by Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee
December 18, 2025
The phrase global warming is widely misunderstood. While it accurately describes a rise in Earth's average temperature, it fails to capture the true source of risk: a rapid increase in total energy within the Earth system. Heat is only the entry point. Once added, that energy is transformed, transferred, and amplified through atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial processes.
In 2025, global mean temperatures exceeded the long-recognized 1.5°C threshold. To a lay observer, this may sound insignificant. It is not. Earth's climate is a nonlinear system. Small average increases translate into large, destabilizing changes in circulation, moisture, pressure, and momentum--producing what are better described as extreme energy events.
Terms like heat waves or extreme weather describe symptoms, not mechanisms. The real driver is energy--thermal, kinetic, latent, and gravitational--moving through a destabilized system.
Extreme energy events include:
These events are becoming more frequent and more destructive because energy scales nonlinearly.
A critical mistake is equating climate change solely with heat. As air warms, it holds more water vapor--about 7% more moisture per 1°C of warming. Over a 10°C increase, moisture capacity nearly doubles.
This excess moisture does not fall gently.
Larger and more numerous raindrops increase mass (m), and falling from greater heights increases velocity (v). Momentum (p = mv) rises sharply. Upon impact, that momentum transfers to surfaces and to runoff, increasing erosion, infrastructure failure, and flood velocity.
Flow forces scale with the square of velocity (v2). Even modest increases in rainfall intensity dramatically increase destructive power.
Because water is ~800 times denser than air, fast-moving floodwater exerts exponentially greater force than wind at the same speed.
In July 2025 alone, hundreds of flash floods occurred across the United States, including multiple so-called 1-in-1,000-year rainfall events in Texas, New Mexico, North Carolina, Florida, and Illinois--statistics that no longer describe rarity, but systemic change.
As temperature gradients shift and circulation destabilizes, pressure contrasts intensify and reorganize. The result is stronger, more erratic winds.
These were not isolated anomalies; they were the mechanical outcome of a hotter, more unstable atmosphere.
Wind is driven by pressure gradients. As climate energy increases, these gradients sharpen.
Notable examples include record-breaking North Atlantic and Pacific storms whose pressures rival major hurricanes.
These systems are extreme pressure machines. Tight gradients around the eye wall accelerate winds to catastrophic speeds. Rapid intensification has become increasingly common as ocean heat content rises.
Atmospheric pressure alone can raise sea level. Roughly 1 cm of sea-level rise occurs for every 1mb pressure drop.
Deep low-pressure systems can elevate ocean levels by half a meter before wind is even considered. When combined with wave energy and rising baseline seas, the result is catastrophic coastal flooding.
A destabilized system oscillates.
These shifts strain ecosystems and human systems designed for gradual change.
This framework of extreme energy events directly aligns with--and physically underpins--tipping-point theory and cascading-collapse dynamics.
Tipping points are not abstract thresholds; they are energy thresholds. A system appears stable while excess energy is absorbed internally--through ocean heat uptake, cryosphere melt, soil moisture loss, or atmospheric moisture loading. Once buffering capacity is exhausted, the system reorganizes abruptly.
Examples include:
Extreme energy events are therefore the observable phase transition--the moment when stored energy is released into motion, flow, and force.
Earth's climate is a tightly coupled system. When one component crosses a tipping point, it injects energy or removes stability from adjacent systems, accelerating their failure.
For example:
Each collapse feeds energy forward, amplifying stress on the next subsystem. This is why observed change is no longer sequential--it is simultaneous.
In nonlinear systems, stress accumulates invisibly. The release is abrupt.
Extreme energy events mark the transition from:
This explains why multiple "once-in-1,000-year" events are now occurring within the same season, across unrelated regions, and through different physical mechanisms.
Our tipping-point and cascading-collapse work emphasizes a critical insight: the danger is not the magnitude of warming alone, but the synchronization of failures.
Extreme energy events are the connective tissue between:
They are how abstract thresholds become lived reality.
Climate change is not simply warming the planet--it is pushing multiple Earth systems past energetic thresholds simultaneously.
Once tipping points are crossed, the system no longer returns to its prior state. Energy flows reconfigure permanently, cascades accelerate, and collapse becomes self-reinforcing.
We are no longer approaching this phase.
We are inside it.
* Our probabilistic, ensemble-based climate model — which incorporates complex socio-economic and ecological feedback loops within a dynamic, nonlinear system — projects that global temperatures are becoming unsustainable this century. This far exceeds earlier estimates of a 4°C rise over the next thousand years, highlighting a dramatic acceleration in global warming. We are now entering a phase of compound, cascading collapse, where climate, ecological, and societal systems destabilize through interlinked, self-reinforcing feedback loops.
We examine how human activities — such as deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, mass consumption, industrial agriculture, and land development — interact with ecological processes like thermal energy redistribution, carbon cycling, hydrological flow, biodiversity loss, and the spread of disease vectors. These interactions do not follow linear cause-and-effect patterns. Instead, they form complex, self-reinforcing feedback loops that can trigger rapid, system-wide transformations — often abruptly and without warning. Grasping these dynamics is crucial for accurately assessing global risks and developing effective strategies for long-term survival.
What Can I Do?
The single most important action you can take to help address the climate crisis is simple: stop burning fossil fuels.
There are numerous actions you can take to contribute to saving the planet. Each person bears the responsibility to minimize pollution, discontinue the use of fossil fuels, reduce consumption, and foster a culture of love and care. The Butterfly Effect illustrates that a small change in one area can lead to significant alterations in conditions anywhere on the globe. Hence, the frequently heard statement that a fluttering butterfly in China can cause a hurricane in the Atlantic. Be a butterfly and affect the world.