frequency of back-to-back hurricanes, which occur within 15 days of one another in the same location. By the conclusion of this century, what used to be a once-in-a-century event will occur roughly every two years.

A "tropical cyclone-deadly heat compound hazard," where a hurricane or cyclone knocks out electricity and is immediately followed by a heatwave, is another potential risk in the future. Millions are exposed to possibly lethal heat above 40°C (104°F) because air conditioning units are broken. According to Tom Matthews at King's College London, such occurrences were previously "vanishingly uncommon". Between 1979 and 2017, only four were noted, all in Australia's thinly populated north-west. However, according to climate models, they could occur as frequently as every three years under 2°C of warming, placing millions of people at risk.

This strikes me as a tipping moment, an irreversible change in Earth's natural processes brought on by a breakdown in the climate. If so, even though many others are nearby, it is likely the first we have crossed. It has a significant effect as well. By definition, disasters have an effect on people; compound and cascading disasters have a greater impact than those caused by just one of their components. There is even a growing body of research that suggests that compound and cascading catastrophes, which people experience with little to no time for recovery, are what trigger mental health crises.

What can we do, if anything? Not much, unless warming is kept at current levels, which is not likely to happen. Making disaster-response systems work harder and quicker or entirely redesigning them to deal with such events are the two choices, according to the NAS, though it didn't specify how this might be accomplished. We don't have a lot of time, though. The new standard is a "untenable scenario," according to the NAS. The stormy skies have formed.