Adapting to a warmer world: No going back

When Superstorm Sandy hit the US coast last month, it blew millions of New Yorkers back into the nineteenth century.

The southern part of Manhattan went black after floodwaters shorted out electrical systems. With the subway system disabled, many residents resorted to traversing the island by foot, and water supplies in some areas became contaminated with bacteria and pollutants.

The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy wreaked US$50 billion in economic losses along the US northeast coast, providing a costly reminder of how ill-prepared even the richest nations are for weather extremes. Some recent weather disasters have now been attributed, at least in part, to human activity, including the 2003 European heatwave¹ and the floods in England in 2000 (ref. 2). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), storms, floods and droughts will strike more frequently and with greater strength as the climate warms³. And if nations are struggling to cope now, how will they manage in a warmer, harsher future?

Just a decade ago, 'adaptation' was something of a dirty word in the climate arena — an insinuation that nations could continue with business as usual and deal with the mess later. But greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate and countries have failed to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. That stark reality has forced climate researchers and policy-makers to explore ways to weather some of the inevitable changes.Nature special:nature.com/kyoto

“As progress to reduce emissions has slowed in most countries, there has been a turn towards adaptation,” says Jon Barnett, a political geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Adaptation has tended to focus on hard defences, such as shoring up sea walls and building dams. But as awareness of adaptation has grown, so too has the concept. “Adaptation means different things to different people, and is extremely location specific,” says Neil Adger, an environmental and economic geographer at the University of Exeter, UK. Although residents in Bangladesh can raise their houses on stilts to survive floods, some settlements in Alaska and the Maldives must move in the face of rising sea levels. More

 

Adapting to a warmer world: No going back

When Superstorm Sandy hit the US coast last month, it blew millions of New Yorkers back into the nineteenth century.

The southern part of Manhattan went black after floodwaters shorted out electrical systems. With the subway system disabled, many residents resorted to traversing the island by foot, and water supplies in some areas became contaminated with bacteria and pollutants.

The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy wreaked US$50 billion in economic losses along the US northeast coast, providing a costly reminder of how ill-prepared even the richest nations are for weather extremes. Some recent weather disasters have now been attributed, at least in part, to human activity, including the 2003 European heatwave¹ and the floods in England in 2000 (ref. 2). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), storms, floods and droughts will strike more frequently and with greater strength as the climate warms³. And if nations are struggling to cope now, how will they manage in a warmer, harsher future?

Just a decade ago, 'adaptation' was something of a dirty word in the climate arena — an insinuation that nations could continue with business as usual and deal with the mess later. But greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate and countries have failed to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. That stark reality has forced climate researchers and policy-makers to explore ways to weather some of the inevitable changes.Nature special:nature.com/kyoto

“As progress to reduce emissions has slowed in most countries, there has been a turn towards adaptation,” says Jon Barnett, a political geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Adaptation has tended to focus on hard defences, such as shoring up sea walls and building dams. But as awareness of adaptation has grown, so too has the concept. “Adaptation means different things to different people, and is extremely location specific,” says Neil Adger, an environmental and economic geographer at the University of Exeter, UK. Although residents in Bangladesh can raise their houses on stilts to survive floods, some settlements in Alaska and the Maldives must move in the face of rising sea levels. More

 

Sea levels are rising 60 percent faster than expected

One thing that can be said categorically about Hurricane Sandy is that sea-level rise was a key factor in the damage the storm caused. New York Harbor is 15 inches higher than it was in 1880, eight of which are due directly to human-made climate change. A 2007 report suggested that by 2100 the seas could be at least seven inches higher still.

But those estimates may have been conservative. The Institute of Physics revealed today that the seas are rising 60 percent faster than expected.

While temperature rises appear to be consistent with the projections made in the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] fourth assessment report (AR4), satellite measurements show that sea-levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report. …

Satellites measure sea-level rise by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface and are much more accurate than tide gauges as they have near-global coverage; tide gauges only sample along the coast. Tide gauges also include variability that has nothing to do with changes in global sea level, but rather with how the water moves around in the oceans, such as under the influence of wind.

The study also shows that it is very unlikely that the increased rate is down to internal variability in our climate system and also shows that non-climatic components of sea-level rise, such as water storage in reservoirs and groundwater extraction, do not have an effect on the comparisons made.

Which means that in 88 years, New York’s harbor will be at least 11 inches higher — assuming that the speed of the rise doesn’t increase still more.

in 88 years, New York’s harbor will be at least 11 inches higher

From The Guardian:

The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres — such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida — or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said.

Scientists earlier this year found sea-level rise had already doubled the annual risk of historic flooding across a widespread area of the United States. …

“The study indicates that this is going to be as bad or worse than the worst case scenarios of the IPCC so whatever you were planning from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod in terms of how you were preparing for sea-level rise — if you thought you had enough defences in place, you probably need more,” [study coauthor Grant] Foster said. More

 

Increasing Drought Stress Challenges Vulnerable Hydraulic System of Plants, Professor Finds

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2012) — The hydraulic system of trees is so finely-tuned that predicted increases in drought due to climate change may lead to catastrophic failure in many species.

A recent paper co-authored by George Washington University Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Amy Zanne finds that those systems in plants around the globe are operating at the top of their safety threshold, making forest ecosystems vulnerable to increasing environmental stress.

In the current issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Zanne and lead authors from the University of Western Sydney in Australia and Ulm University in Germany, report that the hydraulic system trees depend on is a unique but unstable mechanism that is constantly challenged.

"Drought is a major force shaping our forests," said Dr. Zanne, a faculty member within the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. "Over the last century, drought has been responsible globally for numerous large-scale forest diebacks. To make effective predictions of how forest landscapes may change in the future, we need to first understand how plants work."

The primary challenge plants face during drought is how to keep their plumbing working. Drought stress creates trapped gas emboli in the water system, which reduces the ability of plants to supply water to leaves for photosynthetic gas exchange and can ultimately result in desiccation and death.

"Vulnerability to embolism is one of the main factors determining drought effects on trees," Dr. Zanne said. "However, plants vary dramatically in their resistance to drought-induced embolism, which has made predictions of how forests might be altered under future climates more difficult."

While the research findings are alarming, plants do have a few other tricks up their sleeves. They may have some flexibility of changing their plumbing or new species of trees may replace species no longer capable of persisting in a given place.

An international team consisting of Dr. Zanne and 23 other plant scientists organized via the ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, analyzed existing measures of plant hydraulic safety thresholds in forest species around the world.

The surprising result that the group discovered is that while plants vary greatly in their embolism resistance, they are sitting at similar safety thresholds across all forest types. The team found these thresholds are largely independent of mean annual precipitation.

The findings explain why drought-induced forest decline occurs in arid as well as wet forests, which had historically not been considered at risk. More

 

Europe Changing Fast as Climate Warms

BRUSSELS, Belgium, November 26, 2012 (ENS) – Climate change is affecting all regions of Europe as glaciers melt, the Greenland ice sheet shrinks, sea levels rise, snow cover decreases and permafrost soils warm, finds a new assessment issued by the European Environment Agency.

The report by 50 authors was published in advance of the annual United Nations climate summit, which opened Monday in Doha, Qatar.

Higher average temperatures have been observed across Europe with decreasing precipitation in southern regions and increasing precipitation in northern Europe, according to the report, “Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2012.”

Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency said, “Climate change is a reality around the world, and the extent and speed of change is becoming ever more evident. This means that every part of the economy, including households, need to adapt as well as reduce emissions.”

Extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods and droughts have caused soaring damage costs across Europe in recent years.

Future climate change is expected to add to this vulnerability, as extreme weather events are expected to become more intense and frequent. If European societies do not adapt, damage costs are expected to continue rising.

While more evidence is needed to determine the part played by climate change in this trend, growing human activity in hazard-prone areas has been a key factor, according to the EEA report.

Some regions will be less able to adapt to climate change than others, in part due to economic disparities across Europe, and the effects of climate change could deepen these inequalities, the report says.

The last decade (2002–2011) was the warmest on record in Europe, with European land temperature 1.3° C warmer than the pre-industrial average. Various model projections show that Europe could be 2.5–4° C warmer in the later part of the 21st Century, compared to the 1961–1990 average.

Heat waves have increased in frequency and length, causing tens of thousands of deaths over the last decade. The projected increase in heat waves could increase the number of related deaths over the next decades, unless societies adapt, the report says. However, cold-related deaths are projected to decrease in many countries.

Climate change is projected to increase river flooding, particularly in northern Europe, as higher temperatures intensify the water cycle.

River flow droughts appear to have become more severe and frequent in southern Europe. Minimum river flows are projected to decrease in summer in southern Europe but also in many other parts of Europe. More

 

 

UN Climate Chief: Talks Are Making Slow, Steady Progress

Few jobs on the international stage are more daunting than the one held by Christiana Figueres, the woman in charge of United Nations talks aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Figueres, of Costa Rica, is executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in 1997 led to the adoption of the landmark Kyoto Protocol but that, in recent years, has been widely criticized for failing to secure a treaty imposing binding limits on emissions.

Christiana Figuere

With a new round of talks set to begin next week in Doha, Qatar, Figueres sat down with Yale Environment 360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert to assess the state of those negotiations. Figueres, whose father and brother both served as president of Costa Rica, said that contrary to public perceptions, global climate talks have actually been moving forward in a “slow but steady” manner, with a goal of securing a new accord in 2015.

In the interview, Figueres discussed the need for the United States to finally sign on to a global climate treaty, the inevitability of world economies making the transition to a low-carbon future, and the need for politicians to feel the same urgency as climate scientists about the threats posed by global warming. “There’s a huge gap between the two,” says Figueres, “and it is our very challenging task to encourage the closing of that gap.”

Yale Environment 360: It is becoming increasingly common to hear very knowledgeable people say that the possibility of holding average global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius is slipping away from us. Just the other day PricewaterhouseCoopers put out a report that said government ambition to limit warming to 2 degrees is highly unrealistic. Are these people right, and if they’re wrong, why do we keep hearing this?

Christiana Figueres: Well, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] actually has this challenge front and center in terms of drafting their Fifth Assessment report, and this is one of the main issues that they are looking at — what are the options for countries to reach the two-degree target? So the jury is still out. We will wait for the work of the IPCC and their assessment report to see what they are suggesting with respect to options. What is very clear and what no one denies is that of course the more delay there is in increasing mitigation, the more delay there is in decreasing emissions, the more the window is closed to the possibility of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.

e360: There has been a lot written over the last couple of weeks about how Hurricane Sandy really represents a wake-up call for the U.S. and maybe now we’ll see a change in the politics around the issue in this country. We’ve also heard this before. And we just had a whole presidential campaign in which this issue really didn’t get discussed. Since Sandy, do you think that there has been any change? Do you feel that this is any kind of an opportunity?

Figueres: Yes, I certainly do think that this is yet another wake-up call. I did hear President Obama say quite categorically in his acceptance speech that he is not going to have a future that is threatened by increasing warming. I also heard [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg say very clearly right after Sandy that in his view this has been a wake-up call for New York specifically, but also for the broader United States to really understand the vulnerability in particular of coastal cities to the increasing challenges being brought by climate change. And I do think that this mirrors the growing awareness in the United States. So I do think that Sandy has contributed to this. Is it the tipping point? That remains to be seen. More

 

Climate change a 'real and present danger,' Kent says

Canada's Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent thinks recent extreme weather events are forcing politicians in both Canada and the U.S. to focus on the issue of climate change, and that includes members of his Conservative government's cabinet.

Peter Kent

"It has focused minds absolutely," Kent told reporters after appearing at a parliamentary committee hearing.

In perhaps his most forceful comments on climate change to date, Kent says the recent Hurricane Sandy that devastated parts of the U.S. East Coast is putting the issue top of mind, as are recent examples of extreme weather in Canada, such as the increasing number of tornadoes to hit Ontario.

"Scientists tell us on a regular basis you can't connect individual incidents of extreme weather with climate change, but I think it's quite clear that we are seeing increased incidents of extreme weather, droughts, floods, the diminishing ice cap, ozone opening and closing over the poles, he said.

"You don't have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and we need to address it."

Kent said he talks to his U.S. counterparts on a "more than monthly basis" and there's a general consensus that it's an issue that has to be addressed. "We would ignore it at our peril."

In his first news conference after being re-elected, U.S. President Barack Obama talked about the growing number of severe weather events and the need to act on climate change for future generations.

Canada aligns with U.S.

Canada aligns its environmental policies with those of the U.S. But Canada has been roundly criticized for its continued lack of clear legislation to make so-called "large final emitters," like energy companies, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Canada has been taking a sector-by-sector approach, bringing in rules for cars and coal-fired power plants but leaving the toughest for the last.

Kent has also been raked over the coals internationally for pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change last year. That accord expires at the end of next month.

Global leaders and environment ministers are heading to Doha, Qatar for the next UN Climate Change Conference, which is set to begin Nov. 26. It's the annual conference where countries consider a new global agreement to replace Kyoto.

Canada will be in Doha, too. Even though it pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, it's still a signatory to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overall international umbrella agreement of which Kyoto is a part.

Countries are now split over whether to negotiate a second Kyoto-like agreement or follow the Copenhagen Accord. That's the non-binding agreement signed in 2009 that calls for developing nations to do more to reduce their emissions along with the rich developed ones.

Kent says increased public attention on extreme weather events is bringing added attention to next week's global conference. He says Canada is committed to getting a new agreement but warns it won't be easy. More