Don't call the extreme heat, flooding, and wildfires 'the new normal'

• The climate crisis is causing a "new abnormal" characterized by more frequent and intense disasters.
• How media and politicians frame extreme weather shapes how people view climate change.  
• More people are connecting their personal run-ins with disasters to the climate crisis.
• This article is part of Insider's weekly newsletter on sustainability. Sign up here.

Let's not call the extreme heat, flooding, and wildfires upending lives around the world "the new normal."

The phrase suggests the frequency and intensity of these disasters will stabilize, Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Insider.

"We're not on a plateau," Leiserowitz, who studies people's attitudes toward the climate crisis, said. "We're on a roller coaster. This is the new abnormal. And it's getting worse."

Phoenix on Wednesday had a record 20 consecutive days of temperatures reaching 110 degrees or beyond, and local officials have reported 12 heat-associated deaths. Another 55 are under investigation.

The problems aren't just in the US: An airport in Iran reported this week that the heat index — what the temperature feels like when humidity is factored in — reached 152 degrees. That's much higher than what researchers have found the human body can endure before becoming vulnerable to heatstroke and death.

Canada's wildfire season is now the country's worst on record, polluting the air breathed by millions of people in North America. Vermont residents are recovering from a "once-in-a-hundred-year" flood for the second time in a little over a decade. The ocean, which has absorbed 90% of the planet's warming from greenhouse-gas emissions, hit alarmingly high temperatures off the coast of Florida.

The way the media and politicians frame these events is important because most people around the world still don't connect their own run-ins with disasters to the climate crisis, Leiserowitz said. People also tend to gradually normalize change, in what psychologists call "shifting baselines."

"It's a strength and a weakness that we are able to get used to new conditions," he said.

In the US, it wasn't until around 2016 that personal experiences with hot days started to shift public views of the climate crisis and break through political ideology, Leiserowitz said.

In a survey conducted by Leiserowitz and his colleagues between mid-April and May 1, 44% of Americans polled agreed that they personally experienced global warming. The figure is double what it was over the past decade.

Still, the climate crisis remains psychologically distant for many people. They think it will affect "polar bears or maybe developing countries but not the United States, not my state, not my community, not my friends, not my family, not me," Leiserowitz said.

This has consequences for the institutions with the most power to combat the climate emergency: national governments and corporations, which reflect the people who run them. These institutions haven't acted fast enough to avert the crisis, climate scientists say. The delay isn't solely attributed to human psychology. Politics and profits also play a role.

But now all three of those factors are shifting, at least to some degree, in favor of climate action, Lena Moffitt, the executive director of the environmental group Evergreen Action, told Insider.

"A lot of politicians and business officials see that there is an economic benefit to taking action now," she said. "The Biden administration is investing in renewable energy and in making that technology here in the US. A lot of those investments go to red states."