The British Royal Society is warning that Climate Change will increase the risks from extreme weather. (BBC video report here.) It's not just from the weather alone; more people from rising world population will be living in areas at risk, an aging population will be less able to tolerate weather extremes, and food production will be threatened.
Climate Change is a moving target. News stories are coming out all the time, as are efforts to suppress and confuse the issue. How to keep up?
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The Royal Society report summarized here is matter of fact about why the risk is increasing.
• Increasing population numbers in areas that are exposed to extreme weather events exacerbate the risks from floods and droughts in many regions, but especially East, West and Central Africa, India and South-East Asia.
•Over-65s are one of the groups most vulnerable to heatwaves. As a result of changes in the climate, the number of heatwave exposure events they experience each year could be up to three times larger by 2100. However, the number of over-65s is also increasing. By the end of the century, the combination of climate change and population change could lead to more than 10 times the number of annual heatwave exposure events currently suffered by over-65s.
• Changes in temperature and humidity could result in significant reductions in ability to work outdoors across much of Africa, Asia, and parts of North, South and Central America. This would impact rural communities and food production for a growing global population.
The report is titled
Resilience to Extreme Weather; it is
available in PDF formats at this link. The rationale for the report is this:
How do we reduce the impact of extreme weather today while preparing ourselves for future changes? What can we do to build our resilience?
‘Resilience to extreme weather’ investigates these, and other, key questions to help inform important decisions about adaptation and risk reduction that are being made at global, national and local levels.
The other thing that needs to be noted is that not only are risks increasing, the incidence of extreme weather is increasing.
Via the Guardian UK:
Climate scientists in Germany noticed that since 2000 there have been an “exceptional number of summer weather extremes, some causing massive damage to society”. So they examined the huge meanders in the high-level jet stream winds that dominate the weather at mid-latitudes, by analysing 35 years of wind data amassed from satellites, ships, weather stations and meteorological balloons. They found that blocking patterns, which occur when these meanders slow down, have happened far more frequently.
“Since 2000, we have seen a cluster of these events. When these high-altitude waves become quasi-stationary, then we see more extreme weather at the surface,” said Dr Dim Coumou, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It is especially noticeable for heat extremes.” The intense heatwaves in Russia in 2010, which saw 50,000 people die and the wheat harvest hit hard, and in western Europe in 2003, which saw 30,000 deaths, were both the result of blocking patterns. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2011 that extreme weather would become more common as global warming heats the planet, causing both heatwaves and increasingly severe rain storms.
So, not only greater risk, but more events of risk as well. How to stay on top of it all?
One of the more damnable things about Climate Change deniers is that they are needlessly condemning millions to suffering and death as they not only block action on reducing human carbon emissions, they also block efforts to deal with the consequences already being felt and those already 'in the pipeline' so to speak. This is long past the stage of honest doubt - their opposition and efforts to confuse the issue are a classic strategy to pursue personal gain at the expense of everyone else.
It's an old trick, but it still works. The nine minute video below shows how it is done.
http://youtu.be/...
An additional problem with Climate Change is that it is happening on a scale the ADHD media cycle has trouble encompassing. It is long-term, it is incremental, it is global - but news focusing on the screaming headlines of the moment is ill-equipped to cover that kind of persistent story - especially when it is discouraged by the rightwing - conservative propaganda apparatus of FOX, talk radio, the GOP messaging machine, etc. The treatment of Climate Change as a mere ideological controversy serves no one well - except the deniers. But there are exceptions.
New Scientist, The Scientist, Scientific American - these publications are driven by facts, not politics. They and others like them do a good job covering the issue. (The "science' referenced in their names is there for a reason. There are plenty of others out there, but these are aimed at everyone, not just scientists, and they cover a broad range of science topics.) Since science is their 'beat', they're better equipped to report on science matters in general, and in greater detail.
The BBC also does a good job on covering Climate Change, in my opinion, for a number of reasons. Its history as a government monopoly and controversies over its coverage of news, plus the way it is funded by license fees from its audience means it is less susceptible to the sorts of pressures American commercial media has to deal with - it's a kind of quasi-public institution. It also maintains a global perspective because of the United Kingdom's history as a global empire. (American media tends to regard any news that doesn't take place in America or involve Americans as less marketable to the audiences it tries to deliver up to its advertisers.) The BBC isn't perfect, but it has a lot more freedom to operate in certain areas.
NPR and PBS have a mixed record - again in my opinion - for several reasons. They have done excellent reporting at times, and the existence of individual member-supported stations means they can pick up on stories at the local level. But, the lack of a dedicated funding stream makes them more susceptible to pressure. Sponsorship by corporations and wealthy individuals affects both local and national programming decisions. Congressional support is uncertain; Republican animus toward 'public' anything makes them a target. Still, their mandate to serve the public interest means they have a far greater incentive to actually do so than commercial broadcast and cable companies driven by advertisers and stockholders. They've lately been suffering from "fair and balanced syndrome" as they seek to avoid pissing off the rightwing. It's only going to get worse with a Republican Congress looking to axe them.
The decline of print media (because we're all looking at electrons instead of dead tree slices these days) doesn't mean there isn't good reporting out there. The New York Times has long had a focus on science, and their Dot Earth commentary section is a good place to keep an eye on things. The Guardian is another place that does excellent reporting upon occasion.
In any case, here's a roundup of climate related news stories from the past few days. If you've got any sources you'd like to promote, please do so in comments.
From the BBC, news that the world is on track for yet Another Warmest Year.
In unusually strong language, Mr Jarraud highlighted the impacts of the weather extremes.
"Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives. What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface, including in the northern hemisphere."
And he asserted that the new figures confirm the key trend in climate change: "There is no standstill in global warming."
Under that same heading,
UN climate talks begin as global temperatures break records
The two weeks of discussions have started amid record-breaking global temperatures for the year to date.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the global average temperature over land and ocean from January to October was the hottest since records began in 1880.
Speaking at the opening ceremony in Lima, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the conference had to make history.
"2014 is threatening to be the hottest year in history and emissions continue to rise, we need to act urgently," she told the negotiators.
"We should be able to lay the foundations for a strong agreement in Paris and raise the level of our ambitions so that gradually over the long term we are able to achieve climate neutrality - this is the only way to truly achieve sustainable development for all."
More on the climate talks from
NPR and the
New York Times. From the Times:
...while scientists and climate-policy experts welcome the new momentum ahead of the Lima talks, they warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s population and economy.
Recent reports show that there may be no way to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising, given the current level of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the projected rate of emissions expected to continue before any new deal is carried out.
That fact is driving the urgency of the Lima talks, which are expected to produce a draft document, to be made final over the next year and signed by world leaders in Paris in December 2015.
emphasis added
Meanwhile, Major Deltas Could Be Drowned - also from the BBC. Rising seas will drown areas of the world where many populations live, as well as inundating a critical region for interaction between land and marine ecosystems, affecting fish and other wildlife. It's exacerbated by dams up river that block the flow of silt to river mouths, meaning there's a lack of sediments to build up deltas in the first place. Its report is based on a paper just published in Nature.
More than a century after Mark Twain argued that the Mississippi River could never be tamed by engineers, dams and dikes constrain the great waterway. Its once muddy waters run clearer1. Starved of sediment and fragmented by economic development, the Mississippi delta downstream is shrinking by thousands of hectares per year. The rich delta ecosystem and the services it provides — storm protection, nutrient and pollution removal and carbon storage — are being destroyed. Fisheries and the bayou cultural heritage are threatened.
Deltas worldwide share this fate2. In Pakistan, one-fifth of the Indus delta plain has been eroded since the river was first dammed in 1932. In China, the northern shore of the Yellow River delta has retreated 300 metres each year for the past 35 years.
(One of the things I really like about the BBC is that they don't just report on science publications - they link to them when possible. And
Nature has a great policy: Nature makes all articles free to view)
Highlighting that global coverage thing, the BBC reports Australia sweats over extreme hot weather. (The picture at the link is a keeper as a metaphor for global warming.) The article discusses how record temperatures are making life difficult, and concludes:
Heatwaves are occurring more often because of climate change, says climate scientist Sarah Perkins.
The University of New South Wales researcher, who specialises in heatwaves, says Australia is experiencing different types of extreme temperatures, including hotter, longer and more regular periods of heat.
"I am quite concerned that in 2013 we blitzed so many temperature records in Australia," says Ms Perkins.
"For me, it is a screaming climate change signal that we are changing to a new state," she says.
And let's not forget events like the monster typhoon heading for the Phillipines,
here and
here, or
the California drought.
There's a thoughtful piece at the New York Times Magazine that asks Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change? Writer Rebecca Solnit begins by looking at a swallow fried by a solar power plant - a horrifying story by itself - but steps back for a larger perspective:
Supporters of fossil fuel and deniers of climate change love to trade in stories like the one about Ivanpah, individual tales that make renewable energy seem counterproductive, perverse. Stories cannot so readily capture the far larger avian death toll from coal, gas and nuclear power generation. Benjamin Sovacool, an energy-policy expert, looked into the deaths of birds at wind farms (where the blades can chop them down) and concluded that per gigawatt hour, nuclear power plants kill more than twice as many birds and fossil-fuel plants kill more than 30 times as many. He noted that over the course of a year fossil-fuel plants in the United States actually kill about 24 million birds, compared to 46,000 by wind farms. His calculations factor in climate change as part of their deadly impact.
Over all, climate change tends to be reported as abstract explanations about general tendencies and possible outcomes. It’s a difficult subject to tell and to take in. The scientific side is complicated. Understanding it requires the ultimate in systems thinking: the cumulative effect of all of us burning coal and oil impacts things far away and yet to come. A lot of it is hard to see. If you didn’t pay attention to a species beforehand, you won’t have noticed its decline. There’s no direct, tangible way for you to know the ocean is 30 percent more acidic than it used to be, or that it is expected to rise several feet in this century and then keep rising.
emphasis added
New Scientist has a review of some geoengineering proposals intended to address the consequences of Climate Change. It's of increasing urgency as political solutions lag behind.
IF WE can't reduce emissions enough, what else can cool the planet? We need to find out if geoengineering works, and soon, say a group of atmospheric scientists.
Engineering the planet's weather and climate is a highly controversial idea. That's why we need experiments, the group say, and they want the first to start in two years' time. The frontrunners are schemes to alter the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun's rays back into space, or to change clouds so that they let more of Earth's heat out instead of trapping it (see diagrams).
Last week, the group published a "road map" of proposals for how real-world experiments might be carried out (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, doi.org/xb9).
Scientific American has also looked at growing consideration of what are basically measures of desperation, because the risks of inaction are now seen as so high. In an interview with science historian James Fleming of Colby College in Maine, author of
Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, he points out that man-made control of the weather and the global environment is not a new idea - and the problems with it.
To take just one example from my book, on page 194: "Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control" read the headline on the front page of The New York Times on October 1, 1946. The previous evening, at his testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, RCA president Brig. Gen. David Sarnoff had speculated on worthy peaceful projects for the postwar era. Among them were "transformations of deserts into gardens through diversion of ocean currents," a technique that could also be reversed in time of war to turn fertile lands into deserts, and ordering "rain or sunshine by pressing radio buttons," an accomplishment that, Sarnoff declared, would require a "World Weather Bureau" in charge of global forecasting and control (much like the "Weather Distributing Administration" proposed in 1938). A commentator in The New Yorker intuited the problems with such control: "Who" in this civil service outfit, he asked, "would decide whether a day was to be sunny, rainy, overcast...or enriched by a stimulating blizzard?" It would be "some befuddled functionary," probably bedeviled by special interests such as the raincoat and galoshes manufacturers, the beachwear and sunburn lotion industries, and resort owners and farmers. Or if a storm was to be diverted—"Detour it where? Out to sea, to hit some ship with no influence in Washington?"
We now realize we've been running a centuries-long geoengineering experiment (inadvertently) which is showing what happens when levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are artificially raised to record levels in the atmosphere. And as Fleming's quote points out, the political aspects make a difference in how it is perceived and addressed. An opinion piece in Scientific American has
Race and the Politics of Climate Change in Two Charts:
Chris and Peyton suggest these differences might be an example of the “white male” effect, “in which white males have been found to be generally less concerned about a number of environmental and other types of risks.” They add that Hispanic Americans may have “greater awareness of how people think and how they grapple with environmental issues in other parts of the world.”
Both may be true, but I suspect partisan politics may be driving attitudes in the U.S. as well. Democrats are far more likely to think that climate change is occurring–and African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to belong to the Democratic party.
What may perhaps be good news is that the increasing evidence of Climate Change may be reaching a point where even if the Lima conference falls short, there will still be steps being taken to do something, as per this
David Biello blog post at Scientific American.
Decades of delay mean hopes of restraining global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius or limiting CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to less than 450 parts-per-million may seem a little unrealistic. In fact, if the world can only add roughly 1 trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere as has been suggested by scientists, then half has already been burned and the rest could go up in smoke in the next few decades. The world still gets 80 percent of all its energy from burning fossil fuels. No wonder geoengineering—the deliberate manipulation of the planet’s climate by sucking CO2 back out of the air or blocking sunlight—has begun to be suggested as a backup plan.
Yet, there is still hope. The world’s biggest polluter—China—will attempt to reach a peak in its voluminous output of greenhouse gases by 2030 under the terms of a new agreement with the U.S., and not a peak that is the size of the Himalayas on its borders. Under that same agreement, the U.S. will attempt to cut its CO2 pollution by as much as 28 percent by 2025. The European Union rounds out the world’s biggest industrial polluters by committing to a 40 percent cut by 2030.
There is plenty of bad news about Climate Change out there - but good news as well. Deniers would rather no one saw either, but those who want to know can find it. Now we need to act on it.
One more thing. Let me summarize my understanding of Climate Change. These are all points that can be expanded, but a list is a good thing to keep handy, if only to organize thoughts. Feel free to suggest additions or corrections in comments.
• It's real
• It's global
• It's man-made.
• Its consequences are too big to ignore, and getting worse every day.
• There is plenty of coverage in the news - IF you look in the right places.
• There is an active effort to deny it and confuse the issue for no good reason - but plenty of bad ones.
• Addressing Climate Change needs international cooperation - and it is starting to happen - but it needs to go faster.
• The cost of addressing Climate Change is trivial compared to the cost of ignoring it - and it will create jobs in the process.
• There are solutions - we don't need more study or new discoveries to start using them.
• The only thing holding us back is the lack of political and economic will to do something - and deliberate obstruction.
• This is a challenge that transcends all other problems facing mankind - it comes down to the survival of the human species on a planet that is livable.
• The longer we take to act, the harder it is going to be.
• No one else is going to save us without a determined effort on our part, not God, market forces, or trusting to luck.
It can be done. It must be done.
UPDATE: Here's some suggestions from commenters for more information on Climate Change
FishOutofWater suggests http://insideclimatenews.org/
Ashaman suggests realclimate.org climate change from climate scientists
Villabolo recommends skepticalscience.com and their list of rebuttals to climate denial myths.