Climate security

Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change

Just off the top of his head, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth can recount many of the weather disasters that hit the planet in 2018. Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States.

“Climate change is adding to what’s going on naturally, and it’s that extra stress that causes things to break,” said Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “It takes the experience well outside anything that’s been experienced before. It crosses thresholds. As a result, things break, people die, and things burn.”

There is no single metric for measuring extreme weather globally and comparing 2018 with previous years. The American Meteorological Society puts out an annual report on extreme weather, but it just published the 2017 results and won’t issue its report on 2018 until late next year.

But it was definitely a hot and perilous year. Perhaps most striking were the temperature extremes.