Sustainability Corner: What is a “climate breakdown?”

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Climate breakdown has become a prevalent issue in recent months as devastating tendencies have been displayed in a more brutal form across the world.

As news about environmental issues begins to take a backseat for the upcoming Presidential Election, one keenly prevalent issue has been cited multiple times in recent months: Climate breakdown. 

The Cambridge Dictionary defines this term as “very serious and harmful changes in the world's weather, in particular the fact that it is believed to be getting warmer as a result of human activity increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” Many may think this term—a subcategory of climate change—is synonymous with climate change, but the prominent difference is the time necessary for changes to occur. 

Climate change defines readily hurried changes in a biome—an “area classified according to the species that live in that location”—caused by human-created emissions via agricultural waste, industrial work, everyday activities, and other factors. Climate breakdown is the wide-scale deterioration of a biome—a region’s native weather, animal, and plant life—resulting from human-caused emissions known for region-wide changes in months; it is the sudden collapse of a climate. For classification’s sake, climate breakdown is the accelerated, sudden shift towards devastating biome changes. 

Recently, these devastating tendencies have been fully displayed in a familiar but drastically more brutal form: Wildfires, floods, and systematic breakdowns. These effects have been seen most prominently sweeping across the European Union (EU), in places like Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Germany; and farther out in places like Greenland, Portugal, and California. It has even been cited as affecting processes like thermohaline circulation, i.e., the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). 

Across the EU, “Torrential rains brought by Storm Boris on the weekend have destroyed infrastructure, submerged vehicles, and caused billions of euros in damages,” and has caused a chain reaction leading to various internal river systems overflowing—resulting in even more harrowing damage. Cities across central Europe and beyond have begun experiencing this drastic rainfall, with only a few receding; this flooding issue is worsening. 

Additionally, in Portugal, devastating wildfires have sprouted up and have killed six people thus far, but this number is expected to rise. In California, wildfires have begun and culminated into the largest forest fire of the year. Unlike its EU counterpart, California’s wildfires are suspected of being caused by arson; case pending. Even with these two drastic cases, the words of EU Crisis Management Commissioner Janez Lenarcic hold true: “Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly. This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future.”

In Greenland, the ice caps melt at an unprecedented rate of “ 234 billion tons of ice per year,” at minimum. This is due to the continued slowing of the AMOC, which is responsible for “circulat[ing] warm, salty water from the South Atlantic and tropics via the Gulf Stream to the colder North Atlantic. There, warm salty waters cool, release heat, and eventually sink to the deep ocean and move south.” Ironically, this slowing of AMOC is caused by unprecedented low sea surface temperatures worldwide, which melting glaciers have inversely caused; it has entered a negative feedback loop devoid of a strong thermohaline circulation, which may prove impossible to pull AMOC out of. 

Through all this, one thing stands to be clear: Climate breakdown is apparent and prominent and will continue into unforeseen damaging facets. Amidst it all, economies worldwide struggle to cope with the cost such damage brings. 

Specifically, in the EU, Janez Lenarcic stated that “the average cost of disasters in the 1980s was 8 billion euros per year. More recently in 2021 and 2022, the damage [cost] has surpassed 50 billion euros per year, meaning the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action.” He continued, “Europe is the fastest warming continent globally and is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events…We could not return to a safer past.”

As the climate continues to degrade worldwide, it may be important to stay informed about what actions each individual could take to help. As time passes, the necessity for people to make an effort appears crucial to avoid an unsalvageable tomorrow and reclaim the hope of the past.