Extreme weather is our new reality. We must accept it and begin planning. As wildfires, floods, droughts and record-breaking temperatures have shown, the post-climate change era has arrived. Now we need honesty and action from our leaders. Guardian Gaia Vince 15 Feb 2025  Not yet a quarter of the way into this century and global average temperatures are already 1.75C above the preindustrial average. January 2025 was the hottest on record and has also set a record for the highest yearly minimum global surface temperature, and likely the highest minimum in the past 120,000 years. It is part of a clear pattern. Last year’s global average was 1.6C above the preindustrial – a sobering reality check, given that, only three months ago at the UN Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, leaders were still declaring that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C was within reach.We are firmly in the post-climate change world now, and the serious implications of this demand honest acknowledgment. The reality is that we are living now in a time of continual disasters that are unfolding alongside our slower, planetary scale disaster. In this riskier time, we need to prepare.The hottest January began with scenes literally from Hollywood of raging wildfires engulfing some of the world’s most valuable property, in Los Angeles, in one of the world’s richest countries. Among the apocalyptic images of devastation filling our screens were tens of thousands of dazed citizens forced to evacuate, some of them our planet’s wealthiest climate refugees. As the 200,000 Los Angeles residents return home, tough decisions will have to be made in this new disaster-prone time about where to rebuild and which places should be abandoned in the retreat from risk. It is clear that we will need better protection, sometimes by adapting buildings, but also that some places will no longer be able to sustain larger populations. 

Agricultural disasters can be devastating both locally and globally. I have met relatives of drought-hit farmers pushed to suicide and others forced to migrate across borders. I have heard from flood-hitBritish farmers who lost entire harvests and were left saddled with debt. The impact on food prices can be widespread. Food inflation in the UK rose to 19.1% in 2023, significantly adding to the cost of living and pushing some on the poverty line into malnutrition. The price of orange juice more than doubled after Florida’s citrus belt was hit by hurricanes at the end of last year; olive oil soared in price after heat and drought hit olive trees, making it the most shoplifted item in Spain. Disasters impoverish people and they are costly for nations, especially when multiple disasters hit the same country. Last year, Brazil suffered catastrophic floods across its southern states that displaced more than half a million people. The same year, prolonged drought and heat triggered devastating fires across the Amazon and Pantanal region. Often, one disaster cascades into others, such as when Pakistan was hit by unbearable heat and drought in 2022, before violently destructive flash floods displaced 33 million people in a week, only to be followed by landslides that destroyed key infrastructure. Technological resilience must be combined with social resilience, and that comes from investing in society

In this post-global heating era, we can expect more severe and frequent extreme events. Disasters will affect you and the people you care about over the coming decades. We must accept and factor this new reality into our plans. Adaptation means changing the language we use and adjusting our expectations and strategies. It requires honesty from our leaders. It is no longer acceptable to talk about global heating as if it is a future possibility that can be avoided. People are dying and having their lives destroyed today; we need a much more practical response. Planning homes in high-risk flood zones is climate denial. And what about those already living at risk Adaptive planning can make a huge difference......read on https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2025/feb/15/extreme-weather-new-reality-wildfires-floods-droughts

Storm Boris stalled over central Europe in mid-September and unleashed record-breaking amounts of rain upon Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The heavy rains turned calm streams into wild rivers, triggering floods that wrecked homes and killed two dozen people.The researchers said measures to adapt had lowered the death toll compared with similar floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. They called for better flood defences, warning systems and disaster-response plans, and warned against continuing to rebuild in flood-prone regions.  “These floods indicate just how costly climate change is becoming,” said Maja Vahlberg, technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and co-author of the study. “Even with days of preparation, flood waters still devastated towns, destroyed thousands of homes and saw the European Union pledge €10bn in aid.”

Rapid attribution studies, which use established methods but are published before going through lengthy peer-review processes, examine how human influence affects extreme weather in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.The scientists compared the rainfall recorded in central Europe over four days in September with amounts simulated for a world that is 1.3C cooler – the level of warming caused to date by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. They attributed a “doubling in likelihood and a 7% increase in intensity” to human influence.......read on       https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/25/global-heating-doubled-chance-of-extreme-rain-in-europe-in-september   

AND.....‘We’re getting rid of everything’: floods destroy homes and lives in Czech Republic

Should We Name Heatwaves? Aside from connectivity, another issue in effectively communicating heat risks is that people still underplay or do not fully understand them.read on       https://earth.org/silent-killer-how-cities-are-bracing-for-more-heatwaves/ 

Global heating will push billions outside the ‘human climate niche’.World is on track for 2.7C and ‘phenomenal’ human suffering, scientists warn. Guardian Damian Carrington 22 May2023 Global heating will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather.

The world is on track for 2.7C of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 29C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past. Up to 1 billion people could choose to migrate to cooler places, the scientists said, although those areas remaining within the climate niche would still experience more frequent heatwaves and droughts. However, urgent action to lower carbon emissions and keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cut the number of people pushed outside the climate niche by 80%, to 400 million.The analysis is the first of its kind and is able to treat every citizen equally, unlike previous economic assessments of the damage of the climate crisis, which have been skewed towards the rich. In countries with large populations and already warm climates most people will be pushed outside the human climate niche, with India and Nigeria facing the worst changes. India is already suffering from extreme heat waves, and a recent study found that more than a third of heat-related deaths in summer from 1991-2018 occurred as a direct result of human-caused global heating.

Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK, who led the new research, said: “The costs of global warming are often expressed in financial terms but our study highlights the phenomenal human cost of failing to tackle the climate emergency. “Economic estimates almost always value the rich more than the poor, because they have more assets to lose, and they tend to value those alive now over those living in the future. We’re considering all people as equal in this study.” Prof Chi Xu, at Nanjing University in China, and also part of the research team, said: “Such high temperatures [outside the niche] have been linked to issues including increased mortality, decreased labour productivity, decreased cognitive performance, impaired learning, adverse pregnancy outcomes, decreased crop yield, increased conflict and infectious disease spread.” Prof Marten Scheffer at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a senior author of the study, said those pushed outside the climate niche might consider migrating to cooler places: “Not just migration of tens of millions of people but it might be a billion or so.”

The idea of climate niches for wild animals and plants is well established but the new study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, identified the climate conditions in which human societies have thrived. It found most people lived in places with mean annual temperatures spread around 13C or 25C. Conditions outside those are too hot, too cold or too dry and associated with higher death rates, lower food production and lower economic growth. “The climate niche describes where people flourish and have flourished for centuries, if not millennia in the past,” Lenton said. “When people are outside [the niche], they don’t flourish.”Scheffer said: “We were surprised how sharply limited humans have remained when it comes to their distribution relative to climate – this is a fundamental thing we’ve put our finger on.” ........read on   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/22/global-heating-human-climate-niche