Catastrophic floods in the Hudson Valley. An unrelenting dome of heat over Phoenix. Ocean temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit off the coast of Miami. A surprising deluge in Vermont, a rare tornado in Delaware.
A decade ago, any of these events would have been seen as an aberration. This week, they are occurring simultaneously as climate change fuels extreme weather, prompting New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to call it “our new normal.”
Over the past month, smoke from wildfires in Canada has engulfed major cities across the country, a deadly heat wave has hit Texas and Oklahoma and heavy rains have flooded parts of Chicago.
“It’s not just a figment of your imagination, and it’s not because everyone has a smartphone now,” said Jeff Berardelli, the chief meteorologist and climate expert for WFLA News in Tampa. “We have seen an increase in extreme weather. It happens without a doubt.”
It tends to be more extreme. This year, a strong El Niño developing in the Pacific Ocean is poised to release additional heat into the atmosphere, fueling more extreme weather around the world.
“We’re going to see things happen this year around Earth that we haven’t seen in modern history,” Mr. Berardelli said.
But even as hurricanes, fires and floods become more frequent, climate change lives around for most voters. In a country focused on inflation, political scandals and celebrity feuds, only 8 percent of Americans identified global warming as the most important issue facing the country, according to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
As climate disasters become more common, they may be losing their shock value. A 2019 study concluded that people learn to accept extreme weather as normal in just two years.
“It’s not only a complex issue, but it’s competing for attention in a dynamic, uncertain, complex world,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Lilian Lovas, a 77-year-old lifelong Chicagoan, said she has seen the climate change in her hometown, but she avoids the news to stay positive.
“It used to be very cold here in the winter but now we only get a few really bitter days a year,” he said. “I’m voting and doing my part but things are really out of my hands.”
Kristina Hengl, 51, a retail worker in Chicago, said she’s not sure the peak season is anything that hasn’t happened before.
“I’m not a scientist so it’s hard for me to make a judgment call,” he said, before offering an imprecise explanation. “Our planet is always changing and this may just be the cycle of life. You have to consider that deserts used to have lakes, Lake Michigan wasn’t always a lake.”
Despite growing alarm among climate scientists, there are few signs of the kind of widespread societal change that will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the planet.
“Even if hurricanes and other climate extremes happen, if they are far away, we soon pretend that they don’t affect us, because we don’t want to do the things necessary to deal with the threat that this. ,” said Paul Slovic, a professor at the University of Oregon who specializes in the psychology of risk and decision making.
“More and more people recognize climate change as a problem, but they don’t want solutions,” Mr. Slovic added. “They don’t want to give up the comfort and convenience that we get from using energy from the wrong source, and so on.”
Last Thursday, in what researchers say was the hottest day in modern history, a record number of commercial flights, each emitting more planet-warming gases, were in the air, according to Flightradar24.
As wildfires and rising sea levels wipe out communities from California to North Carolina, residents continue to rebuild in disaster-prone areas.
And while more electricity is being generated by wind, solar and other clean energy, the world is increasingly powered by fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, the main source of planet-warming emissions.
The cumulative effect of all those greenhouse gases is on frightening display around the world. The planet has warmed an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels, fueling a dizzying array of extreme weather events.
Studies show that last year’s deadly floods in Pakistan, the heat dome that baked the Pacific Northwest in 2021 and Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico in 2017, have been made worse by climate change.
“Climate change is here, now,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not far from the Antarctic and it’s not off in the future. This climate change has caused extreme events in the time we all live in.”
Weather disasters costing more than $1 billion in damages continue to rise in the United States, according to a Climate Central analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1980, the average time between billion-dollar disasters was 82 days. From 2018-22, the average time between these extreme events, even controlling for inflation, was just 18 days.
“Climate change is driving these events to new levels,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central. “We don’t get breaks between them to catch up like we used to.”
Human activity has had such a huge impact on the planet’s ecosystems and climate that scientists are now discussing whether to declare that the Earth has entered a new geologic time interval: the Anthropocene.
And with emissions still rising worldwide, scientists warn that there is little time left to change course dramatically before the effects become truly catastrophic.
“This is the last slap in the head we’re going to get when it’s still important,” said Bill McKibben, a longtime climate activist. “Clearly this is an important moment in Earth’s climatic history. It also has to be an important moment in Earth’s political history.”
In the United States, climate change is a partisan issue, with many Republican leaders questioning established climate science, promoting fossil fuels and opposing renewable energy.
Climate scientists and environmentalists hope that each new storm and ice storm can spur Americans into action.
A survey of adults this spring found that most are now concerned about climate change and support federal action to combat global warming and promote clean energy, according to Just a recent survey by Yale.
Even in Florida, a state that has grown more conservative in recent years, a growing number of residents believe humans are causing climate change, including a record number of Republicans, according to a Florida Atlantic University survey.
“The polling data has changed over the last few years, and I would bet that it will again,” Mr. McKibben said. “At a certain point, if you see enough fires and floods, who are you going to believe?”
Additional reporting by Cara BuckleyRobert Charito, Delger Erdenesanaa and Raymond Zhong.