Clairvoyant 2012 climate report warns of extreme weather

Sound like the past few summers? This is. But it’s also a warning and prediction for the future issued by the United Nations’ top climate scientists more than a decade ago.

In a report that changed the world’s perception of the dangers of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on extreme events, disasters and climate change warned in 2012: “Climate change is causing the frequency, intensity, extreme weather and The spatial extent, duration and timing of climate events and can lead to unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.” It said there will be more heatwaves, exacerbated droughts, increased heavy rainfall leading to flooding and stronger and wetter tropical cyclones and A more serious disaster for people.

“This report is clairvoyant,” said report co-author Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “This report is exactly what a climate report should do: warn us about the future in time so we can adapt before the worst happens. The world continues to do what it normally does. Some people and governments listen, some don’t. I think it’s sad The lesson is that the damage has to happen very close to home or no one is paying attention right now.”

In the U.S. alone, the number of weather disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages – adjusted to inflation – According to the National Bureau of Statistics, from an average of 8.4 per year in the decade before the report was released to 14.3 per year after the report, the U.S. caused more than $1 trillion in weather in extreme cases alone Loss of Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A man walks through dry and sun-scorched grass on a road in Greenwich Park in London on August 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, file)

Northern California hits record high in September, with temperatures reaching 104 degrees U.K. (40 degrees Celsius) earlier this summer. The 20-page summary of the 594-page report highlights five case studies on climate risks from worsening extreme weather, which scientists say will be a bigger issue, and how governments can address them.

In each case, scientists can point to a recent example: flash floods in “informal settlements.” Look at this year’s floods in impoverished areas of Durban, South Africa, said Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross and Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands, report co-author and climate scientist. Or Eastern Kentucky or Pakistan this year or Germany and Belgium last year, the report authors said. – Heat waves in European cities. “We’ve got that spade. It’s unanimous,” said University of South Carolina disaster scientist Susan Carter.

“I think Europe is seeing longer heat periods every year.” — Property damage from hurricanes in the U.S. and the Caribbean is increasing, but not more frequent, as storms become wetter and stronger. Oppenheimer noted that Louisiana has been hit by multiple hurricanes over the past few years, with Hurricane Ida killing people in New York last year when torrential rain flooded basement apartments, 2017 Hurricane Harvey’s record-breaking rain paralyzed Houston, and Hurricane Maria devastated Hurricane Irma in Puerto Rico is somewhere in between. Drought causes famine in Africa.

It happened again in the Horn of Africa and last year in Madagascar, Van Alsted said. Rising sea levels, sea intrusion and storms have combined to inundate the island. It’s harder, but co-author Chris Eby, a climate and health scientist at the University of Washington, noted that in 2016, a record-breaking tropical cyclone, Winston, hit Vanuatu and Fiji.

“People are feeling it right now,” Van Alster said. “It’s no longer what the science told them. All these warnings came true.” Co-authors Ebi and Cutter say, in fact, the reality may be worse, with extreme cases than what the authors did in 2011 and published a year later. Predictions are much more and more powerful.

Nunay Mohamed, 25, holds her malnourished one-year-old child as she flees the drought-stricken Lower Shabelle region in a makeshift camp for displaced persons on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia, on June 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh, File)

That’s partly because when real life happens, disasters are exacerbated with sometimes unforeseen side effects, such as heatwaves and droughts that dry up hydroelectric plants, nuclear plants without access to cooling water, and even coal-fired plants without fuel deliveries, as scientists say , the dry rivers of Europe.

“It’s a whole different thing to imagine something scientifically or say it exists in a scientific assessment than it is to actually live,” said co-author Katharine Mach, a climate risk scientist at the University of Miami. She said and previous Same Coronavirus disease Pandemic. Health officials have long warned of a pandemic, but when it does, the lockdowns, school closures, economic fallout, supply chain problems are sometimes beyond what can be imagined in dry scientific reports.

Before this report, the vast majority of climate research, official reports and debates had spoken of the long-term consequences, a slow but steady rise in average temperatures and rising sea levels. Extreme events are considered too rare to study for good statistics and science, and are not considered a big problem. Much of the focus of science, international negotiations and media coverage is now on extreme climate change.

Deaths from weather disasters in the U.S. and globally are generally declining, but scientists say that’s because of better forecasting, warning, preparedness and response. From 2002 to 2011, before the report was released, the U.S. had an average of 641 annual weather-related deaths, and now the 10-year average has dropped to an average of 520, but 2021 is the deadliest year in a decade with 797 Died due to weather. Meanwhile, the 10-year average heat death toll in the U.S. rose slightly, from 118 to 135 per year.

“We’re adapting fast enough to reduce the impact,” Carter said. “We’re not reducing greenhouse gas emissions to really address the cause of warming.”

Scientists were rightly warned, but “we may have been too conservative” in the language used, said Chris Field, a Stanford University climate scientist who led the report’s project a decade ago. Aside from the dry facts and figures presented, he wished he had used the phrase “grab people by the shoulders, shake them a little more, and say these are real risks.”