Channel NewsAsia - Benjamin P Horton*
The World Economic Forum says extreme weather
events are the most likely and most severe threat facing humanity in
2018 yet climate change doesn’t get the attention it needs, says one
expert from the Earth Observatory of Singapore.
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Singapore experienced flash floods, hailstones, strong winds and a cool
spell in January 2018. (Photo: Alex Lo, Facebook / Michael Wong)
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SINGAPORE: The story about climate
change arguably got its first big public hit more than ten years ago
with Al Gore’s documentary about global warming An Inconvenient Truth.
But maintaining public attention and keeping the heat on climate change action have been tough.
People
are hungry for news about the risk of climate change but boring,
technical jargon is alienating them, said the United Nations top
environment official Erik Solheim in December 2017.
People need to be excited and inspired to take action and change their behaviour, he added.
Yet
“the language of environmentalists has been boring, so uninspiring ...
If we just speak a technical language, with many acronyms and
politically-correct phrases, no one will listen,” he said in an
interview during a Bonn conference on landscapes.
Perhaps the consequences of human-driven climate change seem abstract, technical or too far away in the future.
Do these in turn cause readers to look at climate change news, shrug and then move on to other stories?
There’s a strong case to be made about the importance of communicating the priority we need to place on climate change.
Recent extreme weather pattern are giving us a glimpse into the catastrophe we might find ourselves in if we fail to act.
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| A woman pushing her car which stalled in a
flood at Bedok North on Monday morning (Jan 8), after a heavy downpour
over many parts of Singapore. (Photo: Twitter/SynCPositive)
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Extreme weather in early January
The
start of 2018 has been marked by extreme weather with widespread impact
on public safety, transport, energy and health around the world.
A
major winter storm hit the United States Atlantic coast in early
January, battering coastal areas with heavy snow, blizzards and strong
winds and a drop in temperatures.
Boston suffered coastal flooding after it saw the highest ever recorded tide since 1921.
Flash
flooding and deadly mudslides took place in southern California because
of intense rain, in areas where protective vegetation have
been destroyed by devastating wildfires in late 2017.
In
Asia, central and eastern China saw heavy rain and snow in Shaanxi,
Henan, Hubei, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces in early January, with monthly
maximum rainfall levels broken in 92 counties.
In the
southern hemisphere, Cape Town is running out of water, because reliable
winter rains have vanished — a phenomenon one meteorologist calls a
once-in-628-years weather event.
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| If the rains do not materialise and consumption does not fall in Cape
Town, people will be forced to use standpipes, officials say. (Photo:
AFP/Rodger Bosch)
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Australia was gripped by intense heat, with the weather station in Sydney reaching 47.3°C on Jan 7, the hottest in 80 years.
Flash
floods, strong winds and hailstones in Singapore coupled with a bout of
freakish cool weather, the longest cold spell experienced here in at
least a decade showed we were not immune.
Global warming a key culprit
These
extreme weather events were both signals of a dangerous, human-made
shift in Earth’s climate as much as they were a natural stretch of bad
luck.
Monsoon surges that bring cool weather partially explains what transpired in Singapore.
Natural
climate cycles, especially the interplay between upper atmospheric
conditions over polar regions and mid-latitude conditions over the
oceans and on land, were primary forces driving the extreme weather
globally.
But natural cycles by themselves don’t explain the recent number of record-breaking extreme weather events.
The reality is that the forces undergirding is global warming – and it’s all coming to a head.
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| NASA's Terra satellite captured this visible light image of Tropical Cyclone Berguitta moving toward Mauritius. (Photo: NASA)
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Hotter, with rising sea levels
The
Earth is getting warmer, with significantly more moisture in the
atmosphere. Decades of data show that a long-term build-up of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere is trapping heat and warming up lands, oceans,
and the atmosphere.
17 of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year global temperature record all have occurred since 2001, with the exception of 1998.
The year 2016 ranks as the warmest on record globally and here in Singapore, which had a mean annual temperature of 28.4°C.
2016
was an El Niño year, and mainland Southeast Asia encountered its
warmest monthly mean surface air temperatures in April 2016 since
record-keeping began.
Apart from surpassing national
temperature records in mainland Southeast Asia, this event disrupted
crop production, imposed societal distress and resulted in peak energy
consumption.
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Battered by massive cyclones, El Nino-fuelled
drought and swollen king tides, fragile Pacific island nations were one
of the hardest hit countries in 2016. (Photo: AFP/Giff Johnson)
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El Niño might have exacerbated the
situation, but the temperatures would never have happened without the
human-made shift in Earth’s climate.
Some models have
predicted that the warming of the Earth’s climate could increase the
average strength of hurricanes and typhoons.
Scientists
are confident that rising sea levels are leading to higher storm surges
and more floods - and the mean sea level in the Strait of Singapore has
increased at the rate of 1.2mm to 1.7mm each year in the period 1975 to
2009.
By the end of the century, the average world
temperature could increase by 5 °C, depending in part on how much carbon
we emit between now and then.
The latest climate models
concluded with high confidence that with continued warming projected for
the rest of this century, Singapore and other countries in Southeast
Asia will experience more frequent, record-breaking hot Aprils, just
like the extreme weather event of 2016.
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| Workers in outdoor environments including those in construction and
shipping are particularly at risk from heat-related health issues. (File
photo: Ngau Kai Yan)
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Most likely and most severe threat
The
Global Risks Report 2018 of the World Economic Forum (WEF) states that
extreme weather events are the most likely and most severe threat facing
humanity in 2018 – because scientists expect the frequency of extreme
weather events to increase substantially.
The trend
towards more frequent extreme weather events only underscores how
important it is that we enhance our ability to predict and manage them.
So what can we do?
The solution has been clear for more
than two decades: Governments must take aggressive action to curb
greenhouse gas emissions. The extreme weather lends greater urgency to
climate change initiatives like those under the Paris Agreement.
An essential key to meeting the challenge of extreme weather is critical environmental intelligence.
Just
like the intelligence of the security world, intelligence in the
environmental arena combines data, analysis, modelling, and assessment.
The
smart approach to extreme weather is to attack all the risk factors, by
designing crops that can survive drought, buildings that can resist
floods and high winds, policies that discourage people from building in
dangerous places - and of course, by shifting our economy to greener
energy sources and reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions.
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The Paris Agreement commits signatories to
efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming,
which is blamed for melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels and
more violent weather events. (Photo: AFP)
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Singapore has taken steps to
reduce the impact of extreme weather events by improving drainage to
reduce flood-prone areas, developing weather-proof technologies, and
cooling the island by growing urban green spaces such as rooftop
gardens.
Where climate change poses a real danger, we cannot take the attitude that it’s someone else’s job to sort out.
Indeed,
the biggest challenge we must guard against in this battle against
climate change is people tuning out to the message about global warming.
Erik Solheim mentioned this when he said:
For
this to happen, we have to speak in a different language that is
simpler and breaks down the science to explain to people what climate
change really means for them, in their daily lives, here and now.
As
individuals, we should seize everyday opportunities to reduce our
greenhouse gas emissions. We can recycle, reuse and reduce. Whenever we
can, we should use public transport and walk.
Quite literally, small steps can lead to large-scale change when we, citizens of the earth, act together.
*Professor Benjamin P Horton is principal investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University.
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