The Future and Natural Disasters
Floods droughts and storms have dramatically increased over the past decades as global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels have risen. This week Earthbeat looks at the changes occurring in our climate and what the future has in store.
Alexandra de Blas: This week on Earthbeat, we peer into the crystal ball of planet Earth, to see what the climate has in store for us, and there are natural disasters a-plenty.
I'm Alexandra de Blas, welcome to the program.
Mark Maslin: We are probably going to have more storms which are going to be perhaps slightly more powerful, but the biggest problem is not necessarily they're bigger, worse, or more frequent, it's that we don't know where they're going to go, and it's that unpredictability which causes loss of life and major financial problems.
Stephen Schneider: We know for virtually certain as you can be in science, that we're something like 6/10ths of a degree warmer than we were a century ago. It's consistent with the 10-20 cm sea level rise which occurs when the oceans expand and rise. It's consistent with plants and animals moving towards the poles, moving up mountains, flowers blooming earlier, birds laying eggs earlier, there is essentially no doubt that global warming is going on.
Graeme Pearman: Carbon dioxide when we release it into the atmosphere, has a lifetime in the atmosphere of almost 100 years. This means that you actually have to reduce the emissions well below their current levels to stop the concentration rising in the atmosphere and that leads to two very clear outcomes: one is the sooner you can actually start mitigating or reducing the emissions the better, because whatever you put in the atmosphere is going to hang around for a long time, and the second one is knowing the inertia in the energy system and our dependence on fossil fuel industries, means that we're in for change, and we need to understand the impacts of that and be able to think about adapting to it.
Alexandra de Blas: So what does the future hold for us in terms of predicting the weather? Dr Mark Maslin is from the Environmental Change and Research Centre at University College in London.
Mark Maslin: The problem is actually predicting weather, as opposed to climate, is actually very difficult, because very small influences can actually change weather patterns over the other side of the world, and this was the idea that's been coined that a butterfly flapping in the Amazon can cause storms in Australia. It's again a metaphor, but what it means is things like changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures can actually change weather in Europe, and what happens is when you try to scale out the climate, which is then what is the average weather, our problem is then how to actually predict the future, and it's these complications that actually cause our huge errors in saying what's going to happen in the next 100 years.
Jackie May: So can we predict climate?
Mark Maslin: The problem is, some of the best computer models in the world, there's 26 of them that are used, which have the biggest computing power with some of the best brains in the world, have a prediction which says in the next 100 years because of carbondioxide in the atmosphere, things are going to get warmer. All of them have slightly different assumptions in them, and so the actual magnitude of that warming is actually different. And it's around a range of 1-degree to about 5-degrees Celsius. But of course the biggest problem with storms and floods is that slight movement in the weather patterns around the world means that an area that used to get nice monsoonal rains may for a couple of years get drought. Again it's very, very sensitive to changes and of course we're tinkering with that, and instead we're doing the great experiment on our own planet.
Jackie May: Now you're looking at a couple of particularly worrying trends. The first one is the impact of global warming on the way the ocean itself actually circulates.
Mark Maslin: Yes, one of the biggest problems that we have with global warming is that we do not know how the oceans will react. At the moment we have wonderful warm water from the Caribbean flowing northwards into the Atlantic and into the Arctic Ocean, and there it actually cools down and sinks and flows down southward underneath at about 3 kilometres deep. And this big sort of like energy that flows, actually regulates the heat flow of the planet. The problem is we have no idea how sensitive that is, and some scientists, again with computer models, suggest that if you have a little bit of fresh water in the North Atlantic, fresh water means that the salt water doesn't come as dense and it won't sink, and therefore you could disrupt the whole of that deep water circulation. However if the fresh water impact was down in Antarctica, where the Antarctic bottom water forms, which is the counter flow to the northern source, temperature difference between the waters mean that if the northern water takes over, it heats up the ocean and the ocean expands by .3 of a percent, which sounds very small, but it means 3-metres of sea level rise around the world, which wipes out something like 16% of Bangladesh, and about 25% of its gross national product.
The scientists have already said that it's already too late to do a lot about some of the warming that's going to happen in the future, so what we have to do is plan for the future, mitigate, try to actually work out how to deal with sea level rise, shifting storm tracks, so we can actually prepare. Classic example is at the present day, if a hurricane hit Florida, very few deaths occur because they are so well sorted out for evacuation and protection of people. However when the same type of hurricane hit Central America, Hurricane Mitch in 1998, unfortunately 20,000 people died.
Woman: I've never seen anything like it, it's absolutely devastating. Mostly when there's a disaster it's in a specific area so that aid can be flown in or taken, and people can be brought out, and in Honduras there's nowhere that hasn't been affected.
Alexandra de Blas: An eyewitness account of the impact of Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998. And before that, we heard Dr Mark Maslin from the Environmental Change and Research Centre in the United Kingdom. He was talking to Jackie May.
The weight of scientific evidence that global warming does indeed affect the rate of climate change is now overwhelming. Scientists like Stephen Schneider, say we all have to learn to live with it, while getting on with fixing the problem.
A biologist, Professor Schneider is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University in the United States. He specialises in making the science of climate change accessible to the general public.
Jackie May asked him how we know that humans are to blame.
Stephen Schneider: How do we know the sun didn't do it? We've only been measuring it for the last 20 years. Maybe over the last 100 years it got hotter. Well the first thing you'd say is what happened over the last 1,000 years. Well it turns out the last couple of decades are the warmest by far in the last 1,000 years, so it makes it improbable, but not impossible. But if the sun got warmer by increasing its output, the stratosphere would warm up, the atmosphere would warm up, and the surface and lower atmosphere would warm up. That's not what happened. What happened is the lower level warmed up, but the stratosphere got cooler. That's consistent with the fingerprint of ozone depletion plus greenhouse gases, which would cool the stratosphere and warm the surface. So it's only circumstantial evidence, but it's important piece.
What else does the theory say? The theory says the high latitudes should warm up more than the lower latitudes. Well, that's also happened. The theory says the land should warm up more than the ocean. That's also happened. Every single one of these issues you could take and say, 'Oh well, this is just circumstantial evidence. Oh that could have been nature by herself.' But what about all four fingerprints, all lining up in exactly the right way that's expected by theory, at a time when we know that for certain there's 30% more carbon dioxide and 150% more methane in the atmosphere. What is the probability that all these coincidental events are just chance? Almost zero, despite what you hear from the US President and Administration, and unfortunately Australia's trying to copy their line, which is not anything to be proud of.
Jackie May: You've been visiting Australia during the time of what we're tending to call nowadays extreme weather events. We've had bushfires, we've had massive dust storms, we've got an ongoing, very bad drought. What's that link there, between what's going on and climate change?
Stephen Schneider: It's tempting to say, 'Aha, this is it', but one can't really say that. What you can say is this is the kind of event we expect to happen with increasing frequency and intensity as the world warms. We can say that we're loading the dice. Think of climate as dice, with sides that are wet and dry and so forth, we're loading them toward more extreme events because of the intensification of the hydrologic cycle. We, humans dumping our pollution, are not making tropical cyclones, we're not making droughts. What we're doing is cranking up the intensity of the top end ones, and if you look at the casualty losses that have the insurance companies so worried, about 80% of the damages in the weather related events come from the top 20% of intense storms. So the insurance companies, trillion dollar set of businesses, are very worried about global warming because what they see is a potential for increase in the intensity of those extreme events, which is precisely the kind of events that damage their business.
Alexandra de Blas: Professor Stephen Schneider from Stanford University, and he's also a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Alexandra de Blas: The insurance industry has been examining the global warming phenomenon for almost 20 years now, with an eye firmly on the bottom line. The Munich Re-insurance Company is one of the major re-insurers of insurance firms themselves. Gerhard Berz is head of the Geo Risks Research Department in Germany.
Gerhard Berz: According to our worldwide records, the losses from natural disasters have increased eightfold in economic terms during the last four decades, already adjusted for inflation by the way. The insured losses have even increased by a factor of 14. If we now continue these trends, it means that at the end of this decade we will have already losses per year what we have had in the '80s for the whole decade. That is really a drastic increase and therefore of course the price for insurance cover has to increase in the near future already, and we see that already in many regions.
Alexandra de Blas: So if you're looking at changes like that just ten years in advance, what do you consider if you look out to 50?
Gerhard Berz: At least in some regions, natural hazards will become uninsurable. For example, storm surges in the areas which are vulnerable to sea level rise, and if these areas are also in regions where you have tropical cyclones or other types of wind storms, this could become too high a risk for the insurers.
Alexandra de Blas: Critics of the Kyoto Protocol claim that it's too expensive to make deep cuts in our greenhouse gas emissions; how do you see the costs of not taking action?
Gerhard Berz: I definitely believe that the costs of not taking action is much higher than the costs of the Kyoto process, and on the other side, I think that we have every reason to do our best to get these changes under control, otherwise climate change will continue uncontrolled and this will lead to a climate within this century which exceeds everything mankind has so far experienced. And the great concern I have is that we will see a lot of counter acts in the nature, which are so far unpredictable, unforeseeable, and this will lead to a lot of surprises and we are not prepared for it, and this will cause enormous costs for the economy, and also for the individuals.
Alexandra de Blas: Re-insurance executive Gerhard Berz.
Stephen Schneider is another who argues that the cost will be greater later on unless we tackle climate change now.
Stephen Schneider: How irrational can you get, to think that we should ignore this and not take out insurance which in this case means slowing down the rate at which we dump in the atmosphere, and the key to that is providing incentives to individuals and companies, both to be cleaner, more efficient and invent the new products that will replace the old Victorian technologies that have brought us this difficulty in the first place.
Jackie May: It's interesting that you raise that spending by our government through its greenhouse program is seriously underspent for the year, that money has been available for grants and the like to encourage better practices and it hasn't been taken up. That's very disappointing, isn't it.
Stephen Schneider: Well it's kind of sad, because efficiency is actually good business. The problem that we have is that this is an expression called energy intensity. That's the amount of energy it takes to produce a unit of GDP. It's come considerably down in the last 30 years. Going down is good, because that means you don't need as much flow of energy and materials to produce your wealth. Why is that? It's because we've been switching away from moving logs around in diesel trucks, to moving electrons around in the microchips of computers. So we're actually getting richer while being cleaner, that's the good news. It makes me an optimist.
It's not good news if you're a coal miner or an auto worker in the United States who's producing a sport utility vehicle which is a horribly inefficient truck that's exempt from the Clean Air Act by a special Act of Congress which really is a subsidy to the industry. So the trouble is that you've got small groups of people who will lose from having to have the system clean up and become more efficient, they know it, they're organised, and they're putting pressure on the political system. But in my personal value system, you help people through a transition, just as developing countries like India and China said, 'Wait a minute, you rich countries, you use the Victorian Industrial Revolution, sweatshops, coal-burning, internal combustion engines to get rich. Now we've got this global warming thing, which tells us that we can't follow in your footsteps and catch up.' I mean some of these countries use one-tenth as much energy per person as we do in the US or in Australia, and they're saying, 'Hold it. The developing world has to play'. But they shouldn't have to repeat the Victorian Industrial Revolution, they should be able to leapfrog right over it to high technology. That's already happened. Cell phones, they didn't string copper wires all over China, and take 50 years like we did. They're now leapfrogging to high technology. The same thing has to happen, we have to leapfrog to fuel cell automobiles, hybrid cars as a transition. They have to leapfrog from coal to gas and into renewables. And I think that could happen, but it's going to take transfer of technology and it's going to take capital investment, and that's what comes when you have a Kyoto-like set of mechanisms that can provide funding to provide an opportunity and incentive for people to make those investments in the developing world, when they get carbon credit for doing it and at the same time the developing world gets to leapfrog.
Alexandra de Blas: Professor Stephen Schneider.
I'm Alexandra de Blas and here on Earthbeat we're discussing the future of the world's climate on Radio National.
Woman: It's never been as bad as this.
Woman: Never, no.
Woman: From this side it doesn't look too bad, but when you go round the back you can see it all coming round from the back and the sides, it's just meeting. We're just .....
Alexandra de Blas: Nursing home residents in the UK waiting to be evacuated in widespread flooding that occurred in that country in the year 2000.
Australia and the United States will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but unlike the US, Australia intends to achieve the emission targets it agreed to, an 8% increase on 1990 levels, by 2012.
In February this year, both countries signed a Climate Action Partnership in which they'll collaborate on projects to better understand the climate science. Talks on the partnership were held this week when Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration visited Australia.
Conrad Lautenbacher: Well the key elements involved a number of activities in improving our modelling, improving our observing systems, improving some of the knowledge that we have of basic processes, CO2 in the ocean, temperature, currents and I would say ocean circulation and ocean matters around Australia.
Alexandra de Blas: Well one of the ways in which you're collaborating is with the Argo Float Program. There are 13 countries involved, and 3,000 floats will be launched in oceans around the world in the next five years. How exactly do they work?
Conrad Lautenbacher: It's a fascinating technical achievement. Basically it's a float that's about the size of a man in height, probably 10-12 inches in diameter. The float has the ability on command to sink to 2,000 metres, taking data as it descends, and then it drifts freely for 10 days at the 2,000 metre level in the ocean, and then rises to the surface. When it rises to the surface, it then transmits all of the data that it's recorded to a satellite for assimilation into our models.
Alexandra de Blas: Many people have been very critical of the Climate Action Partnership between Australia and the US, because it enables the US to look like it's doing something while failing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in line with the targets that it originally agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol. How useful is it to get all this understanding into the effects of climate change when the world's biggest emitter, the US, is not cutting its emissions, which is the cause of the problem?
Conrad Lautenbacher: Well I would take issue with some of the items you mentioned in your statement. Let me try to summarise a bit. First of all, the United States spends $4-1/2-billion a year on both climate change science and climate mitigation, meaning cleaner energy, fewer emissions, more efficient use of the energy sources, renewable energy sources. We spend more per year than the EU and Japan combined on trying to solve these problem, so we are not hiding from it, nor ducking our responsibilities. The United States has a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas intensity by 18% in the next ten years, and we are strongly engaged in doing that right now.
Alexandra de Blas: But what that actually means is that the US is going to have a 14% increase in greenhouse gas emissions on its 1990 levels, so while the US is making a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, they're still going to be going up substantially.
Conrad Lautenbacher: Yes, but we will be doing something - we are committed to achieving greenhouse gas stability, so that is the basis of the UN framework convention on climate change. We have a program that will do that, we're going to stabilise greenhouse gases. The program we're talking about is equivalent to taking 70-million cars off our roads. Let me give you an analogy on what we're doing here. If you were going to the doctor and you had a headache, and the doctor says to you, 'The first thing I'm going to do is operate on you. You obviously need brain surgery', you would take offence at that and say 'Why wouldn't you want to examine me first? Why wouldn't you want to hook me up to every possible technical diagnostic tool you have at this point to tell what's wrong with my headache before you recommended brain surgery?' Well that's the kind of situation we're in with the Earth. We have the technology to wire the Earth to provide the sensors that can tell us what's going on in rather short order, and that's something we ought to do before we contemplate brain surgery where we'll spend billions of dollars and dislocate millions of people and perhaps ruin the opportunities for the future of the development of many parts of our world. So there's a balance that has to be applied in this particular situation.
Alexandra de Blas: Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, an administrator with NOAH in the United States.
Meanwhile, debate about the Kyoto Protocol continues. This week New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, with support of the Victorian and South Australian Premiers, convened a high powered expert panel to examine the economic benefits of ratifying the treaty. And the Business Council of Australia is reviewing its policy, which opposes ratification.
Reporter: Eva Keegan lives on the outskirts of Roma in Western Queensland. She noticed a change in the air late this morning. By mid-afternoon, she said conditions were shocking.
Eva Keegan: I live out of town and I can just barely see down the paddock. I can't see the neighbour's house and he's about half a kilometre away.
Reporter: Can you go outside?
Eva Keegan: I have been outside actually, but I came inside because I was eating dust. Not worth going outside at all.
Alexandra de Blas: In late October, a dust storm swept across Outback Australia through to the coast, and caught the attention of media worldwide.
The social and economic cost of the current drought is biting deep. But the price we'll pay for global warming will be exorbitant. Kevin Hennessey from CSIRO Atmospheric Research outlines the changes forecast for Australia.
Kevin Hennessey: We expect Australia to become basically warmer and a bit drier. Now those impacts will be felt not only as changes in average weather conditions, but also as changes in climate variability and extreme events. So for example, with drier conditions overall, we would expect more droughts, and with warmer conditions and those dry conditions, perhaps more fires. Our climate models also suggest that tropical cyclones might become a little stronger, more heatwaves, fewer frosts, and possibly more of these coastal storm surges that tend to occur with low pressure systems like tropical cyclones.
Alexandra de Blas: Do we know where it's going to get drier and where it's going to be wetter?
Kevin Hennessey: Our models suggest that drying will mainly occur in southern Australia, particularly in winter and spring. Even up the east coast, including Queensland in winter.
Alexandra de Blas: What can we expect for people living on the coast?
Kevin Hennessey: In coastal regions sea level rise will lead to more coastal inundation. However that's a very gradual process. We expect a rise of between about 15cm and 80cm over the next century, and that's something that we can adapt to. The more relevant issue is the extreme hazards that come from coastal storm surges, and these tend to occur with tropical cyclones and on the east coast, east coast lows, and these are likely to become more intense, leading to more inundation and in fact with hurricanes in the northern hemisphere, it's the damage due to these coastal storm surges that is more costly than the wind damage itself.
Alexandra de Blas: What are the big impacts that we don't know about, the areas we need to explore further?
Kevin Hennessey: We really need to know a lot more about storms. These are very small-scale features that are not captured very well by the course resolution of our climate models. So we're not picking up important things like extreme wind events, hail, lightning and so on, and of course these are natural disasters that are of great importance, particularly to the insurance industry. The other big one really is the Murray-Darling Basin. Now it's the breadbasket of Australia and yet we don't really know what the water resource impacts will be, and how that will affect water allocations for irrigation and so-called environmental flows, and blue-green algae outbreaks.
Alexandra de Blas: Kevin Hennessey, and he was sharing the forecasts from CSIRO's Mark II climate models.
Atmospheric Research Chief Scientist, Graeme Pearman says they are now running the Mark III models, which promise to forecast with far greater precision.
Graeme Pearman: We've been building these models for over a decade, and we started pretty much from scratch, and so we're very proud of the fact that they rank in the top few best models in the world. But the Mark III model, which is now running, is producing a simulation of the real climate system that is very, very much more realistic. It for example, generates real el Ninos at the frequency and in the magnitude of their effect, compared with the real world. It generates naturally within the model, tropical cyclones, as a result of the physics and the dynamics that's included in the model. So by and large we think that it will take us a year or more to predict the future changes at a regional level, which is what people really want to know. We can tell people what's going to happen in the region in which they are attempting to grow crops, to look after biodiversity, to live with the water resources and so on, and we believe the Mark III model is getting us much closer to that than we've ever been before.
Alexandra de Blas: How important is it to be able to look 50, 100 years out in front, and to be able to make those predictions with accuracy?
Graeme Pearman: Well there are two ways of answering this: I have a philosophical view that the only way of getting to a satisfactory future is by having a vision and then working back and deciding what you need to get there. And therefore we need to know what's likely to be the climatological situation embedded in all of the other circumstances and issues that will change as the population grows and as technology develops and so on, into the future. So I think philosophically, it's very important for us to be asking the questions, Is this really what we want? Is this consistent with some kind of vision of where we want to go? But in addition of course it's important to be starting to analyse the changes so that we can look at the adaptation issue and we can say, Well for particular parts of the community, and I think particularly of water use resources where you need to build dams and reticulation systems that last for 50, 80 or even 100 years, that you need foresight that arises from this kind of prediction to say Well what we've got built today will, or won't be, appropriate for the future. And that's what these models are promising.
Graeme Pearman: Climate change is only one of a number of issues that is occurring, and the more we look at these things today, the more we realise that we can't look at them separately. There is a water problem in Australia, there's a salinity problem, there is a biodiversity problem, there's a climate change problem, and they're all interlinked, and so what we need to do is to look at these from a scientific point of view as interlink systems, and look at them in an integrated way. But equally, when one's developing policy, whether it be in private companies or in the governments, there needs to be this integrated approach to things, and I think that's a new way forward; it's not going to be easy because our existing institutions are really built about the segregation of our effort into these discrete groups, and that's not going to be the best way of doing it in the future.
Alexandra de Blas: Graeme Pearman from CSIRO.
And that's all I have for you on the future of our climate and the enormous challenge it presents. Earthbeat is produced by Jackie May and Janita Palmer. I'm Alexandra de Blas, thanks for your company.
- Dr Mark Maslin
- Lecturer in Marine Geology & Palaeoclimatology
Environmental Change Research Centre
- Professor Stephen Schneider
- Senior Fellow
Centre for Environment, Science and Policy
Institute for International Sciences
- Gerhard Berz
- Geo Risks Research Department
Munich Re Group
- Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher
- Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere
National Oceonagraphic & Atmospheric Administration
- Kevin Hennessy
- Climate Impacts & Adaptation Working Group
CSIRO Atmospheric Research
- Graeme Pearman
- Chief Scientist
CSIRO Atmospheric Research
- "The Coming Storm: The True Causes of Freak Weather"
- Mark Maslin
- ABC Books
- Are the economic costs of stabilising the atmosphere prohibitive ?
- Christian Azar & Stephen H. Schneider
- Ecological Economics 42 (2002) 73-80
- Alexandra de Blas
- Jackie May
- Jackie May / Alexandra de Blas