The rubble in Tacloban. (AFP)
"The storms are getting stronger. If this is due to climate change, we'd better be prepared"
Just as the world was beginning to take in the almost unimaginable devastation wrought by Typhoon Haiyan, a young Filipino diplomat, Naderev Sano, was getting ready to lead his country's negotiations in the United Nations climate talks in Warsaw, Poland.
Sano is a scientist and head of his country's national climate commission and had flown out of Manila just hours before the vastness of Haiyan became apparent.
By Monday morning, Sano knew that the Philippines had been struck by possibly the strongest storm in history, killing many thousands of people and leaving millions homeless. He took the floor and, in some trepidation in front of the delegates of 190 countries, gave an extraordinary, passionate speech in which he clearly linked super typhoon Haiyan to man-made climate change and urged the world to wake up to the reality of what he said was happening from Latin America to Southeast Asia and the United States.
He criticised the rich countries, and dared climate change deniers to go to his country to see for themselves what was happening.
When he sat down, sobbing, he was given a standing ovation.
This was not just diplomatic theatricality or righteous grandstanding by a developing-country diplomat about the snail-like speed of the climate talks, which have dragged on for years and are not likely to conclude until 2015. What few
people in Warsaw knew until Sano had nearly finished his speech was that even as he was addressing the UN, his brother was digging people out of the rubble of the ruined city of Tacloban and he and his family still did not know the fate of other relatives.
Normally stone-hearted diplomats broke down, and Sano, who calls himself a "revolutionary" and a "philosopher" <a href="http://www.twitter.com/@yebsano" target="_blank">on Twitter</a>, said later he would go on a hunger strike for the whole of the two-week meeting. He has been joined by another 30 activists.
Just as significantly, his speech has reopened the growing debate about whether the extreme weather events seen around the world over the past few years, including Hurricane Sandy, the melting of the Arctic sea ice and heat waves in the US, Russia and Australia, can be attributed to man-made climate change. If they can, the argument goes, then the urgency of addressing the problem becomes incontrovertible;
if it doesn't, then it allows countries to continue delaying action or reducing their commitments.
Logic, at least, suggests a clear link between Haiyan and a warming world. Storms receive their energy from the ocean and the warming oceans that we can expect from global warming should therefore make super storms such as Haiyan more likely. New research suggests that the Pacific is, indeed, warming – possibly at its fastest rate in 10 000 years. If the extra heat stored in the oceans is released into the atmosphere, then the severity of storms will inevitably increase. In short, a warmer world will probably feature more extreme weather.
This week, atmospheric scientists were clear. "Typhoons, hurricanes and all tropical storms draw their vast energy from the warmth of the sea. We know sea-surface temperatures are warming pretty much around the planet, so that's a pretty direct influence of climate change on the nature of the storm," said Will Steffen, director of the Australian National University climate change institute.
"The consensus is that climate change is not making the risk of hurricanes any greater, but there are physical arguments and evidence that there is a risk of more intense hurricanes," says Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at Oxford University.
The consensus of climate scientists is increasingly that super storms will be more frequent. According to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): "The average tropical cyclone maximum wind speed will likely increase, but the global frequency of tropical cyclones will likely decrease or stay unchanged."
In September, the IPCC's fifth assessment stated, more cautiously: "Time series of cyclone indices such as power dissipation, an aggregate compound of tropical cyclone frequency, duration and intensity that measures total wind energy by tropical cyclones, show upward trends in the North Atlantic and weaker upward trends in the western North Pacific since the late 1970s, but interpretation of longer-term trends is again constrained by data quality concerns."
In other words, the best science
says there is some evidence that storm intensity has already increased, at least in the North Atlantic, but there is not enough data to say categorically that any particular weather event can be linked to climate change.
But the science is moving on quickly and it is now possible, with new modelling methods, to quantify and attribute the changed odds of any given event happening.
"Because of the random nature of weather, it had been assumed that no single event can be attributed to climate change. However, with new research methods and better quality data, scientists are increasingly able to connect the dots between extreme weather events and climate change," says James Bradbury, formerly a researcher with the World Resources Institute in Washington and now with the US department of energy.
"For example, one can quantify the odds of a typical heat wave happening and estimate how much a warmer world would load the dice toward the more frequent occurrence of a similar event. Or, to understand the causes of melting sea ice or severe drought, researchers
can use sophisticated climate models to help identify various factors that could individually contribute or dynamically interact to influence climate conditions in a particular region," he says.
Evidence that climate change makes heat waves, super storms and droughts far more likely is growing. Earlier this year, scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United Kingdom's Met Office, and the research teams from 16 other global institutions tried to calculate how much climate change had possibly influenced 12 extreme weather events that occurred in 2012. By no means all could be linked, they concluded, but they agreed that it had helped raise the temperatures during the run of 37.7°C days in last year's US heat wave, and was behind the record loss of Arctic sea ice and the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, plus several other extremes. They were less certain about Britain's wet summer and the drought in Spain.
"Determining the causes of extreme events remains challenging," says Thomas Karl, director of the national climate data centre in the US. Allen, whose work has shown that global warming tripled the odds of the severe 2010 Russian heat wave and tripled the risk of the widespread flooding in England in 2000, says extreme weather can be linked to climate change given enough computer time. He says the influence of climate change on Typhoon Haiyan could be calculated in future: "If we used the same tools as are used now to make seasonal weather forecasts, there would be a straightforward answer."
A 2013 study by MIT's Professor Kerry Emanuel found that the most intense cyclones – category three to five – will increase with climate change and also found that "increases in tropical cyclones are most prominent in the western North Pacific", which is where Typhoon Haiyan struck.
Ordinary people have less trouble
untangling climate change from natural events. Talk to farmers in the Philippines, Nepal, Southeast Asia, Latin America and much of Africa, and most will say that they are seeing more extreme storms, unseasonable rains and more droughts and heat waves. Their observations are not "peer-reviewed" by scientists, but their memory is usually good, and invariably supports national records.
The Philippines has been particularly hard hit by extreme events, being the first land mass that typhoons encounter on their usual track westwards from the mid-Pacific. Haiyan was the third super storm to strike the archipelago in a year, coming after seven major typhoons in October alone. Typhoon Trami caused massive flooding on the island of Luzon in August, and about 2 000 people died during Typhoon Bopha last December.
Moreover, the Philippine government's raw statistics suggest the region's typhoons are getting stronger. From 1947 to 1960, the strongest to hit the country was Amy, in December 1951, with a highest wind speed recorded at 240km/h in Cebu. From 1961 to 1980, the highest wind speed recorded was 275km/h in October 1970. In the past 13 years, the highest wind speed has soared to 320km/h, recorded by Reming in November to December 2006. "Menacingly, the Philippine typhoons are getting stronger and stronger. If this is due to climate change, we'd better be prepared for even stronger ones in the future," says Romulo Virola, head of the Philippine government's national statistics board.
What is certain is that extreme weather events are on the rise globally and that greenhouse gas emissions are rising inexorably. The US alone has experienced 25 extreme weather events since 2011, each of which caused more than $1-billion in damages. A new report by the Norwegian met office shows that precipitation in Europe has become more severe and more frequent, that winter rainfall has decreased over southern Europe and the Middle East and that there are more and longer heat waves and fewer extremely cold days and nights.
The evidence is overwhelming that climate change is happening in developing countries, says Oxfam, which works in most of the world's most vulnerable nations.
"In 2012, the drought in Russia cut the grain harvest by nearly 25%; in Pakistan, the devastating 2010 flood destroyed more than 570 000 hectares of crop land and affected more than 20-million people; the 2011 drought in East Africa affected more than 13-million people and led to a famine in Somalia," says a recent Oxfam report.
Sano, now on a hunger strike, called for a redefinition of the word "disaster".
"We must stop calling events like these natural disasters," he told the UN. "It is not natural when science already tells us that global warming will induce more intense storms. It is not natural when the human species has already profoundly changed the climate." – © Guardian News & Media 2013