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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Warning: extreme weather ahead
  • Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:35:26 -0600


Warning: extreme weather ahead
John Vidal
guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 June 2011 19.59 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/extreme-weather-flooding-droughts-fires
Tornados, wildfires, droughts and floods were once seen as freak conditions.
But the environmental disasters now striking the world are shocking signs of
'global weirding'

Drought zones have been declared across much of England and Wales, yet
Scotland has just registered its wettest-ever May. The warmest British spring
in 100 years followed one of the coldest UK winters in 300 years. June in
London has been colder than March. February was warm enough to strip on
Snowdon, but last Saturday it snowed there.

Welcome to the climate rollercoaster, or what is being coined the "new
normal" of weather. What was, until quite recently, predictable, temperate,
mild and equable British weather, guaranteed to be warmish and wettish,
ensuring green lawns in August, now sees the seasons reversed and temperature
and rainfall records broken almost every year. When Kent receives as much
rain (4mm) in May as Timbuktu, Manchester has more sunshine than Marbella,
and soils in southern England are drier than those in Egypt, something is
happening.

Sober government scientists at the centre for hydrology and ecology are
openly using words like "remarkable", "unprecedented" and "shocking" to
describe the recent physical state of Britain this year, but the extremes we
are experiencing in 2011 are nothing to the scale of what has been taking
place elsewhere recently.

Last year, more than 2m sq km of eastern Europe and Russia scorched. An extra
50,000 people died as temperatures stayed more than 6C above normal for many
weeks, crops were devastated and hunderds of giant wild fires broke out. The
price of wheat and other foods rose as two thirds of the continent
experienced its hottest summer in around 500 years.

This year, it's western Europe's turn for a mega-heatwave, with 16 countries,
including France, Switzerland and Germany (and Britain on the periphery),
experiencing extreme dryness. The blame is being out on El Niño and La Niña,
naturally occurring but poorly understood events that follow heating and
cooling of the Pacific ocean near the equator, bringing floods and droughts.

Vast areas of Europe have received less than half the rainfall they would
normally get in March, April and May, temperatures have been off the scale
for the time of year, nuclear power stations have been in danger of having to
be shut down because they need so much river water to cool them, and boats
along many of Europe's main rivers have been grounded because of low flows.
In the past week, the great European spring drought has broken in many places
as massive storms and flash floods have left the streets of Germany and
France running like rivers.

But for real extremes in 2011, look to Australia, China and the southern US
these past few months. In Queeensland, Australia, an area the size of Germany
and France was flooded in December and January in what was called the
country's "worst natural disaster". It cost the economy up to A$30bn
(£19.5bn), devastated livelihoods and is still being cleaned up.

In China, a "once-in-a-100-years" drought in southern and central regions has
this year dried up hundreds of reservoirs, rivers and water courses,
evaporating drinking supplies and stirring up political tensions. The
government responded with a massive rain-making operation, firing thousands
of rockets to "seed" clouds with silver iodide and other chemicals. It may
have worked: for whatever reason, the heavens opened last week, a record 30cm
of rain fell in some places in 24 hours, floods and mudslides killed 94
people, and tens of thousands of people have lost their homes.

Meanwhile, north America's most deadly and destructive tornado season ever
saw 600 "twisters" in April alone, and 138 people killed in Joplin, Missouri,
by a mile-wide whirlwind. Arizonans were this week fighting some of the
largest wildfires they have known, and the greatest flood in recorded US
history is occurring along sections of the Missouri river. This is all taking
place during a deepening drought in Texas and other southern states – the
eighth year of "exceptional" drought there in the past 12 years.

"I don't know how much more we can take," says John Butcher, a peanut and
cotton farmer near Lubbock, Texas. "It's dry like we have never seen it
before. I don't remember anything like this. We may lose everything."

The impacts of extreme weather are greater in poorer countries, which this
week are trying to secure a climate deal in the resumed talks in Bonn. In
Mexico, the temperature peaked at 48.8C (119.8F) in April, the warmest
anywhere in the world that month, and nearly half the country is now affected
by drought. There have already been 9,000 wildfires, and the biggest farm
union says that more than 3.5 million farmers are on the brink of bankruptcy
because they cannot feed their cattle or grow crops.

"We are being battered by the adverse impacts of climate change," says a
negotiator for the G77 group of developing countries who wants to remain
anonymous. "Frontline states face a double crunch of climate heat and
poverty. But the rich countries still will not give us the cash they promised
to adapt or reduce their emissions."

Wherever you look, the climate appears to be in overdrive, with stronger
weather patterns gripping large areas for longer and events veering between
extremes. Last year, according to US meteorologist Jeff Masters, who
co-founded leading climate tracker website Weather Underground, 17 countries
experienced record temperatures. Colombia, the Amazon basin, Peru, Cuba,
Kenya, Somalia and many other countries have all registered far more or less
rainfall or major heatwaves in the past few years, he says. Temperatures in
Bangladesh have been near record highs, leaving at least 26 people dead in
the past week; Kuwait has seen temperatures in excess of 50C and Rajasthan in
India 49.6C, while parts of Canada, including Toronto, have been sizzling at
a record 33C.

Rich countries may be more or less immune in the short term because the
global trading system guarantees food and access to electricity allows air
conditioning, but in parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, millions of people
this year have little or no food left after successive poor rainy seasons.
Last week, international aid agencies warned of an impending disaster.

Sceptics argue that there have always been droughts and floods, freak
weather, heatwaves and temperature extremes, but what concerns most climate
scientists and observers is that the extreme weather events are occurring
more frequently, their intensity is growing and the trends all suggest
long-term change as greenhouse gases steadily build in the atmosphere.

Killer droughts and heatwaves, deeper snowfalls, more widespread floods,
heavier rains, and temperature extremes are now the "new normal", says Nikhil
da Victoria Lobo of the giant insurance firm Swiss Re, which last month
estimated losses from natural disasters have risen from about $25bn a year in
the 1980s to $130bn a year today. "Globally, what we're seeing is more
volatility," he says.

People in the most affected areas are certainly not waiting for climate
scientists to confirm climate change is happening before they adapt. In
Nepal, where the rain is heavier than before, flat roofs are giving way to
pitched roofs, and villagers in the drought-prone Andes are building
reservoirs and changing crops to survive.

New analysis of natural disasters in 140 countries shows that climate is
becoming more extreme. Last month, Oxfam reported that while the number of
"geo-physical" disasters – such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – has
remained more or less constant, those caused by flooding and storms have
increased from around 133 a year in 1980s to more than 350 a year now.

"It is abundantly clear that weather-related disasters have been increasing
in some of the world's poorest countries and this increase cannot be
explained fully by better ways of counting them," says Steve Jennings, the
report's author. "Whichever way you look at the figures, there is a
significant rise in the number of weather-related disasters. They have been
increasing and are set to get worse as climate change further intensifies
natural hazards.

"I think that global 'weirding' is the best way to describe what we're
seeing. We are used to certain conditions and there's a lot going on these
days that is not what we're used to, that is outside our current frame of
reference," says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University.

New trends have been emerging for a decade or more, says the UN's World
Meteorological Organisation (WMO). "In Europe, a clear trend is emerging
towards drier springs. This year's drought follows exceptionally dry years in
2007, 2009 and 2010," says a spokesman.

While no scientist will blame climate change for any specific weather event,
many argue that these phenomena are textbook examples of the kind of impact
that can be expected in a warming world. Natural events, such as La Niña and
El Niño, are now being exacerbated by the background warming of the world,
they say.

"It is almost impossible for us to pinpoint specific events . . . and say
they were caused by climate change," says William Chameides, atmospheric
scientist at Duke University, who was vice-chair of a US government-funded
national research council study on the climate options for the US which
reported last month. "On the other hand, we do know that because of climate
change those kinds of events will very, very likely become more common, more
frequent, more intense. So what we can say is that these kinds of events that
we are seeing are consistent with climate change."

He is backed strongly in Europe. "We have to get accustomed to such extreme
weather conditions, as climate change intensifies," says Friedrich-Wilhelm
Gerstengarbe, assistant director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research in Germany. "Heavy storms and inundations will happen in northern
Germany twice or three times as frequently as in the past."

"We've always had El Niños and natural variability, but the background which
is now operating is different. [La Niña and El Niño] are now happening in a
hotter world [which means more moisture in the atmosphere]," David Jones,
head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Australian Bureau of
Meteorology in Melbourne told Reuters after the Queeensland floods.

David Barriopedro, a researcher at Lisbon University's Instituto Dom Luiz,
last month compared last year's European heatwave with the one that struck in
2003 and calculated that the probability of a European summer experiencing a
"mega-heatwave" will increase by a factor of five to 10 within the next 40
years if the warming trends continue. "This kind of event will become more
common," he says. "Mega-heatwaves are going to be more frequent and more
intense in the future."

But there may be some respite coming from extreme weather because the El
Niño/La Niña episodes are now fading fast, according to the WMO. "The weather
pattern, blamed for extremely heavy downpours in Australia, southeast Asia
and South America over late 2010 and early 2011, is unlikely to redevelop in
the middle of 2011," it advises. "Looking ahead beyond mid-year 2011, there
are currently no clear indications for enhanced risk of El Niño or La Niña in
the second half of the year"

The WMO concludes, tentatively, that global weather will now return to
something approaching normal. The trouble is, no one is too sure what normal
is any more.









  • [Livingontheland] Warning: extreme weather ahead, Tradingpost, 06/18/2011

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