There Is No New Climate Normal Until We Stop Burning Fossil Fuels

Extreme heat, extreme rain, and extreme smoke are on full display across the U.S. this summer, leading many, including the governor of New York, to declare extreme weather and catastrophic flooding the “new normal.” In a sense it is, but this also misses the essential challenge of climate change — there is no normal.

First, the extremes we are witnessing are not normal. Not normal in the sense that they are not natural. This summer’s heat domes and smoke waves are much more likely on a planet where people have been burning coal, oil, and natural gas for 150 years. Some of the events we’ve witnessed are so far beyond historical norms that they truly could not exist without climate change. This is especially true for the recent global temperature record, which isn’t likely to last long.

While the extremes are unnatural, they aren’t surprising. We are living in the climate predicted by climate models 30 years ago. Those models couldn’t predict that Texas would be baking in July 2023, but they did predict that a world with a CO2 concentration of 420 ppm would have heatwaves like this one. We’ve also known from basic physics that warmer air can hold more moisture, which increases the chances of extreme rains like what New York and Vermont endured last week.

For the first time since people began growing crops and building cities, relying on past conditions—normals—can’t help us protect ourselves.

Second, these conditions are new, but scientifically they are not the new normal in the sense that they represent permanent conditions that we can get used to or plan for. Climate scientists use “normal” in a technical sense to describe the 30-year average conditions. NOAA updated the current climate normals in 2021, and now reports conditions relative to the 1991-2020 average. That average is supposed to guide planning for things like roads, buildings, or storm drains. But it no longer works. The 1991 normal reflects a world 0.9°C (1.6°F) warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. It’s already out of date. We are now closer to 1.3°C (2.34°F).

The insidious feature of climate change is that there is no normal and there won’t be one anytime soon. As long as the world keeps warming, the climate will keep changing, and extreme conditions will only become worse and more frequent. (And yes, Earth’s climate has changed in the past, but the scale and the speed of today’s change are unprecedented in modern human history.)

For the first time since people began growing crops and building cities, relying on past conditions—normals—can’t help us protect ourselves. If we only adjust to what we’ve experienced, we will always be a step or two or more behind. The best we can do is to try to anticipate conditions before they occur. Climate models provide a high-level but blurry view of the future. They don’t really have hurricanes and they definitely don’t have tornadoes. Scientists can also use high-resolution weather models to simulate the weather in a given future climate, but this remains challenging and will probably always be limited.

Another approach—call it a climate life-hack—is to bet on the trend. Assume that if something in the weather is changing or weird, then it’s probably related to climate change and probably going to occur more often. Last week’s extreme rain in New York and Vermont is a good example. We’ve seen intense rainfall in these areas from events like Hurricanes Irene and Ida, and we’ve also seen more ordinary storms without names produce catastrophic rainfall and flooding in places like Maryland and Kentucky. The safest way to protect people in the future is to assume that the entire region faces an increasing risk of these events, and plan accordingly.

So we are not living in a new normal. Climate projections and climate trends clearly tell us that. But science is also clear on what we have to do to find a new normal: stop burning coal, oil, and natural gas. When we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, global temperatures will stabilize and we will have weather that we can get used to. Every new wind turbine or solar farm or electric vehicle makes that possibility more likely. But our current pace of change means that we have decades of work ahead of us to reach a true new normal.