Climate change: the worst case scenarios
Do you remember the floods of summer 2007, when some parts of England suffered more than twice as much rain as the average? On one day alone in London (20 July), Heathrow airport cancelled more than 140 flights, and 25 stations on the London Underground were closed. There was huge disruption affecting millions of people.
Now, fast forward to 2012. The opening ceremony of the London Olympics: 27 July. And just suppose it comes after two solid weeks of unusually heavy rain. Public transport has been disrupted, power supplies are down, in some places, food is running short. Could London cope? Are planners already trying to work out what they would do?
It would be what's known in the trade as a "low probability, high consequence event"; in other words, it's not very likely to happen, but if it does, it'll have very serious consequences. And it is directly relevant to the current debates over climate change, in the run-up to the international climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen next month.
I spent a day discussing all this at a conference earlier this week, organised jointly by The World Tonight, the foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House, the journal International Affairs, and the scientific academy The Royal Society. (You can hear the discussion that we broadcast at the end of the conference by clicking below.)
It was one of those conferences that leave you with plenty to think about. So here's some of what I learned:
-- Planners are already working on "worst case" climate change scenarios. They regard climate change as a "threat multiplier"; in other words, all the other challenges that we may face over the coming decades -- food security, access to clean water, increased demand for energy -- become even more acute because of climate change.
-- But traditional planning theory is based on the assumption that certain things will remain constant: rainfall in the future will be more or less the same as in the past; water flow in major rivers will remain pretty much what it was. If constants become variables as a result of climate change, how do you make your plans?
-- In the Himalayas, average temperatures are already rising much faster than elsewhere. Glaciers are melting rapidly, which means that water flow in the major rivers, which depends on ice melting in the summer, is already down by 60 per cent or more.
-- One quarter of all humanity depends on that water; and three of the nations in which those people live are nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, and China. Military forces in those countries are "war gaming" how they would deal with a major water crisis.
-- Black carbon, soot, is one of the major causes of warmer temperatures in the Himalaya region because millions of people heat their homes and cook their food on open fires. But black carbon is not a carbon gas, so it will form no part of the discussions at the Copenhagen conference next month.
-- The US Department of Energy has set up an Office of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence to provide detailed analysis of all available data on energy and climate-related issues. The US government regards the possibility of climate change-inspired conflict as a major potential security threat.
-- Some intelligence officials worry about what they call "organisational adaptive disabilities"; in other words, they fear that governments simply aren't up to the job of dealing with some of the scenarios under consideration.
(Our editor, Alistair Burnett, has written about the reporting of climate change issues on the BBC Editors blog here.)
By the way, did you hear about the major power cuts that hit much of Brazil this week and left nearly 60 million people in the dark? Unusually strong storms brought down power lines, apparently, and knocked out all electricity supplies to Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and several other major cities. (Brazil will host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Think about it ...)
But yes, I did pick up one bit of good news: the global economic slow-down has resulted in a significant reduction in the emission of carbon gases. We've got about four more years than would otherwise have been the case.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~32~RS~)
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Robin,
You were not at Piers Corbyn's 'CO2 is not to blame for Climate Change' conference at Imperial a week or so back you might have enjoyed it. (See your colleague's Richard Black's blog)
The 'facts' that underlie most of the very simplistic understanding of the politicians are unravelling as soon as they are looked at in detail. But the poor dears, and their even poorer civil servants, just don't understand enough of the science to ask sensible questions all they are left with is their Allan Johnson arrogance that fires the messenger if you don't like the message (no change there then).
The subtlety and complexity of the message that we are damaging our planet cannot be reduced to lowering CO2 emissions (a gas which is by the way vital for life - but I won't go on about this here.)
I think the reason that the CO2 message is the only one that came to the fore is the financial community's ability to run a racket with Carbon Trading. Make no mistake Carbon Trading is a racket and a fundamental fraud against the interests of the World's people and will only benefit the city slickers and the World's mega corporations. (It will also neither reduce CO2 nor will it moderate climate change - as CO2 is not the cause of climate variability -as is even shown in the IPCC's data - but not their summary report.)
You are however quite correct to note that there are many other destructive man-made disasters going on around the world from exporting hazardous waste to cutting down the rainforest to grow bio-fuel source plants (Oh, bio-fuels - is another racket of no benefit to the globe at all and indeed at a huge cost to the globe.)
We as a planet are still doing idiotic things - building more airports included, but worse we are chasing an illusion that we can manage the planet when we have very little knowledge about how the planet works or its weather. (Professional meteorologists can't get the weather right for more than about 4 days ahead and then the basis is that tomorrow will be much like today!)
The guess that CO2 was the 'cause' of temperature rise grew from the 'analysis' of CO2 in ice cores and associated temperature 'measurements'. (Both the analysis and measurements are in fact so full of unaccounted for experimental error that the data is almost meaningless.) This showed that when temperatures were higher so was CO2 (some of the time!.) Some bright spark then erroneously said that a high CO2 leads to a high temperature. The IPCC data, when properly analysed, showed that CO2 when up after the temperature had risen so could not have been the cause. But the City slickers had already persuaded their politician dupes that they could manage CO2 by giving licences to pollute to the existing polluters and letting the city sllickers trade these (and options and futures and derivatives and synthetic conglomerated instruments of these licences to pollute.)
Now, politicians are a generally greedy bunch with an eye for the main chance, their pension and seats of the board when they retire, so once started Carbon Trading became unstoppable even though its whole basis is false.
There are also huge problems distinguishing local climate variability to global aggregates - right down to the quality of the global temperature data.
Global dimming and high atmospheric/stratospheric cloud and water vapour is a major problem, and my guess, it is locally quite important. Of course if we were to limit air flights that generate the vast majority of the man-made clouds in the sky that would apparently be such a bad thing that it can't be done - this is of course nonsense, but just like the armaments industry we can't do anything that would hurt the airlines and the operators of the tax free shopping malls (sorry airports)! Hypocrisy! (See also politicians free travel perks and retirement plans!)
Robin as you are about to retire due to your age I will pass on a small nugget of info. I picked up at Pier's Corbyn's conference. It goes like this, in summary, for about the next decade and a few bits the planet will get generally cooler and then the temperatures will pick up to levels higher than 1999 by 2030 - so move to South West France till you are 75 and then return by 2030 to Scotland when it will be warmer by then - and also enjoy free domiciliary care! This 'strategy' will permit you to keep the same wardrobe and avoid deciding on new styles of dress - that old jacket with the elbow patches should do a while longer!
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What a stupid world we live in. People all over the globe are worried about what might happen to the climate forty or fifty years from now but hardly think much at all about what will happen in eighteen or twenty-four months from now if Iran acquires an atom bomb. Will Israel feel so threatened it will launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike of its own? Will it set Iran's oil fields ablaze the way Saddam Hussein lit up Kuwait's? If it does the fires will be a thousand times bigger and there will be no putting them out. A hundred years worth of CO2 evolution under normal conditions is six months. That ought to generate some global warming. Back to Copenhagen and carbon credit trading.
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Freak events like the flooding in 2007 are becoming more common around the world as a result of climate change. If it happened during the Olympics it would be truly disastrous.
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