26 September 2017, The Conversation, How TV weather presenters can improve public understanding of climate change. A recent Monash University study of TV weather presenters has found a strong interest from free-to-air presenters in including climate change information in their bulletins. The strongest trends in the survey, which had a 46% response rate, included: + 97% of respondents thought climate change is happening; + 97% of respondents believed viewers had either “strong trust” or “moderate trust” in them as a reliable source of weather information; + 91% of respondents were comfortable with presenting local historical climate statistics, and just under 70% were comfortable with future local climate projections; and + 97% of respondents thought their audiences would be interested in learning about the impacts of climate change. According to several analyses of where Australians get their news, in the age of ubiquitous social media TV is still the single largest news source. These three factors – trust, the impartial nature of weather, and Australian’s enthusiasm for the weather – puts TV presenters in an ideal position to present climate information. Such has been the experience in the US, where the Centre for Climate Change Communication together with Climate Matters have partnered with more than 350 TV weathercasters to present simple, easy-to-process factual climate information. In the US it is about mainstreaming climate information as factual content delivered by trusted sources. The Climate Matters program found TV audiences value climate information the more locally based it was. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
20 September 2017, The Conversation, Vietnam’s typhoon disaster highlights the plight of its poorest people. Six people lost their lives when Typhoon Doksuri smashed into central Vietnam on September 16, the most powerful storm in a decade to hit the country. Although widespread evacuations prevented a higher death toll, the impact on the region’s most vulnerable people will be extensive and lasting. Government sources report that more than 193,000 properties have been damaged, including 11,000 that were flooded. The storm also caused widespread damage to farmland, roads, and water and electricity infrastructure. Quang Binh and Ha Tinh provinces bore the brunt of the damage. Central Vietnam is often in the path of tropical storms and depressions that form in the East Sea, which can intensify to form tropical cyclones known as typhoons (the Pacific equivalent of an Atlantic hurricane). Typhoon Doksuri developed and tracked exactly as forecast, meaning that evacuations were relatively effective in saving lives. What’s more, the storm moved quickly over the affected area, delivering only 200-300 mm of rainfall and sparing the region the severe flooding now being experienced in Thailand. Doksuri is just one of a spate of severe tropical cyclones that have formed in recent weeks, in both the Pacific and Atlantic regions. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and, most recently, Maria have attracted global media coverage, much of it focused on rarely considered angles such as urban planning, poverty, poor development, politics, the media coverage of disasters – as well as the perennial question of climate change. Disasters are finally being talked about as part of a discourse of systemic oppression – and this is a great step forward. Read More here
7 September 2017, The Guardian, The unprecedented drought that’s crippling Montana and North Dakota. hen Rick Kirn planted his 1,000 acres of spring wheat in May, there were no signs of a weather calamity on the horizon. Three months later, when he should have been harvesting and getting ready to sell his wheat, Kirn was staring out across vast cracked, gray, empty fields dotted with weeds and little patches of stunted wheat. “It’s a total loss for me,” said Kirn, who operates a small family wheat farm on the Fort Peck Reservation, an area of north-eastern Montana that lies right in the heart of the extreme climatic episode. “There’s nothing to harvest.” Kirn’s story is typical across the high plains in Montana and the Dakotas this summer, where one of the country’s most important wheat growing regions is in the grips of a crippling drought that came on with hardly any warning and, experts say, is without precedent. While much of the country’s attention in recent weeks has been on the hurricanes striking southern Texas and the Caribbean, a so-called “flash drought”, an unpredictable, sudden event brought on by sustained high temperatures and little rain, has seized a swathe of the country and left farmers with little remedy. Across Montana’s northern border and east into North Dakota, farms are turning out less wheat than last year, much of it poorer quality than normal. Read More here
5 September 2017, Reuters, ANALYSIS-Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath could see pioneering climate lawsuits. After disasters in the United States like Hurricane Harvey, lawyers get busy with lawsuits seeking to apportion blame and claim damages. This time, a new kind of litigation is likely to appear, they say – relating to climate change. That’s because rapid scientific advances are making it possible to precisely measure what portion of a disaster such as Harvey can be attributed to the planet’s changing climate. Such evidence could well feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “As extreme weather events and related damages and other impacts increase in severity … courts will increasingly be called upon to seek redress for damages suffered,” said Lindene Patton, a risk-management lawyer with the Earth & Water Group, a Washington-based specialty law firm.Hurricane Harvey last week brought unprecedented destruction as incessant rain and winds of up to 130 miles per hour caused catastrophic damage, making large swathes of Texas and Louisiana uninhabitable for weeks or months. Images of soldiers and police in helicopters and special high-water trucks rescuing Texans stranded by floodwater brought back painful memories of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana a decade ago. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a contention by scientists and the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization that the historic rainfall from Harvey was linked to climate change. Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events. This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change. Read More here