Yet just recently, one of the largest re-insurance companies in the world, Munich Re, issued a report entitled Severe Weather in North America. In it it notes that weather-related disasters have quintupled over the last three decades.
Obviously many factors may have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, yet this report, from a non-scientific organisation, chooses to focus on global warming as one of the major culprits by observing: "Climate change particularly affects formation of heatwaves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity."
Clearly, given the complexity of the climate and its associated weather systems, it would be scientifically illiterate to attribute a particular weather event to global warming. But the rise in global average temperature means warmer air and warmer oceans and simple hydrodynamics tells us that this implies increased water storage in the atmosphere, while simple thermodynamics tells us that the biosphere now stores much more energy than in the pre-industrial age. Sandy, in doing what cyclones do, merely gathered some of the extra water and energy to make itself into a superstorm.
As a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has firmly demonstrated, by warming the atmosphere mankind is "loading the dice" so that disastrous weather events become more common. Another Sandy is not 100 years away but perhaps as near as next year.
It is time the media, and politicians, exercised responsibility and began providing the public with the full facts on our changing climate.
Alan J Sangster,
37 Craigmount Terrace,
Edinburgh.
No comments:
Post a Comment