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Greenhouse gases are creating such disequilibrium in the atmosphere that past patterns are no longer reliable predictors of the future. For a journalist reporting on climate change, this can mean finding where volatility has its most poignant impacts.
Volatility is a fundamental characteristic of climate change; only uncertainty is truly certain. A team of water scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey alerted us to that volatility in 2008, when they concluded that past patterns of rainfall — going back several hundred thousand years — were no longer reliable predictors of future rainfall. Their paper in Science was called “Stationarity Is Dead,” an ominous phrase that captured how scientists’ fancy term for baselines — “stationarity,” evoking the range of fluctuations in natural systems — was no longer operative as a way to plan for the future. These scientists predicted much of what we’re seeing today — the collapse of baselines, from rainfall to temperatures and the frequency of extremes, calculations upon which entire governments, industries and human settlements have been based.
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This creates a unique set of challenges for journalists covering climate. It’s something like painting a canvas while riding a rodeo horse. (I wrote about this volatility in my book, The End of Stationarity).
Baselines are handy for journalists because they offer a sense of how much variance we’re experiencing from the norm. But what is the norm? What’s the meaning of a baseline if every year the previous “baseline” is surpassed, and the past does not foreshadow the future in a measurable way?
In 2018, the Weather Underground, a data-heavy source on the weather, reported that over the previous three years — 2014-2017 — we’d experienced the most intensive rainfall periods in recorded history. Then came NOAA, which reported that the six successive months of July between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest months of July on record. Then came the World Meteorological Association, which upped the ante and reported that it’s actually been the past eight years, including the current year, that have been the warmest in the history of record-keeping. So the records keep falling one atop the other.
Consider the “100 year” flood. These are supposed to be floods of such monumental size and destructiveness that they are expected to hit flood prone areas only once every hundred years. To be more precise, every single year there’s a 1% chance of a hundred year flood. That idea, a useful reference point for all journalists reporting on the disasters that follow flooding, informs everything from insurance rates to coastal development plans to the planning of municipal water systems, dams and reservoirs, and on and on, since human civilization relies upon access to and storage of water.
Alas, that calculation, too, has been blown out of the water by … the water. Researchers at Princeton studied the FEMA flood maps and concluded that “100 year floods will be happening every 1 to 30 years,” most notably along the shorelines of the southeast Atlantic and Gulf Coast.
So amid this uncertainty, here are a couple of potential storylines to consider:
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