The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week's events have now ravaged some of the world's wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
"I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien," said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. "There's not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save people's lives."
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