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By Gary Yohe
Professor Emeritus at Wesleyan
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Every time another catastrophic flood, wildfire, or heat wave strikes, I know exactly what is coming next. Not a weather report, but a hastily called press conference where someone will stand behind a podium and call it “unimaginable.”
That word should make us uncomfortable. Calling a disaster unimaginable suggests that nobody could reasonably have anticipated it. After decades of climate science, that explanation is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
The United States alone endured 403 weather and climate disasters between 1980 and 2024, each causing at least $1 billion in damage. Their combined cost exceeded $2.9 trillion.
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In 2024, 27 such disasters occurred, making it the second-highest annual total on record. But this is not simply an American story. Around the world, communities are confronting extreme heat, flooding, wildfire and other hazards, the consequences of which increasingly extend across economies and borders.
I have spent decades studying climate science. Every time I hear another disaster described as “unimaginable,” I don’t hear an accurate description. I hear an excuse. If something could not have been imagined, then nobody can reasonably be held responsible for failing to prepare for it.
But scientists did imagine these conditions. More importantly, they modeled them.
The Use of Language Around Climate Is Vitally Important
Syukuro Manabe’s pioneering climate research demonstrated decades ago how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations would alter atmospheric temperatures. His work helped establish the foundations of modern climate modeling and ultimately contributed to his 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The warnings became increasingly specific. In 2011, climate scientists Noah Diffenbaugh and Martin Scherer examined when exceptionally hot summers could become increasingly common as global temperatures rose. What once sounded like a warning about a distant future now looks increasingly familiar.
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Still, after disasters, we reach reflexively for words such as “historic,” “unprecedented,” “once in a generation” and “unimaginable.” Some events genuinely do break records. The problem begins when exceptional language encourages exceptional thinking, as though each catastrophe exists separately from the changing risk conditions scientists have spent decades documenting.
The danger is that surprise becomes a habit. A society that treats every disaster as unforeseeable has little reason to examine building standards, infrastructure, emergency planning, land use or the resilience of essential services before the next one arrives. Preparation remains reactive because every catastrophe is treated as an exception.
Preparedness Needs to Become Measurable
There is another path. Scientific knowledge can become the basis for anticipating where systems are vulnerable and investing before lives, homes and livelihoods are lost. Communities can strengthen infrastructure around risks that are no longer hypothetical. Businesses can incorporate physical climate exposure into long-term decisions.
Governments can design emergency plans around conditions that are plausible tomorrow rather than those considered normal decades ago.
The stakes extend well beyond weather reports. When rivers flood, families lose homes and livelihoods. When heat intensifies, crops can fail, and food prices can rise. When wildfires burn, smoke travels far beyond the flames. Insurance markets, public budgets, supply chains, and businesses can all absorb consequences. Climate disasters rarely end where they begin.
That is why preparedness needs to become measurable. Governments should identify their highest-consequence climate risks, publish the infrastructure and emergency-planning gaps those risks expose, assign responsibility for addressing them and report publicly on progress each year. Businesses should conduct the same exercise for facilities, workers and supply chains. A warning becomes useful only when somebody is accountable for acting on it.
Human Suffering Should Never Become Ordinary
My concern is not with nature. Nature follows physical laws with remarkable consistency. The greater failure occurs when institutions possess credible evidence of changing risks and continue planning as though yesterday’s conditions will return.
The next catastrophic flood, wildfire, or heat wave may still shock us.
Human suffering should never become ordinary. But shock and surprise are not the same thing. We can be horrified by a disaster without pretending the underlying risk was impossible to foresee.
So when the next catastrophe is described as “unimaginable,” ask a harder question. What did we already know, and what did we do with that knowledge?
Science cannot prevent every disaster. It can, however, deny us the excuse of saying we never saw the risk coming.
Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation professor of economics and environmental studies, emeritus, at Wesleyan University. He has written extensively over the past 40+ years on climate change economics, risk management, and three climate response options: abate, adapt, or suffer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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