Storm Hilary is a sign of the unpredictable weather we must learn to live with

Oliver Milman

As Hilary, the first tropical storm to hit California in decades, flooded roads, toppled trees and triggered mudslides on Monday August 21, it served as another example of how this summer in the northern hemisphere has not only been extreme but also rather strange.

In focus

There have been record-breaking heatwaves – July was the hottest month ever recorded by humans – across much of the northern hemisphere, as well as flooding and other impacts that scientists have long warned about as the mounting toll of the climate crisis.   But climate change has set off cascading, jarring impacts that can be hard to fully predict. Hilary, for example, not only brought a rare and extreme post-cyclone to the US south-west – a region usually sheltered from such things by a barrier of cooler ocean waters and favourable winds – it caused the incongruous flooding of the desert city of Palm Springs. It also dumped a year’s worth of rain in a single day on Death Valley, which had, only a month previous, seen wilting tourists – some in fur coats – gather around a large thermometer proclaiming a 128F (53C) day, a near world record temperature.   Canada has had an astonishing year of forest wildfires – again, a phenomena that has known links to global heating – but few expected the resulting smoke would turn New York City’s skies a Blade Runner orange. It was so hot in Arizona the burns unit was at full capacity just from people who had touched the scorching pavement with bare skin. In Greece, the Acropolis was shut down, its staff on strike, because of the brutal heat.   Many climate scientists reject the idea that the climate crisis is outpacing previous predictions, or that it is accelerating in some way. We continue to billow enormous volumes of planet-heating gases into the atmosphere, with a well-documented understanding of how this is warping our climate to a state not seen during the span of humanity.   But the exact consequences of this global heating still has the capacity to surprise, as rising temperatures meet the reality of organised society. The climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has a podcast series that is titled Global Weirding – a nod to the rather chaotic, unpredictable way that the climate crisis is blundering through our lives.   As we continue to bake the planet, the mundanities of life become more shrouded in uncertainty. Will the train you catch run on time, or have the rails buckled in the heat? Are the kids still able to partake in school sports or have they been called off? Will the price of certain fruits in your supermarket go up because they have been fried in the fields of Italy or Florida? Will you have to flee a towering inferno while on holiday?   We still have an opportunity to retain some of the old certainties, although time is short and action is still lacking. That could change as the weird summer gives way to a gathering of governments at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai in November. Oddly, yet somehow appropriately, this summit will be chaired by an oil industry chief executive.   Read more on Storm Hilary:

What role did the climate crisis play in Storm Hilary – and could there be more like it? “I’ve never seen anything like this”: Tropical Storm Hilary brings deluge to desert Tropical Storm Hilary hits California – in pictures