Tag: Africa

The Climate Show #14: volcanoes, black carbon and crocks from Christy

A busy news week sees Glenn and Gareth discussing volcanoes in Chile and Africa, busy pumping ash into the atmosphere and disrupting flights in South America, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, an extreme spring in the USA, drought in Europe and a warm autumn in NZ, a new UN report on black carbon and how a reduction could cut future warming, Aussie scientists fighting back against climate denial, and forecasts for the summer ice minimum in the Arctic. John Cook from Skeptical Science deals with their new series on John Christy’s climate crocks, and introduces a great new graphic front end for the SkS climate literature database, plus we cover price reductions on solar panels, LEDs on streetlights in San Francisco and MIT’s Cambridge crude.

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Hotspots hit poor hardest

Another report this week drives home the message that the world’s poorer people are going to suffer the early and potentially devastating effects of climate change. The report is the work of the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme associated with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a group of food research organisations.

The report, Mapping Hotspots of Climate Change and Food Insecurity in the Global Tropics, was produced by a team of scientists responding to what CCAFS describes as an urgent need to focus climate change adaptation efforts on people and places where the potential for harsher growing conditions poses the gravest threat to food production and food security.

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Changing Planet, Changing Health

Interconnectedness is a major theme of Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens our Health and What We Can Do about It. Jeffrey Sachs describes the book in his preface as “a scientific detective story of the first order, told with brilliance and relish by one of the world’s great ecological detectives”. The detective is physician and public health scientist Paul Epstein. He has co-authored the book with science writer Dan Ferber.

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Under African skies

Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting has been in Mali, learning how it is affected by climate change. In an article published on Sunday she wrote of her visit to the remote town of Anakila where an enormous encroaching sand dune threatens.

“For years now, the elders explain, they have been worried by climate change. Disrupted rain patterns, shifts in winds have no parallel in collective memory; they notice how it is prompting changes in the behaviour of animals and birds. But all of these anxieties are dwarfed by the sand dune now looming above their town – the result of those drier, fierce winds and erratic, intense rainfall.”

 

She describes the action of the dune and the measures the people are taking to try to contain it. But it’s difficult to see it as other than a losing battle.

“The ecological niche in which they have built their lives has always been full of uncertainties – and often hardship – but now the niche on which they have built cultures of great sophistication and resilience is shrinking beneath them as desert threatens.”

Bunting comments that it is in remote places like this that climate change will hit first and hardest, in cultures built on a deep understanding of their environment.

“Anakila’s residents are the canaries down the mine, their experience a foretaste of an Earth hostile to human inhabitation. But their experience of threat, potential devastation and loss of livelihood is discounted and ignored. No dunes are threatening Manchester.”

She goes on to discuss the requirement of environmental justice that rich countries should assist affected populations in poor countries to adapt to the changes that are upon them, noting however the dismal likelihood that funds for climate adaptation will simply be poached from development aid budgets.

The deniers were out in force in the comments that followed the article, and are still going strong as I write this. No surprises in what they have to say. They have no difficulty brushing aside the notion that something exceptional is occurring. These are perennial problems not related to human-caused climate change which isn’t happening anyway. The population increase in Mali is the reason for the problem. The aid organisations are making a big song and dance out of natural events in order to get more of our money. African governments are corrupt. And so on…and on.

These kinds of arguments will continue to be advanced until doomsday by those who have committed themselves to the view that human-caused climate change isn’t happening. But the experience of the people in the town of Anakila is consonant with the expected impacts of climate change in their region. Sure it may have been worsened by deforestation and sure a rapidly growing population is not the best armoury against a diminishing environment. But the global warming which is basically driving the changes is not within the power of the local population to affect. It is within the power of the major industrialised and industrialising nations. Need those nations wait until they see grave impacts within their own populations, which they undoubtedly will before too much longer? Articles such as Bunting’s are early casualty reports of the damage inflicted on humanity at large by the emissions we continue to pour into the atmosphere.  We owe assistance to those already suffering the effects. And if we have any sense we will also take a warning from what is happening to them.

The Guardian has an accompanying photo gallery of the Anakila dune here, and some blogs of Bunting’s visits to other parts of the country here and here and here. She does a fine job of taking the reader right to where she is. Serious and responsible journalism at its best.

[Paul Simon & Miriam Makeba]

The Weather of the Future

Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

Heidi Cullen takes readers forty years forward in her survey of what is likely to happen in several areas of the world if we continue to burn fossil fuels. Her book is The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet. It is a highly effective communication to the lay person of what climate science predicts for the specific areas she has chosen to explore. Cullen, a climatologist, works as a senior research scientist for Climate Central, an organisation set up in 2008 to act as a central authoritative source for climate change information.

Before moving to the selected areas for closer examination she offers some lucid general introductory chapters, including a very useful explanation of the use of modelling in climate prediction. In response to the question of when the weather will start to reflect predictions about the climate she answers that it already has in extreme weather events. If greenhouse gases continue to rise, the way weather affects life on Earth will be far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before. ”Can we rally around this forty-year forecast for the good of the world, or will we wait until the levees break before we decide to act?”

The first area Cullen surveys is the Sahel region of Africa.  She talks with climatologists who work on understanding the rainfall patterns and outlook for the region.  The picture is complex, but there is no doubt that the region is going to get warmer. All the models agree on that. They show some variation on the expected amount of rainfall, but it seems likely that the rainy season will start later and become shorter, with storms that will possibly become more intense. Pockets of resilience offer some hope from farmers who have turned to tree planting with considerable benefits to their crops and welcome extra income from the trees. But as Cullen takes her projections forward she remarks that there is only so much the trees can do against the increasing reality of climate change. Socially, climate change will become a threat multiplier as conflict spreads across the African continent in lockstep with temperature.

The next selected area is the Great Barrier Reef. Cullen talks with Joanie Kleypas, a marine ecologist and geologist who uses climate models to study the health of coral reefs. “I work on coral reefs, for God’s sake. The entire coral science community is depressed.” The chapter provides very clear accounts of the bleaching effect of warming oceans (“Bleached corals aren’t dead; they’re just starving.”) and the deleterious effect on coral growth from ocean acidification. The speed of both warming and acidification is likely to quickly outpace the conditions under which coral reefs have adapted and flourished through past changes. They are unlikely to be able to adapt fast enough. It’s not a good outlook. Cullen allows herself a detour to point to other and more dramatic effects of climate change that Australia is set to encounter – ferocious wildfires, pervasive drought, and unbreathable air. The lucky country looks anything but in coming decades.

The US is a leading per capita contributor to global emissions. It has not yet accepted the level of responsibility it carries. Other places, far less responsible and much poorer, are bearing the early consequences of global warming. But that doesn’t mean the US will remain exempt from any serious consequences, and it was good to see Cullen turning to her own country for two of her chapters, and driving home that message.  One of the places she selects is Central Valley, California.  The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a focus of her attention here. It’s the hub of California’s water supply system. The Hollywood-style dream is that the Delta will be able to supply enough clean fresh water to help cities and crops increase “forever”, all without harm to the natural environment, she notes dryly. She speaks with a multidisciplinary team studying the Delta, which in reality has far more in common with New Orleans than with Hollywood. The details of the problems and threats are canvassed and the extreme vulnerability of California to coming water shortage exposed. Her other US focus is New York city. Here it will be energy blackouts which threaten as the average temperature increases over coming decades. The power grid is unsuited to climate extremes. The other major area not ready for what lies ahead is flood protection.  However planning is going on in New York to develop resilience to what the changed climate will deliver, and also to mitigate the city’s emissions.  Cullen imagines a time four years from now in which, following damage from a storm, a co-ordinated plan is finally adopted by an alarmed population and New York becomes a city obsessed with adapting to climate change. It clearly needs to.

Her other chapters look at more obviously and immediately vulnerable places. In the Arctic she examines the current experience of the Inuit in an area of Canada and in Greenland. Change is well under way as sea ice diminishes and permafrost melts. It brings with it not only the physical challenges to the Inuit ways but also severe cultural threats. In Greenland as the ice melts there’s the promise of wealth from resource extraction, and the ambiguities that come with it. Bangladesh is skilled in adaptation to change and experienced in flood management, but by 2050 with almost 25 per cent of the country under water as a result of rising seas and increasing tropical cyclones, accompanied by the slow and deadly seepage of saline water into wells and fields, Bangladesh will be in serious trouble. Millions of villagers will have to move to the city, and many are likely to cross illegally into India hoping to find work.

The value of Cullen’s book is that by focusing on specific places, and by talking with scientists who are devoting full attention to the problems climate change poses for those places, she brings the reader close up to inescapable realities. The details are spelt out. Moreover she does this by a lively narrative of her discussions with the scientists closely involved. Her book is not a dry account of scientific papers but a picture of the people working to understand, predict and prepare for what is in waiting for the populations in the areas she discusses. It’s a reminder too of the number and variety of people who now work on climate change-related issues.

The book recognises the adaptation capabilities being shown by some of the populations already affected by climate changes. It is with some reluctance that it acknowledges the possibility of defeat if high emission levels continue. They don’t need to continue, of course, but that is in the hands of policy makers. Cullen in conclusion examines two words in use in the science. One is unequivocal, used to describe the warming of the climate system. The other is irreversible, used to describe uncertain but all too possible eventualities. She uses the cutting down of the last tree on Easter Island, as imagined so vividly by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, as an analogy for irreversibility. Unfortunately as yet the two words are not powerful enough in policy circles to shift the forecast for the future.

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