Is wild weather the new normal?

With rising global average temperatures expected to breach the crucial 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels as early as 2027, the increasing warming of the planet because of man-made greenhouse gases means more extremes in climate and weather around the world. But the headline for New Zealand from one of our most prominent climate scientists is that this year’s ruinous weather may just be down to rotten luck. Well, probably.

“My hope,” says James Renwick, doing his best to sound hopeful, “is this unfortunate sequence of events in the North Island so far this year is not going to be the norm in the future. I can’t be sure it won’t be, but there’s no real reason to think it will be. My seat-of-the-pants feeling is it won’t be.”

Seat-of-the-whatnots or not, Renwick has the expertise to make the call. He was a climate research scientist at Niwa, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, for 20 years. Now, he’s a professor of physical geography at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka and a member of New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission. He’s also been a key contributor to the global Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since the early 2000s.

So any prediction Renwick makes should be listened to by those who are worried about where our climate and weather are headed – and that’s most of us. A poll of New Zealanders taken by insurer IAG last year found 75% of those surveyed said they were seeing, or were expecting to see, more frequent and extreme floods, while 72% thought they were seeing, or were expecting to see, more frequent and more severe storms.

If you are already expecting things to get worse because of climate change, it’s a natural assumption after disasters like the swamping of Auckland and the devastation of Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti to expect such events to be our lot from now on. Although they probably won’t be, Renwick is clear that without worldwide action to decarbonise, climate change will fundamentally alter our climate, how we live and work, and reshape our world.

Still, there is some comfort to be taken from this year’s destructive events being likely aberrations, though those in the direct path may feel differently.

“I feel sorry for the people who were in the firing line,” says Renwick, who lives on the Kāpiti Coast. “I’ve never had my house flooded out. But it must be a terrifically dispiriting thing to have happen. And to have it happen again and again – awful.

“We have had a lot of those events this year, but I don’t think that’s a sign of climate change, it’s just a sign of bad luck.”

But here’s the terrible irony: disasters get our attention. Extreme events such as Cyclone Gabrielle are unavoidable even for those not directly affected, and they force us to think about what Renwick calls the “existential threat to global civilisation” caused by man-made climate change. “I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish we didn’t have to have death and destruction to get to that point.”