Imagine being told you have 20 minutes to leave your home before a glacier crashes down and buries it. Or watching helplessly as your car floats down your street, your only way out disappearing in the torrent.
Over the last two weeks, the floodgates have well and truly opened across five continents at the same time, with mass flooding events in Maryland, Argentina, Australia and Algeria and a glacial landslide in Switzerland that consumed a picturesque village.
From Switzerland to Sydney, the rain is not only shifting but bucketing down. As the atmosphere warms, its ability to hold and dump more water anywhere in the world is proving one of our most challenging early snapshots of the climate changes to come.
In Maryland and Virginia in the US, flash floods swept away roads, submerged schools, and tragically claimed the life of a 12-year-old boy. Hundreds of children had to be rescued from schools as floodwaters surged through classrooms, and entire towns were declared disaster zones. In Argentina, more than 2,000 people were evacuated after more than 400mm of rain fell in less than two days. A similar bomb of rain fell across Australia’s Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, where more than 10,000 properties were damaged and five people died.
One of the main reasons driving these sudden downpours is the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which describes how much water vapour the atmosphere can hold at any time. With every degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold about 7 per cent more rain. As the WMO warns, we are likely to exceed 1.5C of warming by the end of this decade, we need to prepare for more intense downpours like this.
But don’t expect it to be uniform. In the wake of Australia’s flooding across the Mid North Coast in New South Wales, farmers have been crushed by drought. Maryland had been issued a drought alert just last month, and farmers just west of Argentina’s recent flood events were complaining of severe drought only a few months ago. Even here in the UK, we could be on track for one of the driest springs in 150 years, driven by a 4C ocean heatwave just off the coast.
And that brings us to the Swiss Alps, where heat has simply melted million-year-old ice and utterly shattered the picturesque village of Blatten, when a glacier collapsed and buried it in minutes. The tragic landslide was likely driven by melting permafrost that was the glue holding the glacial walls together. As climate scientist Ed Hawkins bluntly stated this week: “The village of Blatten in Switzerland was partly buried yesterday by the collapse of a glacier which melted because our greenhouse gas emissions warmed the climate.”
And it won’t be the last. A new study released this week found that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s glaciers are already doomed to melt – and that’s even if we get our act together and stop burning fossil fuels altogether. But if we don’t, and keep pushing the climate accelerator like we’re on the last lap of an F1 race, we could lose 75 per cent of all glacier ice this century. This isn’t just weather. It’s the sound of the planet crossing a line. And the scariest part? We’re not ready – politically, emotionally, or economically – for what’s coming next.
With the news from Ukraine and Gaza and the constant stream of drama straight from the White House, I can’t blame anyone for thinking that there are more pressing events around the world than this collection of floods and landslides. It’ll still be a while before our climate can cause as much chaos as we seem ever more set on causing ourselves. But there’s something in the water, and it’s high time we wake up and get ready for it. The floodgates are beginning to open up, and we have a chance now to not only batten down the hatches but save millions from being swept away.
This week’s study on glaciers also shows we could save literally twice the ice held in glaciers by shifting away from fossil fuels fast. As Dr Harry Zekollari, co-leader of the glacier study, put it in somewhat gladiatorial terms: “The choices we make today will resonate for centuries.”
Unfortunately, none of this will be fixed by carbon-sucking machines or billionaire climate tech. The truth is, we’ve run out of clever tricks, and it’s time we simply take a long, hard look in the mirror. What’s left is the boring, necessary and unglamorous work that we’ve all heard before. The only way out of this mess is by slashing fossil fuel use, truly valuing and preserving nature, and building resilience against the rain, or lack of it. These intense rain events, the ocean heat and trailing droughts look like they’re here to stay.
It’s up to us just now how intense they all get.
