1 September 2017, The Conversation, Australia’s record-breaking winter warmth linked to climate change. On the first day of spring, it’s time to take stock of the winter that was. It may have felt cold, but Australia’s winter had the highest average daytime temperatures on record. It was also the driest in 15 years.Back at the start of winter the Bureau of Meteorology forecast a warm, dry season. That proved accurate, as winter has turned out both warmer and drier than average. While we haven’t seen anything close to the weather extremes experienced in other parts of the world, including devastating rainfalls in Niger, the southern US and the Indian subcontinent all in the past week, we have seen a few interesting weather extremes over the past few months across Australia. Drier weather than normal has led to warmer days and cooler nights, resulting in some extreme temperatures. These include night-time lows falling below -10℃ in the Victorian Alps and -8℃ in Canberra (the coldest nights for those locations since 1974 and 1971, respectively), alongside daytime highs of above 32℃ in Coffs Harbour and 30℃ on the Sunshine Coast. During the early part of the winter the southern part of the country remained dry as record high pressure over the continent kept cold fronts at bay. Since then we’ve seen more wet weather for our southern capitals and some impressive snow totals for the ski fields, even if the snow was late to arrive. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
31 August 2017, The Guardian, South Asia floods kill 1,200 and shut 1.8 million children out of school. Heavy monsoon rains have brought Mumbai to a halt for a second day as the worst floods to strike south Asia in years continued to exact a deadly toll. More than 1,200 people have died across India, Bangladesh and Nepal as a result of flooding, with 40 million affected by the devastation. At least six people, including two toddlers, were among the victims in and around India’s financial capital. The devastating floods have also destroyed or damaged 18,000 schools, meaning that about 1.8 million children cannot go to classes, Save the Children warned on Thursday. The charity said that hundreds of thousands of children could fall permanently out of the school system if education was not prioritised in relief efforts. “We haven’t seen flooding on this scale in years and it’s putting the long-term education of an enormous number of children at great risk. From our experience, the importance of education is often under-valued in humanitarian crises and we simply cannot let this happen again. We cannot go backwards,” said Rafay Hussain, Save the Children’s general manager in Bihar state….The rains have led to flooding in a broad arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills in Bangladesh, Nepal and India, causing landslides, damaging roads and electric towers and washing away tens of thousands of homes and vast swaths of farmland. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the fourth significant floods this year have affected more than 7.4 million people in Bangladesh, damaging or destroying more than 697,000 houses. They have killed 514 in India’s eastern state of Bihar, where 17.1 million have been affected, disaster management officials have been quoted as saying. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, about 2.5 million have been affected and the death toll stood at 109 on Tuesday, according to the Straits Times. The IFRC said landslides in Nepal had killed more than 100 people. Read More here
29 August 2017, The Independent, A “wave of legal action” over climate change has already begun and cases will become more likely to succeed as the scientists get better at attributing extreme weather events to global warming, activists have warned. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, lawyers from ClientEarth in London and Earth & Water Law in Washington DC said events previously regarded as “acts of God” could increasingly land humans with a bill for damages. Companies and their directors, government agencies and others with a duty of care, who fail to disclose relevant information or to plan ahead, could all potentially be in legal trouble. Several legal cases are already underway in the US with a group of young people suing the US federal government for allegedly creating and enhancing the dangers of climate change; coastal communities in California suing fossil fuel companiesover sea-level rise; and the New York attorney general’s office investigating ExxonMobil amid claims the company may have misled shareholders about the financial risk posed by climate change. The Nature Geoscience article said: “The question is not whether there will be another wave of climate-related litigation — the wave is already in motion. “The question instead is whether it will be more successful than previous efforts. Read More here
29 August 2017, VOX, Climate change did not “cause” Havey, butit’s a huge part of the story, Climate change did not “cause” Harvey, but it’s a huge part of the story. Nine things we can say about Harvey and climate. The recent Category 4 hurricanes making landfall in the US have revived the perennial discussion about the relationship between extreme storms and climate change. Despite what you might think from the dueling headlines, it’s actually a fairly complicated issue — complicated not just because of the physics, but because of the politics. Here are nine things you can say about Harvey, Irma, and climate change. 1) These hurricanes are not centrally about climate change Talking about climate change during a disaster always runs the risk of insensitivity. The story that most matters about Harvey and Irma right now are the effects they are having on lives and land in Texas and Florida, and the efforts underway to prevent more suffering. More broadly, climate is never going to be central to stories like these. There have always been hurricanes and floods in Texas and Floriday. The things making those states’ coastal developments vulnerable to severe weather — heedless development, sandy subsoil, insufficient drainage — would be problems even in the absence of climate change. Climate is not central, but by the same token it is grossly irresponsible to leave climate out of the story, for the simple reason that climate change is, as the US military puts it, a threat multiplier. The storms, the challenges of emergency response, the consequences of poor adaptation — they all predate climate change. But climate change will steadily make them worse. Read More here