Are these people the first global warming refugees?
As an adjunct to “Weather is the real warning” Non Governmental Organisations are at pains to warns us that the world must prepare for floods (no pun intended) of ‘environmental refugees’.
As global warming cause sea levels to rise, whole nations – such as the Maldives and Bangladesh – could be devastated as the land of their nation disappears beneath the ocean.
Exacerbating this crisis, climate change could render whole regions inhospitable and severe weather could force millions to uproot. Consequently, we should be planning our services and devising mechanisms to accommodate these environmental refugees and offer them new places to make home.
So where does Hurricane Katrina fit into this?
Climate change models repeatedly predict that extreme weather events will occur more frequently as the planet warms. Certainly Katrina was extreme, but was she caused by global warming?
The answer, of course, will always be ‘impossible to tell’. But, as ever the folks at www.realclimate.org provide an excellent insight and a meaningful analogy as why those who dismiss global warming should pause for thought.
"Due to [the] semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event, such as Katrina, specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate."
Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been."
It is possible then that the uncommonly destructive force unleashed by Hurricane Katrina is a result of carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Therefore the hapless folk of New Orleans, who are sheltering in community halls in Texas, could well be the first of the many millions of environmental refugees who will soon be roaming the planet looking for a place to settle.
It was fortunate that hurricane hit the USA and not – say – Nauru, or else Australia’s immigration detention centres would be overflowing with unwanted arrivals.
| I am employed by Brisbane City Council. All views expressed in this blog are my own and in no way reflect the views of my employer. |
From WeaselWords.com.au
1 Comments:
Hi there Andrew - good to see that you are keeping ringing the changes on your site.
Regarding your question, not sure how to stop the spammers - luckily they seem to have missed me so far - sure it wont be long.
I use Haloscan rather than bloggers own comments process - there are other 3rd party freeware commenting services out there, some even require you to type a verification text string which seems to work really well at preventing spam. so my advice is try a few different commenting services till you a) find one that works for you and b) prevents or minimises at least the spam.
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