New climate research results should jolt governments into action

The Canadian/Oxford research is highly politically significant, because it will help to strip away the “stonewall”, do-nothing tactics that various governments have used to excuse themselves from dealing seriously with climate change. The studies will have particular relevance in Australia, where extreme weather events are all too evident, and where token gestures by government are the order of the day as far as climate change is concerned.

Greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, CPA – The Guardian, Peter Mac,  23 February 2011 In Australia the public’s attention has been firmly fixed on the havoc wrought by floods in the eastern states, cyclones in Queensland and the Northern Territory, and bushfires in Western Australia. However, extreme weather events are also occurring in many nations overseas.

Within the last few months the United States and much of Western Europe have been gripped by massive snowstorms, while hundreds of people have drowned in floods in Brazil and Pakistan.

Climate scientists have predicted for years that an increase in extreme weather events will result from a global increase in the emission of greenhouse gases, which change the wavelength of the sun’s rays entering the atmosphere, thereby preventing the reflection of the radiation back into space and boosting global temperatures. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, human industry has caused a major increase in the overall level of global emissions.

Although the “greenhouse effect” results in an overall rise in global temperatures, in certain parts of the world extremely cold winters are likely, because of changes in the flow of the world’s ocean currents. In other areas an increase in rainfall levels is likely because the warmer air can contain more moisture.

Two critical new studies

There is widespread agreement among the world’s scientists about the link between climate change and extreme weather events in general. Nevertheless, decisive action to deal with climate change has been frustrated by claims from polluting industries and climate “sceptics” that there is no single extreme weather event that can be linked to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, rather than normal weather variations. However, two new studies, one from Oxford University and another from Canada, have now done just that.

Their reports were published together recently in the scientific journal Nature. The research team from the Climate Research Division of Environment Canada examined daily records of rainfall taken in 6,000 northern hemisphere weather stations between 1951 and 1999. They found that the intensity of extreme rains increased by seven percent, confirming the predictions of climate model simulations.

Team member Xuebin Zhang commented, “Our research provides the first scientific evidence that human-induced greenhouse gas increases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events over large parts of the northern hemisphere.”

The research team conducting the Oxford study calculated the difference between actual rainfall figures and those that would have been expected in the absence of human greenhouse gas emissions under the climate model simulations, with particular regard to the record-breaking floods that hit England and Wales in 2000.

Pardeep Pall, lead author of the Oxford study, reported: “We found that emissions substantially increased the odds of floods occurring in … the record wet autumn of 2000, with a likely increase in odds of a doubling or more.”

False trails

The Canadian/Oxford research is highly politically significant, because it will help to strip away the “stonewall”, do-nothing tactics that various governments have used to excuse themselves from dealing seriously with climate change. The studies will have particular relevance in Australia, where extreme weather events are all too evident, and where token gestures by government are the order of the day as far as climate change is concerned.

CPA – The Guardian – #1490

February 24, 2011 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, AUSTRALIA, climate change | Leave a comment

Extreme weather conditions consistent with climate change predictions

We know that any one single extreme weather event cannot be attributed just to climate change. But we can look at the climate models and predictions, which all say that in a climate-changed world extreme weather events will become more frequent and intense…..Insurance agency Munich Re showed climate change was linked to 21,000 deaths in the first nine months of 2010 – double the number of deaths caused by extreme weather in 2009.

It‘s time to talk of climate change, Sydney Morning Herald, Ellen Sandell, January 14, 2011 What kind of world are we going to leave for the next generation?I N APRIL 2009 the Los Angeles Times ran the headline: “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia”. The article said events unfolding in Australia – record-breaking droughts, killer bushfires and devastating floods – gave a snapshot of our future in a globally warmed world. Nearly two years on, it seems very little has changed…….. Continue reading →

January 14, 2011 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, AUSTRALIA, climate change | Leave a comment