Can a colossal extreme weather event galvanize action on the climate crisis? » Yale Climate Connections

On a sweltering June day in 1988, during the great drought and heat wave of the summer of 1988 — a catastrophe that caused over 5,000 direct and indirect deaths, with damages of $54 billion (2024 USD) in the U.S. — climate scientist Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress that human-caused global warming had arrived (see video below).

Since the summer of 1988, there have been many extreme weather and climate events – each consistent with human-caused warming – that, in another world, would have triggered the U.S. to make the transformational change needed to address the climate crisis. Some examples:

• The $46-billion Midwest U.S. floods of 1993
• The first global coral bleaching event, in 1998 (to be followed by three more: in 2010, 2014-17, and now 2024)
• The 2003 heatwave in Europe, with 70,000 people killed — the deadliest in history
• The hurricane season of 2005, featuring the horrors of a New Orleans savaged by Hurricane Katrina
• The melting of nearly 40% of Arctic sea ice in 2007 — and of over 50% in 2012
• The $88 billion in damage in 2012 from Superstorm Sandy
• The triple-whammy of three Category 4 hurricane strikes in 2017, headlined by Hurricane Harvey’s unfathomable $151 billion deluge over Houston
• The 2018 wildfire that annihilated Paradise, California
• The steady acidification of the oceans, threatening the base of the food chain
• The record loss of ice from the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, and resulting acceleration of sea level rise
• An alarming 15% slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in recent years, with 36-46% of high-quality models now predicting a major interruption of the circulation in the 2030s
• The 2024 intensification of Hurricane Beryl into a Cat 5 on July 1, over two weeks earlier than any Atlantic Cat 5 had even been observed.

And on and on.

Any one of these events might have caused a Sauron “Oh S**t!” moment (a la “The Lord of the Rings”) when the executives of the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they helped put in power realized that Frodo was standing at the rim of Mt. Climate Doom with the One Ring and their empire hung by a precarious thread.

But none of the 13 ominous extreme weather and climate events listed above have fundamentally changed the behavior of these power brokers, who continue to fight tooth and nail against any diminution of their power and profits. As I detailed last month in my post, The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change, we have not made the transformational changes needed to prepare for what is coming.

And we should not expect that any extreme weather event or breakdown of the climate system will change this. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

We’re living in a real-life disaster movie where we’ve already passed the stage where the hero scientist warning of impending disaster is ignored. We’re now in the part where the disaster that the scientist foresaw is actually hitting, but the politicians, corporations, and media pundits that profit from maintaining the status quo say, “Don’t Look Up.”

Climate change futurist Alex Steffen is one of the best at expressing the imminent massive upheavals coming from climate change, and he argues that if we had started in the 1990s to address climate change in an urgent way, an “orderly transition” to a new society in balance with the 21st-century climate could have been achieved. But an orderly transition is no longer possible, thanks to “predatory delay” — the tactics of the fossil fuel industry and their enablers that have stymied climate action.

“Every approach that promises both bold action and the continuation of current practices and systems leads us inexorably into magical thinking,” he says.

It’s like we’ve waited until our skin started getting red before seeking shade from the sun, and we’re only now taking our first stumbling steps toward shade. Well, it’s a long hike to shade, and a blistering sunburn is unavoidable.

But even when climate change inevitably creates global economic shock waves that rock society, it will not be easy for the champions of wise climate policy to finally break the power of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers and get us to shade faster. These bad actors will likely continue to deny climate change’s role in the disaster, blame the opposing side and natural causes for the situation, and cling to power, stymieing climate action.

A cautionary example: The devastating 2023 drought in Argentina brought damages of $9.2 billion, making it the country’s costliest weather disaster on record. Human-caused climate change likely contributed to the intensity of the drought through hotter temperatures, the World Weather Attribution research group concluded in 2023.

The drought’s massive impact on agriculture in Argentina (up to 25% of the nation’s GDP) fed into other economic woes besetting the nation, including a severe monetary crisis that pushed inflation rates above 100% over the last two years. This crisis helped get far-right populist leader Javier Milei elected. Milei has called climate change “a socialist lie” and has promoted strongly climate-unfriendly policies.

A better system is possible

Despite my Sauron reference above, I can partially forgive climate-denying politicians as misguided servants of a flawed culture. The U.S. capitalist system is not properly regulated, allowing corporations to externalize their costs by dumping their heat-trapping carbon pollution into the atmosphere without paying a fee. The current system is designed to protect the profits of the rich and powerful, not to protect the very source of that wealth —our natural resources. The “magic of the marketplace” cannot solve the climate crisis; saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable. Corporation shareholders can sue their company for breach of fiduciary duty if they are not legally maximizing profits — health of planetary ecosystems be damned.

In order for our civilization to survive, we may have to fundamentally change our economic system so that saving the planet is prioritized, a monumental task that is sure to cause massive disruption.

Read: Opinion: Let’s free ourselves from the story of economic growth

A recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “Advancing a People-First Economy,” has some provocative ideas for reform. For example, economic markets should “exist to serve people, not the other way around” and “well-being” should include the ability to “withstand economic instability and to meet one’s needs sustainably and with dignity.”

If economic development is done with renewable energy, forest protection, regenerative agriculture, sustainable groundwater pumping, and the like, it can increase jobs, build a healthier economy and world, and give us more of what we really care about: time to experience nature, engage in creative endeavors, and be with family and friends.