For eight months in the early 1940s, German planes rained heavy ordnance down on
British cities. Day after day, air-raid sirens would wail in some urban
district, whereupon the populace fled to air-raid shelters for safety.
The shelters were built because the authorities correctly forecast The
Blitz and were in
constant use because news services and public officials told the public such
bombings were likely to be regular occurrences. Though those shelters have long
been bricked up and the sirens sold for scrap, they are a reminder of the value
of preparation and the importance of having proper information with which to
plan.
Had the radios and newspapers of the land screamed, after the first major raid,
that it had been “amazing, unprecedented, a hundred-year raid,” folks would
probably have assumed no more were coming. Had they indicated the bombs had
little effect, most likely the public would not have sought shelter during the
next raid. The message, and the words used to convey it, were important.
This dichotomy has been playing out in various
responses
to the current pandemic. One group’s risk assessment was formed by media and
public officials who said precautions were either unnecessary or futile. The
other assessed risk based on news and authorities who said precisely the
opposite. Many from the first group continued, in effect, to drink tea in their
drawing rooms as the bombs fell, while most of the other ran for shelter.
In a paradigm where risk is calculated based on guidance from public media and
government, it is critical not only that those outlets’ information be accurate,
but that their language be calibrated to inspire the most useful — in this case,
the safest — response.
In the same way, in areas where tornadoes are statistically rare, the logical
response is not to build cyclone shelters. (In fact, in part due to cost, in
part due to other factors, many towns even in potentially vulnerable areas do
not have designated storm shelters.)
If the worst will happen once in 500 years, it makes some sense to take the risk
and then rebuild — if and when disaster happens. Yet, if conditions change and
the risk of more such twisters in that same neighborhood rises, it’s prudent to
begin digging.
A tornado cellar on the Texas plains circa 1937 | Image credit: Dorothea Lange/Wikipedia
Yet, when a recent cluster of powerful tornadoes tore up parts of the US
heartland last December, the Omaha World Herald
headline
said it was “astonishing.” Certainly, tornadoes have — up to now — conformed to
historical patterns.
But, as the University of New South Wales recently
asked,
“What is a 1-in-100-year weather event? And why do they keep happening so
often?” There have been recent, well-documented changes in tornado behavior
trends — showing that they now often pack a bigger wallop and defy historical
seasonal tendencies, among other
changes.
This should have alerted the incredulous newspaper that the tornadoes they were
reporting on may become — and in fact may already
be — the new normal, as each
degree Celsius potentially increases severe weather events by 5-20
percent.
As one Oklahoma legislator said
even after a 2009 tornado hit his district and forced him to shelter-in-place in
the state house: “It's risk versus cost … You think it's not going to happen
again.”
When events are characterized with outdated context, it is more difficult to
instigate a change in behavior. As we chronicled in 2020,
the town of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin had to flood some 25 times in 38 years
before the inhabitants finally realized the historical climate pattern had
changed — at which point they dropped their sandbags and rebuilt the town on a
nearby hill.
Futurist Alex Steffen
dubs
this syndrome a ‘discontinuity,’ a time when “the experience and expertise
you’ve built up over time cease to work,” requiring “a process of understanding
[that] the world as we thought it was is no longer there.”
One group that has apparently emerged from the climate discontinuity is the
insurance industry. As Valutus has been
documenting, the huge reinsurance firms
that govern that trade have concluded that carbon-heavy industries are no longer
a viable risk. Yet even in this bastion of actuarial charts and statistics, as
Vox
detailed
recently, insurance companies are often “caught in a bind between balancing
their books and satisfying regulations that require them to keep people
covered.” In other words, many other governments have not yet changed the
calculus from rebuilding to prevention.
Climate-related shifts can also, as the New York Times has
reported,
create issues that feed off one another: “A drought can dry out vegetation,
which in turn can fuel and intensify fires. Fire itself can weaken or kill
plants and make the soil less permeable, meaning that rain is more likely to run
off rather than soak in, causing flash floods and landslides.”
Historic flooding in Merritt, British Columbia — November 17, 2021 | YouTube screenshot, attribution Stepan under CC3 license. Source: Wikipedia
So, when British Columbia experienced unprecedented temperatures as high as
121˚F (49.4˚C) last summer, droughts and wildfires followed, along with flooding in November. Several towns had to be
evacuated
as heavy rains (11.6 in or 29.5 cm) — over a month’s worth in 48 hours due to an
atmospheric river (AR) event — caused widespread flooding, landslides,
mudslides, railway
derailments,
an oil pipeline
shutdown,
and a massive pileup of goods at the Port of Vancouver. Predictably, the
provincial Minister of Public Safety called the
storm
“unprecedented,” but never mentioned the possibility that such was the new
normal.
As one climate analyst
noted,
“Climate change can reveal itself both as a change in the probability of
occurrence of specific extreme events — what was extreme becomes the new normal
— and as the occurrence of new, unprecedented events, which I would call
dangerous climatic surprises.”
The surprise, for the Pacific Northwest at least, is that meteorologists at
Environment Canada explained the cause for the above
disasters as “a mix of record rainfall, melting snow and boosted freezing
levels.” All true, but this analysis left out that the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
(IPCC)
has been tracking the data on atmospheric rivers; and its 2013 Atmospheric Rivers State of Knowledge Report
found that all projected impacts of climate change “indicate that we should
expect ARs and other extreme weather events to intensify, move northward, and
become more frequent over time.” A more recent
model
predicted the likelihood of “a large increase in strong ARs, with the frequency
of Category 3-5 ARs rising by roughly 100-300 percent. In other words, this
event:
-
Could have been anticipated and prepared for
-
Is unlikely to be a one-off event going forward
Yet neither point was emphasized, if mentioned at all, by either the officials
responsible for managing the event or the media charged with reporting on it.
The climate events and their impacts, noted above, are examples of what Valutus
calls submerged
risks.
A company with facilities inland might feel smug to have avoided visible impacts
of the floods on Canada’s coast. Yet a port closure, a washed-out railway, oil
held up in a pipeline may all have problematic and — if submerged risks are not
considered and planned for — devastating effects on the bottom line.
Imagine a company whose facilities were untouched by heat, fires, drought and
floods, and whose production was completely unaffected. Does that mean they’re
fine? Not if their goods are backed up in a crippled port. Not if their
customers are too busy escaping wildfires to buy, or too financially tapped out
because they’re repairing flood damage while waiting for insurance payouts. Not
if major highways for employees or shipping are down to a single lane of traffic
while key rail lines are shut down completely.
It is critical going forward, for business and for the planet, that humanity
reset our approach to climate events. The future ‘new normal,’ as the analyst
quoted above made clear, is already here. It may bring a new ‘New Normal,’ and
that will truly be epic — the first time.
But for now, we don’t have the luxury of approaching such events like
singularities sweeping in once each century. They are here. Now. They are The
Now Normal.
Published Mar 25, 2022 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 6pm GMT / 7pm CET