20/02/2022

(UK The Guardian) How Bad Is Storm Eunice – And Is It A Result Of Climate Breakdown?

The Guardian - |

A rare red warning has been issued as back-to-back storms sweep the UK


Storm Eunice: planes struggle and roofs are ripped off as millions face disruption – video report. 1min 14sec
Where has the storm come from?
Eunice brewed in the central Atlantic and was spun up from the Azores towards Europe by the jet stream.

Is it a particularly bad storm?
Yes, gusts of up to 110mph have been recorded at the Needles lighthouse on the Isle of Wight.

This has exceeded the prediction of 90mph winds, and is just under the record 120mph winds that hit during the devastating storm of 1987, during which 18 people died in one day.

Met Office says Eunice has the potential to be the worst storm since then. A rare red alert has been issued by the Met Office, with people asked to stay at home if they can. The government has convened Cobra to discuss response to the likely devastation ahead.

Prof Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, said: “The Met Office red and amber warnings for high winds should not be taken lightly. Red means you need to act now because there is an imminent danger to life.

"Everyone who lives or works in those areas should be battening down the hatches, literally in some cases, to prevent people from being killed and injured and to protect your homes and businesses.

“Let us be clear what this means. Winds of 70mph will uproot trees, which can block roads and crush cars or buildings. They can pick up roof tiles and hurl them around. If you are hit by one of those you will be seriously hurt or killed.

"Wind that strong will sweep people and vehicles off streets, and topple electricity lines. Do not take any chances. Stay inside.”

There is talk of a deadly ‘sting jet’ coming with the storm, but what is that?
Met Office scientists have said one of these can form. Matt Priestley, a research scientist at the University of Exeter, looking at storm tracks and extratropical cyclones, said they were small areas of very intense winds within a storm’s cyclone that were hard to predict.

“They are generally about 10-20km wide and are generated by specific instabilities within the flight lines of storms and cause very high wind speeds.

“They’re not a feature of all storms. They’re often just a feature of the most intense ones like Storm Eunice. The fact that they are such small scale but can have such high wind speeds makes forecasting them very, very difficult.”

Is Eunice linked to climate breakdown?
Michael Dukes, a forecaster at MetDesk, said it could be. He explained: “Although it is hard to pinpoint climate change as a reason for individual severe weather events, climate models do indicate an increase in these type of storms as the earth continues to slowly warm.

"So this is very much in line with what climate scientists have been warning us about for a number of years now.”

While there is dispute between scientists over whether the storms themselves are likely to increase and become stronger, most agree that the climate crisis will make their impacts worse.

The German climatologist Friederike Otto, who leads the pioneering World Weather Attribution service on whether droughts, big storms or heatwaves were made more likely by the climate emergency, said there was “very little evidence that winds in these winter storms have gotten stronger with climate change”.

She said: “Nevertheless the damages of winter storms have gotten worse because of human-caused climate change for two reasons: one, the rainfall associated with these winter storms has become more intense, and many studies link this clearly to climate change; and two, because of sea-level rise, storm surges are higher and thus more damaging than they would otherwise be.”

Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said: “Once-in-a-decade storms like Eunice are certain to batter the British Isles in the future but there is no compelling evidence that they will become more frequent or potent in terms of wind speeds.

“Yet with more intense rainfall and higher sea levels as human-caused climate change continues to heat the planet, flooding from coastal storm surges and prolonged deluges will worsen still further when these rare, explosive storms hit us in a warmer world.”

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An ‘Emerging Crisis’: The Climate Is Changing Too Fast For Plants And Animals To Adapt

Grist - Diana Kruzman

New UN report highlights how warming temperatures are upending nature's life cycles — with devastating impacts on agriculture and biodiversity.
Ashley Cooper via Getty

White storks migrating to Northern Europe nest up to a week earlier in warm weather, exposing them to extreme storms and threatening the survival of their chicks.

Staple crops like barley, maize, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, and wheat, along with fruits like apples, cherries, pears, and mangoes, are all experiencing disruptions in their growth and development.

Ten years ago, a marine heat wave in the Gulf of Maine sped up the life cycle of lobsters, overwhelming local fisheries that had to harvest them earlier than expected.

Scientists have warned for years that climate change is upending the natural life cycles of plants and animals — to potentially devastating effect. Now, a new report released Thursday by the United Nations identifies these changes as one of the world’s most pressing emerging environmental crises, in need of immediate action.

The report, Frontiers 2022, comes ahead of the UN Environment Assembly meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of February. It also highlights as emerging crises the growing destruction from wildfires and the hidden cost of noise pollution, which leads to 12,000 premature deaths each year in the European Union alone.

But perhaps most strikingly, it warns that life-cycle changes driven by warming temperatures and extreme weather patterns are affecting the natural rhythms of species around the world, often too quickly for them to adapt.

And while these changes may seem subtle season to season, the report argues, they have the potential to devastate commercial agriculture and fisheries, while also threatening vulnerable species, from butterflies to whales.

“Our Frontiers Report series aims to put the spotlight on key and emerging environmental issues — those that potentially have huge effects on our society, economy, and ecosystems,” said Andrea Hinwood, chief scientist for the UN Environment Programme, during a press event.

“We need to be aware of the issues, their causes, so we can look at how we manage them, prevent harm, and implement appropriate preventative actions and solutions.”

The science of how living things time their birth, growth, reproduction and other life-cycle stages is known as phenology, and changes in these patterns — driven by environmental forces like temperature, the arrival of rains and other cues — are called “phenological shifts.”

Particularly in temperate regions of the world, where changing seasons let animals know to hibernate, flowers to bloom, birds to lay their eggs, and fish to spawn, warming temperatures and extreme weather driven by climate change can alter these natural cycles.

The world has already warmed 2.14 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.19 degrees Celsius) from the pre-industrial era.

Studies in the early 2000s found that “the life stages of 203 plant and animal species had advanced by an average of about 2.8 days earlier per decade,” according to the report.

Since then, more recent research has continued to study how ecosystems, biomes, and taxonomic groups are being affected as the rise in temperatures speeds up.

Plants and animals are timing their life cycle changes to catch up to a warming climate. Each circle in this graph represents one species that has been tracked. United Nations Environment Programme
Monarch butterflies have delayed their annual migration by 6 days per decade due to warmer-than-normal temperatures, potentially impacting their access to food sources along the way.

In the Arctic, spring vegetation is sprouting up to 2 weeks earlier than normal, meaning caribou calves are born too late to eat it, decimating populations of the endangered species.

Certain fish species have shifted their egg laying forward by as many as 10 days per decade, and some plankton species are reaching peak abundance as many as 50 days earlier per decade.

 Animals often can adapt, the report explains, with chicks hatching earlier to catch up with their main food source: caterpillars, themselves emerging earlier to keep up with the plants they feed on — a phenomenon known as “phenological plasticity.”

But with climate change occurring so rapidly, “individual or population plasticity may not be able to keep up with the rapid environmental changes we are experiencing,” the report says.

These changes aren’t just about the natural world. As the report warns, phenological mismatches could wreak havoc on human societies if left unchecked.

Along with a loss in overall biodiversity — which has consequences for human health and the spread of infectious diseases — warming trends have already affected crop yields, threatening food security around the world.

When plants flower early because warming temperatures signal to them that spring has arrived, pollinators might not be active in time to reach them, or late-season frosts could destroy the early crop. Warmer temperatures could also encourage the development of pests, threatening yields.

“Rehabilitating habitats, building wildlife corridors to enhance habitat connectivity, shifting boundaries of protected areas, and conserving biodiversity in productive landscapes can help as immediate interventions,” the report concludes.

“However, without strong efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, these conservation measures will only delay the collapse of essential ecosystem services.”

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(AU ABC) These Women Are Tackling Australia's Climate Change Crisis Through Photographs

ABC Radio Canberra - Adrienne Francis | Tahlia Roy

A elderly woman stands in front of a house with an ominous orange sky.
Tracey Nearmy took this stunning photo, "Nancy in North Nowra", and submitted it as part of a visual petition tacking climate change. (Supplied)
From fire to flood to drought, how you feel about climate change-related disasters can be tricky to express in words.

It can also leave you feeling helpless, as Queanbeyan-based professional photographer Hilary Wardhaugh knows all to well.

During 2020's horrific bushfire season, she came across countless dead ladybirds lying among ash at Potato Point, on the NSW South Coast.

"[I saw] lots of ash everywhere along the beach, and within the ash were millions of ladybirds. You could still see them, so they hadn't been burnt, but they were all dead," Ms Wardhaugh said.

The picture she took of that scene became the catalyst for a project now known as the Everyday Climate Crisis Visual Petition — a call to action from women and non-binary people.

Dead ladybugs amongst charcoal on a beach.
This ladybird photo, taken by Hilary Wardhaugh, inspired the Everyday Climate Crisis visual petition. (Supplied)

"It was heartbreaking, and that's why I wanted to start this project," Ms Wardhaugh said.

 "I wanted to crowdsource images that illustrate climate change in Australia, and sourcing images from women and non-binary people only.
"I think it's important that women have a voice, and a voice through photography and creativity."
Ms Wardhaugh's goal is to collect 1,000 photographs; once that number is reached, the petition will be submitted to federal parliament as "a visual response to the Australian government's climate change policies".

"What I hope to do is have the prime minister at the time hold our petition up in parliament, rather than a lump of coal," Ms Wardhaugh said.

A woman with short grey hair and glasses looks at a photograph of a fire on a computer screen.
Hilary Wardhaugh, founder of the #EverydayClimateCrisis project. (ABC News: Mark Moore)
 
'1,000 pictures are screaming from the rooftops'

Despite only formally launching at the Women See Change event last week, the petition already has 500 climate change-themed images from both amateur and professional photographers in its collection.

Audio
Everyday Climate Crisis
14min 21sec

"There's been a lot of images where people have done something quite creative in response to how climate change makes them feel," Ms Wardhaugh said.

"We've got people from all over Australia who've submitted. All range in ages, backgrounds and culture, regions."

PhotoAccess's Caitlin Seymour-King helped launch the petition, and said photography is "a hugely helpful tool in the climate change discussion, to represent perspectives that aren't being listened to".

"I think an image tells us something immediately. We have a visceral response, a bodily, corporeal response that communicates things so much faster and so much more felt," she said.
"If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 1,000 pictures are screaming from the rooftops."
A large pile of branches sits in the middle of a dark forest.
These branches were captured by Hilary Wardhaugh at Potato Point as part of her Everyday Climate Crisis visual petition. (Supplied)



One of the most moving petition images Ms Seymour-King has seen so far was submitted by Lib Ferreira.

Ms Ferreira captured a kangaroo mob against a backdrop of smoke during the 2019-20 bushfire season at Queanbeyan Lawn Cemetery in southern NSW.

"The kangaroos represent all of us just trying to stay alive in this huge climate crisis … and they are helpless, in a way," Ms Seymour-King said.
"They are just there to feed on the land of dead bodies with fake flowers popping through. It's a huge symbol.
"But the kangaroos are also kind of offset with comicalness, because it's kind of hilarious to see them unknowingly being part of this message and this campaign and this story." 

Various kangaroos stand around tombstones surrounded by smoke and eat grass
This photo of kangaroos on the Queanbeyan Lawn Cemetery was submitted to the visual climate change petition by Lib Ferreira. (Supplied)
Uniting voices from across the country

Artist and poet Dr Judith Nangala Crispin, based in Womboin in NSW, was inspired to join the project after the 2020 bushfires devastated her region.

"We all go through terrible times, and part of the way that we cope with that as humans is we overwrite it with the better time that we're in — but nothing brings back those times more clearly than a photograph," Dr Nangala Crispin said.
"If you lived through those fires, or even through the smoke of those fires and you couldn't breathe properly because of the smoke, if you sit there and you look at a photograph, it's going to remind you of that — and we need to keep that lesson fresh."
A plastic water botte with sea creatures growing on it.
Hilary Wardhaugh took this picture of a plastic water bottle covered in sea molluscs as part of her visual petition.(Supplied)






Dr Nangala Crispin believes the petition could feature a "groundswell of voices".

"Women's voices, first nations voices, people who are gender fluid, they've all been overwritten by privileged male voices," she said.

"But with a project like this, every single person who puts in a photograph gives permission for somebody else to do the same."

Dr Nangala Crispin said photo stories are an important art form because every angle captured through the lens is unique, regardless of training.

"You are always the most important person in that moment, no matter what your skill level is, and that's why sometimes we see these incredible photographs taken by people who aren't terribly well known," she said.
"I think the moment you press the shutter, whether it's on a camera or a phone, what you have done is an act of bearing witness — and that is the art there."
Judith Crispin & Caitlin Seymour-King.
Womboin artist Dr Judith Nangala Crispin and PhotoAccess production officer Caitlin Seymour-King believe the photos will be a powerful way to create change. (ABC Canberra: Adrienne Francis)
And, while the images are often confronting, Ms Seymour-King said the project was underpinned by a sense of collective hope.

"The word 'hope' came up as something quite important that we wanted as our anchor, as it's very easy to fall into a hole of despair," she said.

"But potentially we can do something [to affect change] together.

"Anyone can pick up a phone or a disposable camera, take a photo, and mean something with it. And we can validate each other in that process as well."

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