Here Is The Weather Forecast For The Next Five Years: Even Hotter

The Guardian - Robin McKie

Long-range forecast predicts generally upward temperature trend, possibly interrupted by La Niña event in 2017

A sunny January day at Mudeford Sandbanks in Dorset. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex/Shutterstock

Global temperatures will continue to soar over the next 12 months as rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño combine to bring more record-breaking warmth to the planet.
 According to the Met Office's forecast for the next five years, 2016 is likely to be the warmest since records began. Then in 2017 there will be a dip as the effects of El Niño dissipate and there is some planet-wide cooling.
But after that, and for the remaining three years of the decade, the world will continue to experience even more warming. The forecast, which will be released this week, is the first such report that the Met Office has issued since it overhauled its near-term climate prediction system last year.
"We cannot say exactly how warm it will get but there is no doubt the overall upward trend of temperatures will continue," said Doug Smith, a Met Office expert on long-term forecasting. "We cannot say exactly how hot 2018, 2019 or 2020 will be. That will depend on other variables. But the general trend is going to be upwards."
The current El Niño – a meteorological event in which a band of warm water develops in the Pacific Ocean around the equator – is about to peak. However, global warming associated with the event normally lags several months behind that peak and as a result, 2016 could be even hotter that 2015, the warmest year on record.
Some global warming deniers have claimed that the current El Niño alone was responsible for making last year a record one, with the effects of carbon emissions being irrelevant. But Smith rejects these claims.
"We have had El Niños before," he said. "The one in 1997-98 was particularly intense. Nevertheless, global temperatures were less then than they were in 2015 – and that is because background heating caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher today than they were in 1997-98."
However, the end of the current El Niño and the possible triggering of a La Niña event – an extensive cooling of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean – is likely to bring a temporary halt to rising global temperatures, according to the Met Office.
As a result, 2017 is likely to see a dip in global temperatures. "We can be pretty sure there will be a drop that year," added Smith.
After that, temperatures could start to rise again over the rest of the decade. "Whether one of these years – 2018, 2019, 2020 – overtakes 2016 in terms of temperature is very hard to predict at this stage," said Smith. "We are looking quite far into the future, after all."
One reason for such uncertainties is a lack of precise knowledge about the heating of the oceans. "If you want to measure climate change you need to have precise information about the total energy of the planet and most of that is stored in the ocean," said Smith. "Recently temperature rises on the land slowed and people said global warming had stopped. That was never true. The ocean heat content went up all the time."
In a bid to improve information about ocean warming trends, scientists have deployed robot floats – part of the international Argo measuring system – that record temperatures and salinity to depths of 2,000 metres. Now a new generation of Argo devices is to be deployed and will reach depths of 5,000 metres. "That should provide crucial data that will help us make more accurate forecasts," added Smith.
The release of the Met Office study comes as another group of scientists revealed research that shows the last 30 years were probably the warmest Europe has experienced in more than two millennia. An international team used tree ring records and historical documents to reconstruct yearly temperatures going back 2,100 years and discovered there was no period as warm as the last 30 years.

Links

• Daffodils in bloom, the warmest ever December: how worrying is the world's strange weather?
• Climate change slowdown is due to warming of deep oceans, say scientists
• Why our turbulent weather is getting even harder to predict
• Global warming: has the rise in temperatures 'paused'?

The State of Climate Change Litigation: Can Canada and the U.S. follow Urgenda?

Work and Climate Change Report - elizabethperry493






The landmark Urgenda decision in the Netherlands in June 2015 has ignited and re-ignited activity around the world, around the prospect of using litigation to fight climate change. "Unlawful or Above the Law? " in the CCPA Monitor (Nov/Dec. 2015) reviews the Urgenda decision in detail, and puts it in the context of Canadian policy and historical legal cases which have challenged Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. A fuller treatment of the article, titled Canada's Failure to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (October 31, 2015) appears on the Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada website. The authors advocate a legal challenge to Canada's GHG emissions reduction policies. Much of the legal argument is based on the concept of environmental rights as human rights; a Canadian pioneer on this issue is David R. Boyd, whose article " The Constitutional Right to a Healthy Environment" appeared in Environment Magazine in 2012. (a fuller treatment appears in his book The Environmental Rights Revolution: A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights and the Environment (2012)). A more recent publication by Ecojustice, The Right to a Healthy Environment: Canada's Time to Act (2015), acknowledges a large debt to Boyd's work, and the BlueDot movement of the David Suzuki Foundation works in practical ways towards the goal. In December 2015, Toronto became the 100th municipality in Canada to pass a declaration supporting its residents' right to a healthy environment. Climate Change: Tackling the Greatest Human Rights Challenge of our Time (Feb. 2015) by the Center for International Environmental Law and CARE considers how to address the issue within the UNFCCC process.

Liability
Regarding liability for climate change damages, West Coast Environmental Law in B.C. and the Vanuatu Environmental Law Association released Taking Climate Justice into our own Hands on December 8, 2015 "which explains the legal basis for climate-impacted countries to set the rules for climate damages lawsuits and how those rules can be enforced against international fossil fuel polluters." Further, the authors propose language for a Climate Compensation Act, based on common law and thus adaptable to in any country in the world. (Vanuatu released a Statement for Climate Justice in June 2015 ). A newly-launched blog series by the Alberta Environmental Law Centre promises "to provide updates on climate change law developments and include insights from our related law reform research."

Sabin Center
The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School, New York, publishes compendium of cases in the U.S. and non-U.S., and maintains a database called Climate Change Laws of the World. In 2015, the Center published Climate Change in the Courts: An Assesment of non-U.S. climate litigation, as well as Climate Change and Human Rights 2015 (in cooperation with UNEP). The introduction states: "The question is no longer whether human rights law has anything to say about climate change, but rather what it says and how it can best be brought to bear. This report is the most detailed and comprehensive study yet undertaken of those questions".
In a November 2015 blog, "Failure to take climate action is not only morally wrong, it's illegal" Michael Burger discusses the Urgenda and Ashgar Legari case in Pakistan, and links them to current climate change cases in the United States. Most high profile of these have been led by Our Children's Trust, arguing for the right of children to live in a healthy environment. In November in Washington State, Judge Hollis Hill ruled in favour of youth, stating that "[t]he state has a constitutional obligation to protect the public's interest in natural resources held in trust for the common benefit of the people." Other cases are being pursued by Our Children's Trust in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. In August 2015, Our Children's Trust filed a landmark constitutional climate change lawsuit against the federal government in the U.S. District Court of Oregon; plaintiffs include 21 young people and climate scientist Dr. James E. Hansen, serving as guardian for his granddaughter and for future generations. The complaint document is here; the plaintiffs request a court order requiring the President to implement a national plan to decrease CO2 to a safe level, defined as 350 ppm by the year 2100. In January 2016, a judge granted intervenor status in the case to the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers,the American Petroleum Institute, and other energy industry groups.
Internationally, cases claiming damages from climate changes are underway in the Philippines and Peru. To keep up to date internationally, follow eLaws News by the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW), who have also published Holding Corporations Accountable for Damaging the Climate (2014). The Center for International Environmental Law also focuses on climate liability and climate justice.

The Digital Divide: A Challenge To Overcome In Tackling Climate Change

World Bank - John Roome

Students from Tonga's Tailulu College making the most of new high-speed broadband services at 2013 World Telecommunication and Information Society Day celebrations in the the Tongan capital, Nuku'alofa. Nukua'lofa, Tonga. Photo: Tom Perry / World Bank

Try to imagine a world without the Internet.
Impossible, isn't it?
Over the past 25 years, the Internet has become the nervous system of our society, interconnecting all the different parts of our everyday lives. Our social interactions, ways of doing business, traveling and countless other activities are supported and governed by this technology.
At this very moment, just over three billion people are connected to the Internet, 105 billion emails are being sent, two million blog posts have just been written (including this one) and YouTube has collected four billion views. These numbers give you a glimpse of the extent to which humanity is intimately and deeply dependent on this technology.
The digital revolution has changed the daily lives of billions of people. But what about the billions who have been left out of this technological revolution?
This and many other questions have been addressed in the just released 2016 World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends, which examines how the Internet can be a force for development, especially for poor people in developing countries.

A striking contradiction
In many developing countries, more families now own a mobile phone than have access to electricity or clean water. No major technology has reached more people in such a short time but, unfortunately, there's still a significant digital divide between the poor and the wealthy parts of the global population when it comes to Internet access. Perhaps not surprising that the same digital divide has an impact on the ability of developing countries to deal with the impact of climate change.
According to our recently released Report, Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty, climate risk management requires data and knowledge. Connectivity is therefore a fundamental part of the equation for protecting poor people from climate change.

Making the difference on the ground
We already know that greater connectivity in vulnerable countries is crucial for ensuring access to information before, during and after a disaster. The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery has developed a wide array of tools for disaster risk management (DRM), and they rely heavily on the Internet's infinite capabilities.
The GFDRR's Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) is helping countries to set up open disaster information platforms. Through the GFDRR's risk identification efforts, like OpenDRI, over 160 million people in 60 countries have gained improved access to risk information, and 1300 new datasets are now freely available to the public. Digital technologies also allow us to use innovative approaches to disaster risk management such as crowdsourcing and social data mining, which can expand the information base rapidly and cheaply. These digital approaches can also facilitate closer collaboration between all parts of the government, enable fuller integration of public and private services, and allow greater involvement on the part of the public.
The Flood Tags project, for example, is developing a tool to harness data collected via Twitter for on-the-ground flood observations. Such mining of social data can give us a constant and up-to-the-minute understanding of the situation during a disaster, in a way that could not be done before. Connected open-source mobile weather stations can help reduce flood damage and increase community preparedness by collecting crucial weather data and broadcasting SMS-based communications to early warning systems.
As outlined in the Shock Waves Report, another great example of how connectivity can help poor people is financial inclusion. In most developing countries, poor people have less access to financial tools than the rest of the population, often forcing them to save "in kind." Thanks to mobile banking, it is now possible to provide convenient and affordable financial services to those living in rural areas, reducing the vulnerability of poor families. And that matters. For instance, changes in rainfall patterns can mean farmers may have to adjust their practices or  need to invest in new machinery and seeds, or possibly learn new techniques. Without access to credit, these measures may be unaffordable, and they could become locked into activities with declining productivity and income.

Moving ahead  
As underlined in the World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends, more investments are needed if we are to boost our efforts to close the digital divide and make the Internet universal, affordable, open, and safe. Equally we know solving the "climate puzzle" will take a vast array of resources and forward-thinking solutions. The Internet is, without any doubt, the tool that will best allow us to connect, share information and gather collective intelligence in the years to come.

Links

• The road to a greener future
• Carbon markets in the Paris Agreement - an early holiday gift
• The Digital Divide: a challenge to overcome in tackling climate change
• Food systems are finally on the climate change map. What's next?
• Helping youth engage with the global climate talks