Thursday, August 25, 2005
Weather is the real warning

A quick scan of the news paints a bleak picture of the planet’s weather systems:

• Severe flooding in China and India
• Continued drought and record high temperatures contributing to forest fires in Portugal, Spain and France
• Three days of heavy rain causing flooding in Austria and Switzerland
• Heavy rain causing flooding in the Balkans
• Tornados in United Kingdom
• Drought causing forest fires in Indonesian Sumatra
• Flooding in Bouganville
• Continued drought in Australia

All just as the harbingers of global warming had predicted. More extreme weather events occurring more frequently. The implications for human development and settlement are catastrophic.

So far, most climatologists and media outlets have been reluctant to point the finger of blame at human-induced global warming, though some have at least posed the question.

The reasons behind this are quite straightforward. All these events have been triggered by particular weather circumstances; a few days of heavy rain here, a couple of years of poor rainfall there or simply unseasonal weather.

But there are also a number of underlying socio-geographic causes for why the news wires are saturated with catastrophe, but yet the climate change sceptics remain unconvinced.

Firstly, most of these weather events have been intensified by an increasingly malign human impact on the landscape. Deforestation in particular, but also the spread of the built environment and poor land management practices have all exacerbated instances of flooding and forest fire.

Secondly, simply more people equate to more settlement exposed on the urban fringe, which increases the likelihood of loss of life and damage to property. When once time these events occurred far away from human habitation, now they happen at a lengthening development front.

And undoubtedly, the apparent growing frequency of such events is correlated to more widespread new communications technology and globalisation. Ubiquitous information services and a larger diaspora assure that today we have a profitable audience for more news from further around the globe. Flash floods in Bouganville can be instantly beamed into your living room and your greater knowledge of the world increases your concern.

These news stories recount ‘weather’ events, and not, as such, ‘climate’ trends. In a complex system such as the earth’s biosphere, it remains hopelessly difficult to verify that any specific event is a result of a long-term trend, such as global warming. So, in the context of the underlying social-geographic reasons why these stories cram our media channels, it is unsurprising that few serious scientists or journalists are willing to stick their neck out and blame global warming.

In addition, a level of perspective is required. For all the current strife in parts of Asia and Europe, most parts of the globe will be experiencing relatively normal – or at least not wholly unusual – weather patterns. “Average rainfall experienced in Peru” is rarely seen as a by-line in the current media ‘climate’. The ordinary, by definition, isn’t news.

Though the interface between what constitutes ‘weather’ and what is ‘climate’ remains fuzzy, it nevertheless exists: weather events generate climate statistics. The social and geographic factors that permit climate change scepticism could well be a cloaking device, preventing us from noticing the elephant sat in the same room.

But look more carefully at the news. It is not just extreme weather events that are reported. The stories of floods, tornados, hurricanes and forest fires are supported by background stories of research that argues glaciers are retreating, the tundra is thawing, the oceans are warming and Antarctic ice shelves are breaking off: big picture signs of a warming planet.

A healthy suspicion on behalf of the climate change sceptics is welcome; this is how science gets done. But it is surely time to acknowledge the elephant, sew together a bunch of coincidences into a coherent narrative and start managing the risks of climate change, or even better, combating its causes.

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