Surges in five types of extreme weather. Other types (drought, unseasonable weather, hurricane strength, etc.) have changed too but by smaller amounts than triple, my threshold for making this list.

2003 Europe, 2010 Russia: Two mega heatwaves, each with 100X as many killed in a week as in 20th-century heat waves [1]. The third mega might well be in North America.

2010: Severe (damages of more than a billion US dollars) inland floods are up 3X.

2012 Sandy, 2017 Harvey: While hurricane strength or numbers may not have tripled, now we have hurricanes that stall, sticking around 24X longer (Harvey, near Houston) than when just passing through, delivering a year’s worth of rain in only four days.

2000: More hot-dry-windy “fire weather” caused U.S. firefighting costs to triple; now they are at 4X the late 20th-century baseline.

2003: The number of severe inland windstorms (mostly tornado clusters and derechos) tripled. Now they are up at 8X [2].

The annual number of severe windstorms, each of which caused more than US$1 billion in damage. They were mostly tornado clusters and derechos; hurricanes were not counted, so this is about severe inland windstorms.

After the jump up, all five surges stayed up. We seem latched up into a new mode of climate functioning. We scientists usually call that a regime change or an abrupt climate shift. The older weather statistics become irrelevant.

Climate scientists had been warning for fifty years about more extreme weather ahead but had no way of predicting a sudden shift. What do the five surges do for the climate prognosis? At the least, they edge us closer to slippery slopes from which recovery is nearly impossible. They will certainly make life difficult for us as we attempt to repair climate.

This averages temperatures over day and night, all four seasons, land and ocean, both Northern and Southern Hemisphere, and over four years. Land, where most of us live, is warming 2.5X faster than the ocean surface since 1984.

We have gone from Climate Creep to Climate Leap, even though the carbon dioxide levels themselves continue to creep. Did the temperature trend change instead, during the onset of those five surges between 2000 and 2012? It certainly did, but paradoxically. The global average stayed nearly flat in those years.

Clearly, extreme weather is a better indicator of trouble than is a global average temperature.

Nature’s CO2 cleanup job. The public still assumes that excess CO2 disappears on the same time scale as the more visible forms of air pollution [3]. The next good rain usually gets rid of them but not the excess CO2. If excess CO2 levels fell so rapidly, our emissions reduction strategy would make sense.

You probably did not hear the bad news, ten years ago, that nature would take a thousand years to draw down the excess CO2. Most scientists had assumed nature’s cleanup would take a century or two; instead, the exponential decline turns out to have a long tail [4]. Nature might clean up a third of the excess by mid-century (while making ocean acidification worse) if we suddenly went to zero emissions tomorrow, but getting the accumulation down to 20 percent will take another thousand years — unless we do the job ourselves.

In 2018, those big authoritative climate reports finally acknowledged that carbon dioxide removal has become essential [5]. Emissions reduction is still a good goal for the long term, but we need to survive the coming decades first, and emissions reduction will not do the short-term job.