Floods devastate communities in Germany 1:38
(CNN) -
Until recently, climate change was talked about as a threat to the future.
The battle fronts were remote places like the Arctic, where polar bears are running out of sea ice to hunt.
Rising sea levels and extreme drought were a problem for the developing world.
However, in the last month it is the developed world that has been in the front line of fire.
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In the past four weeks, floods in Germany washed away streets and swallowed up houses that had stood for more than a century in the quiet town of Schuld.
A Canadian town of just 250 people, best known for its fresh mountain air, was completely burned down in a wildfire that followed the unprecedented heat wave.
Forest fire destroys town in Canada 1:07
And in the western United States, just weeks after a historic heat wave, some 20,000 firefighters and officials were deployed to fight 80 large fires that have consumed more than 4,047 square kilometers.
Climate scientists have warned for decades that the climate crisis would lead to more extreme weather events.
They said they would be deadly and would be more frequent.
However, many are now expressing surprise that heat and rain records are being broken by such large margins.
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'Climate change is here' say European officials after deadly floods swept through entire cities
Since the 1970s, scientists have predicted quite accurately how much the world's temperature would rise.
What's more difficult for their models to predict - even with increasingly powerful computers - is how intense the shock will be.
Michael E. Mann, director of the Center for Earth System Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, told CNN that recent weeks have demonstrated the limitation of climate change models.
Rescue of a father and his daughters in the middle of floods 0:47
"There is a major factor with many of these events, including the recent 'heat dome' event in the west, that climate models don't capture," Mann said.
"The models are underestimating the magnitude of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events."
In climate models, Mann explained, the weather we experience from day to day is just noise.
It looks a lot like chaos.
In contrast, only the most extreme events stand out as a clear signal.
"The signal is emerging from the noise more quickly" than the models anticipated, Mann said.
"The (real world) signal is now big enough to 'see' it in daily time," although the models did not see it coming.
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That means that historical events like the floods in Germany or the wildfire in Canada were not recorded in the predictions.
For that to happen, scientists say, we need climate models that are even more powerful.
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Tim Palmer, Research Professor of Weather Physics at Oxford University, is one of several scientists who have been calling for a global modeling center.
This center would have an "exascale" supercomputer that can process an exorbitant amount of data.
In the 1950s, scientists and governments established the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
They did so when it became clear that advancing the field of particle physics would require a machine so expensive that it was unlikely to be developed by a single country.
"As an international organization, CERN has been very successful," Palmer told CNN.
"That is what we need for climate change."
Scientists use computer simulations of weather events to make projections of how they may change within decades.
But they can't get enough detail, even down to a city level, to predict the most extreme events.
Despite advances in technology, computers are still not sophisticated enough to operate at such high resolution.
Palmer said climate models must move there.
They analyze how climate change affects hurricanes 0:54
"If globally we are spending trillions of dollars to adapt to climate change, we have to know exactly what we are adapting to," Palmer said, "whether it is floods, droughts, storms or rising sea levels."
'A necessary evil'
While recent extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere took many by surprise, they were "completely unexpected," said Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading.
"This is what science has always been aiming for," he said.
But he agrees that having better computers would be helpful for making more detailed and refined projections.
"It is also difficult to assess how weather patterns will change and alter in the future, including whether the flow from the west over Europe will be blocked more frequently, causing storms to stop over one place, as happened in Europe in July 2021, or if there will be longer and more sustained heat waves like in western North America, "Allan said.
Bootleg fire burns more than 120,000 acres in Oregon 1:14
Even without this granular modeling, climate activists - and increasingly communities affected by extreme weather events - are calling for more action to address climate change.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said over the weekend: "We have to hurry, we have to go faster in the fight against climate change."
Several developed countries, including the United States, significantly increased their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions this year.
Last week, the European Union unveiled an ambitious plan to put climate at the center of almost every development and economic initiative it has.
The European Union approves zero emissions law by 2050 0:41
Yet many activists say their promises fall short of containing the rise in the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This is the figure that, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, is key to avoiding even more catastrophic impacts of climate change.
They also criticize governments that make ambitious promises as they continue to approve new fossil fuel projects, including coal mines and oil and gas facilities.
Merritt Turetsky, director of the Arctic and Alpine Research Institute, hopes that these meteorological phenomena in the developed world will drive such actions.
She herself is challenging her own perceptions of where the battle fronts for climate change are and who is vulnerable.
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"Perhaps this is a necessary evil," Turetsky said.
"We used to think of those battle fronts as island nations due to rising sea levels or in the Arctic."
"We know that there is a cognitive dissonance when climate change affects people who are so far away from you and everything you know. We tend to leave it on a shelf, because it is one thing to see 'this is what they say', but another thing is to feel it. We are at a point where everyone on the planet has now felt the impacts of climate change themselves, or at least someone they love or know has felt. It is getting closer and closer, "he added.
An entire town evacuated due to forest fires 3:03
That is undoubtedly the sentiment among Schuld residents in Germany.
"When you look at what is happening in Canada, where they had temperatures of 50 degrees, and what is happening around the world, it is clear that this is the result of climate change," Niklas Pieters told CNN, while helping his parents clean up the debris from his devastated house in Schuld.
"I don't want to have to get used to this."
CNN's Sam Kiley contributed to this report.
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