Archive for category Environmental armageddon

Let’s talk about the weather. It’s been terrible. In northern Europe, summer has so far been a wash out. Russia has seen disastrous and deadly flooding. Last week I was in China and there was a different extreme: heatwaves across Beijing and Hong Kong. But in central China intense rainfall caused landslides that obliterated villages. It has been a year of such extremes. In Britain, there were record maximum temperatures in March, followed by the wettest April on record, and the equal-wettest June since 1766 (tied with 1860). For this year, the wet summer looks set to continue.

Weather should not be confused with climate (at least that is the correct response to climate change deniers, who like to say that cold weather “disproves” global warming). But can the current weather extremes be directly attributed to global warming? The official and scientific response is that they cannot, but changes in the climatic pattern can (that’s why they call it climate change). EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, speaking at a European Policy Centre event (10 July) said that “it’s important that we do not mix weather and climate,” but added that “I can see [climate] developments that support that something is changing,” with heavy precipitation, floods and grey summers in northern Europe becoming the new normal, in line with climate scientists’ predictions.

It is unfortunate that the link between global warming and weather cannot be made, or that no-one wants to make it. It would be much easier to quantify the damages from climate change if particular weather events could be attributed to global warming.

For example, the November 2009 floods in Cumbria, northern England, caused by unprecedented heavy rainfall, resulted in insurance payouts of about £175 million (€220 million). Damages from current and recent flooding in the UK will be of a similar magnitude. The most expensive insured event in Europe in 2011, according to the Swiss Re sigma study, was flash flooding in Copenhagen in July, which caused damages of $0.8 billion (€0.65 billion). But though such events are becoming more frequent and more intense, and though intuitively they seem to be a consequence of climate change, we have to hold back from saying that they are.

Quantified and attributed damages assessed on a regular basis would focus attention, possibly even in Poland, on the need for governments to do much more in the face of climate change. We are only at the beginning of a process of climate change, caused, so far, by a relatively limited temperature rise. May 2012 was the warmest May on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with an average global surface temperature of 0.66°C above the twentieth century average. If, as seems likely under the current little- or no-action scenario, the global temperature rises by 3 or 4 degrees by the end of the century, events such as the July 2011 Copenhagen floods will happen much more frequently, and the economic costs will rapidly mount.

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Just as Commissioner Hedegaard was saying that specific weather events cannot be attributed to climate change, scientists were saying they can. The UK Met Office published research (10 July) that “for the first time… includes so-called ‘climate attribution studies’, looking at six key weather events shortly after they have happened”. For example, global warming means that “the extreme warm average temperature in November 2011 is 60 times more likely to have occurred than in the 1960s,” though not all weird weather can be similarly attributed to climate change, the scientists said.

Research scientists in Italy seem to have been particularly busy last week, publishing at least three significant reports. The first was about an apparent finding that needs to be proved and may or may not have major ramifications. The other two were observations of phenomena in the real world that will affect everyone. However, only the first garnered any media attention.

The first was the finding of the Opera project, at Gran Sasso near L’Aquila, that Einstein might have got it wrong. The discovery that tiny particles could apparently travel faster than the speed of light earned headlines worldwide, followed by a faster-than-the-speed-of-light debunking (see for example the Wall Street Journal). In fact the scientists who published the finding urged caution and asked others to test their work. So we shall see.

The second report was published by the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability in Ispra, northern Italy. The institute’s data shows that world greenhouse gas emissions from manmade sources reached an all-time high of 33 billion tonnes in 2010.

There are several sobering aspects to this data. First, it shows that the Kyoto Protocol has not worked. Annex I countries (those with emission reduction targets) are likely in fact to collectively meet their target but only because of two historical accidents: the collapse of Soviet-bloc heavy industry, and the continuing financial and economic crisis, which led to major industrial production drops. Had these interruptions not happened, developed world emissions would be much higher.

The report also shows that any Kyoto Protocol related achievements have been rendered largely irrelevant by growth in emissions in non-Annex I countries, especially China. Chinese emissions have doubled since 2003, and in absolute terms are now well in excess of even US emissions. Chinese per capita emissions now exceed those of France and Spain (France is a low-carbon country due to nuclear power), and are on the same level as Italy. Alarmingly, the Chinese could be emitting on a per capita basis at the same high level as Americans by 2017 if current trends continue.

The enormous Chinese emissions growth is largely a consequence of installation of fossil fuel based energy generation, mainly from coal. Depending on who’s figures you look at (Chinese official statistics are treated with caution), in one year alone, between 2009-2010, Chinese coal consumption increased by between 5.9 and 10.1 percent. The building of dozens of coal-fired power plants in China locks in emissions for the next few decades and makes it unrealistic that global emissions will peak in 2015, as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is especially the case because emissions in developed countries are not dramatically declining to compensate for the developing country increases.

The third – largely ignored – finding from Italy last week came from the Italian Glaciological Committee. It found that Italian glaciers have lost 37 percent of their volume in the last quarter of a century, with a speeding-up of the shrinkage since 2003. Italy’s glaciers could be gone completely by 2050, and the process is now likely to be irreversible, the scientists said.

This is a real-world illustration of the pace of global warming, the consequences of which are unpredictable, but which will involve loss of ice cover, rising sea levels, and chaotic weather patterns. The number of weather-related natural disasters is already increasing sharply, affecting more people (see CRED EM-DAT), and becoming more expensive, as the insurance industry well knows.

Unfortunately policy makers are ill-equipped to address the problem, even though they’ve been told enough times what the problem is. The inertia might be down to denial, the cumbersome structure of decision making, short-term thinking or inability to communicate the risks, but the result is the same: too little action, too late. But perhaps the scientists at Gran Sasso will really prove Einstein wrong, and we can send José Manuel Barroso back in time to sort it all out.