Greenhouse gas emissions and extreme weather events – Australia take note
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 2011In 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.
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