20200910 wildfire
Embers light up a hillside behind the Bidwell Bar Bridge as the Bear Fire burns in Oroville, California. Image Credit: AP



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Amid all that, Iowa's derecho - bizarre straight-line winds that got as powerful as a major hurricane, causing billions of dollars in damages - barely went noticed.

Freak natural disasters - most with what scientists say likely have a climate change connection - seem to be everywhere in the crazy year 2020. But experts say we'll probably look back and say those were the good old days, when disasters weren't so wild.

"It's going to get A LOT worse," Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb said Wednesday. "I say that with emphasis because it does challenge the imagination. And that's the scary thing to know as a climate scientist in 2020."

Colorado University environmental sciences chief Waleed Abdalati, NASA's former chief scientist, said the trajectory of worsening disasters and climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas is clear, and basic physics.

"I strongly believe we're going to look back in 10 years, certainly 20 and definitely 50 and say, `Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it,"' Abdalati said.


"It seems like this is what we always were talking about a decade ago," said North Carolina State climatologist Kathie Dello.

Even so, Cobb said the sheer magnitude of what's happening now was hard to fathom back then. Just as the future of climate disasters is hard to fathom now.

"A year like 2020 could have been the subject of a marvelous science fiction film in 2000," Cobb said. "Now we have to watch and digest real-time disaster after disaster after disaster, on top of a pandemic. The outlook could not be any more grim. It's just a horrifying prospect."

"The 2030s are going to be noticeably worse than the 2020s," she said.

University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist, said that in 30 years because of the climate change already baked into the atmosphere "we're pretty much guaranteed that we'll have double what we have now."


"The kind of things we're seeing are no surprise to the (scientific) community that understands the rules and the laws of physics," Abdalati said.

"A lot of people want to blame it on 2020, but 2020 didn't do this," Dello said. "We know the behavior that caused climate change."

Consider the world's environment like an engine: "We have injected more energy into the system because we have trapped more heat into the atmosphere," said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.



Scientists also make direct connections between heat waves and climate change.

Some disasters at the moment can't be directly linked to man-made warming, such as the derecho, Overpeck said. But looking at the big picture over time shows the problem, and it's one that comes down to the basic physics of trapped heat energy.

"I am not an alarmist. I don't want to scare people," Abdalati said. "It's a problem with tremendous consequences and it's too important not to get right."


"I think we'll look back and we'll see a whole bunch of increasingly crazy years," Overpeck said. "And that this year, in 2020, I hope we look back and say it got crazy enough that it motivated us to act on climate change in the United States."Think 2020's disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future