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By Akshat
Rathi
Each year at Bloomberg
Green we brace for the start of the
Northern Hemisphere summer. While many people
think about their holidays, we ready ourselves
to write about the increasingly wild weather
unleashed on an overheating planet.
Yet 2024 has
already been an exceptional year for climate
impacts – and it’s only June. What we’ve seen so
far has been “stunning,” Katharine Hayhoe, chief
scientist at the nonprofit Nature Conservancy,
said on the Zero podcast.
On the
latest episode of Zero, Texas
Tech University professor Katharine Hayhoe
explains why we’re all experiencing “global
weirding.”
Let’s start in
Hayhoe’s home of Texas, which she calls the
“poster child of extreme weather” in the US. The
state sees more billion-dollar damage from
climate-linked disasters than any other. In
February the worst wildfire in Texas history
scorched more than 1 million acres. Last month,
Texas experienced extreme heat, hail, and
tornados. At the same time, local leaders in the
oil state say they are worried about ensuring continued fossil fuel
investment. (Though Texas hasn’t gone as
far as climate-vulnerable Florida, which is making it the law
to ignore global warming when creating
government policies.)
A resident
collects belongings from his vehicle after
riding out a tornado in the bathrooms of a
truck stop in Valley View, Texas, on May 26,
2024. Photographer: Julio Cortez/AP
Global temperatures
are now, on average, 1.3C above pre-industrial
times and many parts of the world are just
trying to survive through this new climate
reality. Zambia, a country of 20 million people
with less than $1,500 of annual income per
capita, is suffering through one of its worst
droughts in four decades. That’s caused the
production of corn to fall to a 16-year low and
forced the country to seek $900 million
in humanitarian aid. It’s not the only nation
where climate has become a severe economic
threat: This year’s heat also badly wilted Pakistani
cotton, which forms the basis of the
country’s giant textile manufacturing industry.
A burnt ear
of corn during a heat wave. Photographer:
Hector Quintanar/Bloomberg
Major cities have
had to grapple with completely unexpected
catastrophes. Dubai is a megacity in a desert
country that gets so little rain the nation has
regularly turned to cloud-seeding to generate
precipitation. The oil-producing country was
caught off guard by devastating floods in April,
made worse by
climate change, which destroyed Ferraris and
forced the government to pledge $544 million for
home repairs.
A Ferrari
sportscar in a showroom damaged by floodwater
following heavy rains in Dubai on April 19,
2024. Photographer: Christopher
Pike/Bloomberg
The daily high
temperature in New Delhi, the capital of my home
country, hasn’t gone below 40C (104F) in over a
month. The nation’s longest and most
extreme heat wave has killed dozens of
people over the past few months. Some of those
were poll workers, because the extreme
temperatures coincided with a national election
where 600 million people turned out to vote. The
new government cabinet includes a former coal
minister who will be tasked with
helping India hit its renewable energy targets.
(Oil-rich Mexico also saw record heat during its
national election, which resulted in climate and
energy scientist Claudia Sheinbaum
winning the presidency.)
People
gather around a municipal tanker to collect
water during high temperatures in New Delhi on
May 18, 2024. Photographer: Anindito
Mukherjee/Bloomberg
Global warming has
dramatically altered everything from the sea to
the sky – as this year’s mass coral bleaching
event and reports of extreme turbulence
show. And things are set to get worse because
our fossil fuel-powered lives aren’t slowing
down and the amount of planet-warming gas in the
atmosphere keeps rising as a result.
In some cases,
extreme weather is actually increasing our
desire for these polluting fuels. Egypt’s
extreme heat wave has led the gas-rich country
to import liquefied
natural gas to keep all of its air
conditioners humming. In other cases, attempts
to move away from fossil fuel production are
causing short-term shortages. Colombia’s
President Gustavo Petro has made fighting
climate change a priority and has refused to
grant licenses to explore for new oil and gas
sites. That means, for now, the country is
having to meet its demand for gas through more expensive imports.
Going through the
seemingly never-ending list of extreme weather
events that have occurred just in the last 12
months, I realized that I’m not capable of
processing the scale of devastation. A troubling
realization dawned on me: In the time it would
take to make any reasonable attempt, new and
worse catastrophes would no doubt have occurred.
It’s the same conclusion Hayhoe came to when we
talked: “We are going to see events that are
even more extreme.”
Akshat Rathi is
the author of Climate Capitalism
that will be out in paperback this month.
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