The earth has seen a four-fold increase in major flooding events since 1980, and a doubling of significant storms, droughts and heat waves, says Europe’s national science academies.
In Europe, where precise data reaches back decades, the number of severe floods has jumped five fold since 1995, according to the report, which updates a 2013 assessment.
“There has been, and continues to be, a significant increase in the frequency of extreme weather events,” said Michael Norton, environmental program director for the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council. “They underline the importance of avoiding greenhouse gases, which are fundamentally responsible for driving these changes,” he said.
In Europe, efforts to shore up defenses against river flooding have proven effective: despite an increase in frequency of such events, economic loses on the continent have remained static.
“Rather than just coping with disasters after they strike, we need to shift to proactive management of all drivers of risks,” commented Munich Climate Insurance Initiative director, Soenke Kreft.
By contrast, in the United States, however, the damage wrought by storms doubled, on average, from $10 billion in 1980 to $20 billion in 2015, adjusted for inflation.
The weakening of the Gulf Stream “is now a credible hypothesis,” said Norton. Scientists have estimated that winters in Britain and much of Western Europe would be several degrees Celsius colder if the Gulf Stream begins to slow.
“Some of the underlying drivers of extreme weather which were speculative four years ago are looking less speculative.” The prospect of the Gulf Stream—also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—slowing, or even shutting down entirely, “must be taken as a serious possibility,” he added.
Scientists have estimated that winters in Britain and much of Western Europe would be several degrees Celsius colder under such a scenario.
Scientists have also examined recent disruptions of the polar Jet Stream, a band of west-to-east winds that circulate at bullet-train speed some 10 kilometers above Earth’s surface at the upper boundary of the troposphere. Recent research has linked severe winters in North America and Europe, as well some extreme summer weather, to Jet Stream fluctuations in the Arctic, where temperatures have risen twice as fast as for the planet as a whole.
“…There have been roughly ten times more warm record-breaking temperatures than cold ones in the last 150 years.” Recent predictions suggest that by mid-century, pockets of southern Europe will face at least one severe climate hazard every year of the scale now occurring only once every 100 years.
By 2100, according to these predictions, Europe’s entire Mediterranean seaboard will be confronted annually with extreme droughts, coastal floods or heatwaves. And a few “hotspots” will be hit every year by two or more such formerly once-in-hundred-years hazards, which also include wildfires, river floods and windstorms.
“While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon man and beast.” The Great Controversy, page 589.