Besides the ongoing global pandemic, the summer of 2021 was different from previous summers in that natural disasters dominated the news. There were flash floods in Germany and Belgium, wildfires throughout Southern Europe, and a massive heat wave stretched through the Pacific West. Wealthy or impoverished, these climate catastrophes did not seem to have a preference for their stomping grounds.

On August 9, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that has changed the rules of the climate change game*. The natural anomalies seen all throughout this summer will no longer be such a rarity. According to the IPCC, human influence on our Earth has reached a point where the consequences of climate change are now irreversible and unavoidable. For the next few decades, the floods, fires, hurricanes, and heatwaves seen during this summer will only continue to occur more frequently and more intensely.

*For an easy-to-understand explanation of this report and its implications, listen to this episode of The Daily.