Cyclone Nargis: 3 months later

While the storm itself came and went nearly three months ago, the Ayeyarwady Delta region of Myanmar continues to feel the effects of Cyclone Nargis. The storm left nearly 140 000 dead or missing, and severely affected another 2.4m more. Women and children bore the brunt of the death toll, with roughly 60% of fatalities reported as women.

Economic losses are expected to run to the $4b mark, comparable to the costs of the Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia. An estimated 450,000 houses were destroyed and another 350,000 damaged; more than 4,000 schools decimated, and about 75 percent of local health facilities wrecked. The storm also destroyed livelihoods in the primarily agricultural and seaside area, killing livestock and sweeping away tools, seeds and fishing equipment.

The local fishing industry remains crippled, with only a fraction of small-scale fisherman having returned to work. Further, the cyclone devastated fish-processing facilities in the area, exacerbating unemployment and the conditions of Myanmar’s poor.

The damages are not only physical, but psychological as well. The survivors continue to suffer from pervasive trauma, further challenging the process of rebuilding shattered lives. Teachers are seeing first-hand the problems children face in returning to their studies. Almost half her students show signs of difficulty concentrating on their lessons. Some feel 'completely bleak'. This woman, a survivor of the storm, has quite a story:

"That night I went into labour in a small bamboo, thatched house on the banks of the Pyapon River to deliver my first child. But as the wind roared, my husband and I struggled outside only to see our home destroyed right before our very eyes.

“As the rain poured down and the water began to reach my chest, my husband lifted me on to some floating debris. As I lay there, the labour pains became so painful I began to scream. I needed help.

"Finally, among the broken pieces of wood I gave birth around six in the morning, but almost died in the process. I had lost so much blood. Both my husband and the woman who had helped me deliver thought I was gone. But a single hope kept me hanging on – that my son needed me.

"After the cyclone, I thought the worst was over. But finally I understood that the worst of our hardship – bringing our lives back to where they were – had only just begun.

Her son's name is Nargis...The rest of her story (follow the last link) is quite illustrative of the problems faced by many, a result of not only the TC itself, but exacerbated by poverty and an apathetic government response. (and general repression).

Cyclone Nargis also appears to have had a broader climate impact. Conditions continue to look favorable for the positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole this (austral) spring. Cool sea surface temperatures off Sumatra have been observed since mid-May, and remain through the most recent observations (21-27Jul; SST anomalies). The is also an absence of deep convection om the area.

The positive phase of IOD has a widespread climate impact, affecting the Southern Hemisphere storm tracks and altering rainfall patterns. In Australia, it often results in large regions of the country having a below-median rainfall totals. A continuation of drought conditions for some, perhaps.

Nargis's role in this is that, as noted in this recent paper, severe TCs in the Bay of Bengal during the April-May period often serve as the trigger for IOD events, in fact may be necessary. The first step in a complex sequence of events, a chain reaction involving the non-linear interactions of ocean, atmosphere and geography.

Building on the conclusions of this paper, should an IOD develop in 2008, it would be unprecedented in the ~100 yr observational record. A hat trick, three in a row. The event of 2007 was unusual in that it occurred during La Nina, the first time that has occurred, and also was the second observed case of two-in-a-row.

Confronted with such observations of course raises some questions...Is this a sign result of man's influence on the global climate or something extremely rare but purely natural? Climate change or natural variability? A sign of climate instability to come?

The are several lessons to be learned here. One is that seemingly singular weather events like Nargis often have very long term effects. Not just on the people directly involved, but also those subsequently affected by any further natural disasters (e.g. wildfire, drought, flood...) that may arise as a result of this initial event.

The second lesson was learned before. Our corporate masters have selected a purely reactive response (i.e. adaptation only) to climate change, nominally because it is cheaper and easier to 'implement'.(It really involves doing nothing now and just hoping for the best) In the long run, this is neither the cheaper nor the easier path, though. The impacts can be complex and extend well-beyond the immediate event, inflating both economic and environmental costs.

An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Mitigation – stopping our destructive lifestyles -- is absolutely necessary. Attempting to halt (to the degree possible) the apparently increasing climate instability, without resorting to some half-baked geo-engineering scheme, is much more prudent. While the initial costs are higher, the potential payoff in the future is much greater. And future generations are what this is about.

So as we meet the future and the consequences of Our Way of Life, let us hope that we face the challenges with the tenacity shown by the Burmese victims of Cyclone Nargis.

**
Images: 1. An aerial view of Myanmar. Taken from one of the linked stories. The metadata on the pic suggests it was taken in early July. Credited to Contributor/IRIN.
2. Extracted from Global SST Anomaly for week ending 27 Jul 2008 at the BoM. Sorry for cutting off the scale. Blue is negative (cool) anomalies, red positive.

Australia and climate change: The official story

A definitive government study on Australian climate change was published 2 October 2007. The report is entitled (imaginatively enough...) “Climate Change in Australia”. A link to the complete report can be found here. The report is written by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.

It is interesting to see some of the headlines and the different emphases that the various parts of the country take in their coverage. It is a comprehensive report.

• From the Sydney Morning Herald: Australia: Hot, dry and sinking – apocalypse Sydney

• ABC News: Scientists: South West will be hardest hit by global warming

• Sunshine Coast Daily: Australia: It's going to get hotter and drier.

• Mercury (Hobart): Australia: Glimpse of future reveals our water woes.

In some ways, the individual news reports all say the one thing: Warming 'inevitable' in Australia. Some prominent Australians don't believe it, but previous readers will know my thoughts on climate change in Australia. Climate change isn't a future problem, it's a here-and-now problem. Hopefully we are not underestimating the unexpected pace and magnitude of change, as much as recent observations of say, polar climate change (particularly the Arctic cryosphere), would suggest we are.

Despite the inevitability of some warming, it is not too late to mitigate the worse effects. But we need to act now. Just because John Howard thinks that any contribution we make towards GHG reduction is worthless (see endnote) doesn't mean it is true. Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has some sound advice on what we should (and realistically could) actually be done to at least prevent some of the worse effects.

Some of the political reactions to the report have been interesting throwbacks. One Liberal Senator is apparently concerned about the Yellow Peril and advocates extensive colonization of the north, particularly “the remote and largely unsettled Top End” to keep other (apparently disease-ridden) migrants and/or climate refugees out. As for the Cape York Peninsula, “Half is locked up as national park and more or less unsupervised Indigenous land," he said,”...it's only a canoe ride across to Papua New Guinea”.

Terra Nullius all over again.

We do have a say and a chance. The federal election is coming soon. Make the environment a top priority in deciding your vote. The rumor is that a change in government will result in Australia signing the Kyoto Protocol. There is hope. But it is time for us to give up our unsustainable ways. It is likely going to crash soon anyway as the global financial situation is grim. Act now for future generations, and for ourselves.

Endnote

Specifically, Howard notes

Australia contributes only 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which when compared to China’s greenhouse gas emissions, are an extremely small percentage globally. If Australia was to close down all of its power stations tonight, the savings in greenhouse gas emissions would be replaced by the growth in China's energy sector emissions in less than 12 months.

Mr. Howard (and the next PM), it's not about tit-for-tat. It's about leading by example. If we sign, it puts pressure on the Americans. If they sign, China will likely follow. The path of least resistance might be easy, but is it moral? Is it the right thing to do?

Bushfires and climate change in SE Australia

A bit of self-promotion...

The Climate Institute of Australia today released a report entitled “Bushfire Weather in Southeast Australia: Recent trends and projected climate change impacts”. I am proud to say that I am the lead author on the report. I will briefly summarize the results.

The basic idea of the study was 1.) to evaluate the potential changes to weather conducive to bushfires in 2020 and 2050 using two CSIRO climate models made for the IPCC 4^th Assessment, and 2.) compare these changes predicted by the model to what has been observed to evaluate how well the model is doing.

The first part was fairly straightforward, and follows on from a similar study we did a couple of years ago using the IPCC 3^rd Assessment. The results were also similar. Broadly speaking, we found a 10-30% increase in fire danger across southeast Australia (NSW, VIC, TAS,ACT, SA and southern QLD) for the worse case scenarios by 2050. This was accompanied by a doubling of high-risk 'extreme' days, where wildfires are generally uncontrollable. We also looked at some of the extreme upper ranges, where much of the house loss and other types of damage occur, finding a similar increase.

Pretty scary stuff, but wait for the other shoe to drop...

Looking at the observations revealed that over the past 5 fire seasons in southeast Australia, we have consistently exceeded the fire danger predictions the model made for 2050. In other words, we are already there! The 2006-7 fire season was, by many measures, the worse fire weather we have experienced in our records at many of the stations. The 2002-3 season was also quite bad (Canberra bushfires), but unlike previous times, there hasn't really been much of a break between these two extreme seasons, which is unprecedented. Our records are limited. For example, the few long time series we were able to gather only extend back to the 1940s, and so fail to encompass some historically bad events like the 1939 Black Friday bushfires in Victoria. There are, as always, a few issues with the data, but we have done our best to work around those and we openly acknowledge what and where the problems exist.

Now, of course we cannot absolutely attribute all of that change to climate change, and we were very careful in the report not to do so. We cannot rule out interdecadal variability, for example. We did detect apparent 20-year cycles in the weather data, and we are currently in an upswing (apparently) in recent years. But, the peaks we are seeing now are higher than those in the past. We hypothesized that what we are seeing is some combination of climate change and interdecadal variability. The test of our hypothesis comes in the next 5-10 years of observations. If natural variability is playing a large role, the we will see a decline in the upcoming years, with a retreat towards conditions more like the 2020 model projections. If we don't see this decrease, the conclusion must be that the climate models are too conservative in this instance, and we are underestimating the impacts of climate change.

This last point is akin to the recent situation with the polar ice caps, wherein the melting is proceeding at a much faster pace than what was previously predicted. We don't have a complete understanding of the climate system (nor does anyone claim we do) and the models may be wrong. Unfortunately, not wrong in our favor. It all points to the fact that the time to act on mitigation of and adaptation to climate change is now (which is the point the Climate Institute is making with our report).

With this report, we have hit the major media outlets in Australia. We were the lead story on the 7:30 Report, a national news magazine. Transcripts and videos here (your humble blog author is featured in these interviews). I saw the report this evening, and I feel they did a pretty good job of reflecting the uncertainties and not exaggerating too much. We have also stories in most of the major newspapers in Australia. Will try to update with links to a few of these stories in the near future...

For those interested in the progress of this year's bushfire season in Australia, I encourage you to visit my other blog, the Australia Bushfire Monitor. There, I keep tabs on the major bushfire developments and events as they occur throughout the country.

Decadal-scale forecasting

Here's more on the decadal forecasting scheme I posted earlier. I think that was the first one that came across the feed, and it not especially clearly written...It was very late, too

Anyway, Nature News has the best report I've seen so far (I have to wait to read the paper...we get Science a few weeks late in the library for whatever reason...). I really like the accompanying graphic, reproduced here. To my mind, the graphic alone raises all sorts of questions and thoughts. More on that below, on to the story

• Model approach to climate prediction – nature.com

British researchers have substantially improved the performance of a global climate model by adding observations about the actual state of the ocean and atmosphere. The results are of seminal importance for those trying to produce reliable short-term 'climate forecasts' on global and regional scales, experts say.

The team, led by Doug Smith of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, has developed a climate prediction system that is capable of including natural variability in the climate system — such as that arising from anomalies in ocean circulation or ocean heat content — into modelling carried out by a global climate model...

I would think that there is small (but finite) chance the model follows that consensus forecast path. I suppose it really depends on what the ocean does and how well the model reflects that reality. That especially presumes there will not be some major, new climate forcing like a major volcanic eruption, an asteroid strike or a regional nuclear war (If there is a global nuclear war, the forecast doesn't really matter...) to throw the climate completely off-track.

[On a bit of a speculative tangent: I find the behaviour of the global temperature in the post-Pinatubo period quite intriguing. The focus of volcanoes and climate seems primarily on the immediate cooling. We see that cooling here. As this post-eruption cooling fades, the result is what appears to be an amplifying oscillation, which culminates in the 1997-8 El Nino event. Are the two things related? Perhaps conincidentally, the similarly huge 1982-3 El Nino also closely follwed a major volcanic eruption...]

If the model is correct, in the next few years natural variability — mainly in factors affecting the heat content of the ocean — will offset some of the climate warming resulting from humanity's greenhouse emissions. But global warming will be taking only a brief breather: half the years from 2009 to 2014 will be warmer than 1998, which is currently the warmest year on record.

Again, I can;t really see the predictions being correct in anything but a broad sense...it's going to get warmer by so much by some time

This prediction is still rather tentative, though. While setting up the initial conditions helps, the various inherent difficulties in the model's attempts to capture all the processes going on mean that the system's forecasts will be far from perfect. The predicted temperatures carry healthy error bars, but Smith points out that the flattening it foresaw in the first few years seems so far to be accurate.

I think this guy sums it up pretty well...

"This study is not primarily important for the brave temperature prediction it makes," he says. "The key thing is that we now have a convincing concept for combining observations and models. It may not be the last word, but it does prove that concrete decadal predictions are possible."

Another area of interest: How is this going to be used for, say, future public planning? Someone, somewhere (justifiably) is going to want to do something along those lines. How do these predictions get turned into useful proposals/actions? What happens when the prediction goes wrong (or at least different)? Who gets blamed in our litigious society?

A brave climate forecast

I don't know any of the relevant details, but this looks to be a mighty brave forecast. I hope it fails miserably, not due to hard feelings or anything, but because I would prefer not to live through the consequences!

Scientists predict surge in global warming after 2009 -- ABC News

A study forecasts that global warming will set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be hotter than 1998, which was the warmest year on record.

IPCC Working Group II report

The latest full report of IPCC Working Group II, focusing on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability is now available. Here is the link.

The wave of the future

A study was published in JGR Atmospheres this week entitled “Doubled length of western European summer heat waves since 1880”. While I haven't read the paper, there have been several 'popular science'-type stories which give many of the salient details. For example (also, here and here):

• European Heat Waves Double In Length Since 1880 -- ScienceDaily

The most accurate measures of European daily temperatures ever indicate that the length of heat waves on the continent has doubled and the frequency of extremely hot days has nearly tripled in the past century. The new data shows that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heat wave events in western Europe by approximately 30 percent.

From a science perspective, an important point is that these data have been homogenized, that is, they have had the artificial trends and discontinuities associated with observational practices, instrumentation changes and such identified and corrected, giving a more accurate estimate of the longer-term behaviour of the time series.

I would suspect that these findings reinforce the notion that the heat over SE Europe can be regarded as an impact of climate change. The map, from IRI at Columbia University, shows temperature anomalies over the past three months (May, June and July) over Europe. Anomalies of 2C are seen across much of southern Europe, from Italy to points east. Peak anomalies of over 3 C were observed in Romania.

The impacts have been enormous. Here are a few with representative links:

• Hundreds of people have perished from the heat, with over 500 in Hungary alone.

• Agricultural losses are expected to range from 30-50% of the crop.

• Wildfires have ravaged across much of the region. Total areas burnt are already equivalent to the amount burnt last year.

• Many regions are also facing water shortages.

If we act now, reduce our emissions and move towards a sustainable lifestyle and economy, then this is our future. If not, things will likely get worse, with more heat waves, droughts, floods and fires. It's our choice.

GRL paper on climate shifts

This post is a diversion from the usual subject of this blog into the more technical aspects of climate change and global warming. I do this in reaction to a recently published paper in Geophysical Research Letters: A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts by Tsonis et al. The press release which announced this paper is here (which is also how my attention was drawn to it).

There have been blog reactions to this (for example, here and here). Most of them are by skeptics and Deniers who claim that this is somehow 'proof' that CO2 has no effect on radiative transfer in the atmosphere and does not cause global warming or some such nonsense. Perhaps, when reading the somewhat misleading press release you can parse those words to mean something like that. However, reading the actual paper (always the authoritative source!) tells a different story.

To begin, the authors of the paper are not addressing the issue of anthropogenic climate change, but rather that of interdecadal variability. They aren't the same thing. No vaguely respectable climate scientist would say that there is not interdecadal variability, and it is certainly a possible explanation for some of the observed warming in recent decades. Nobody has claimed otherwise, including the IPCC. Unfortunately as interdecadal variability is something that is poorly understood at this time, the uncertainty is likely to remain.

Second, the paper does show some interesting shifts in the observations of the global temperature trends in the early 1910s, the early 1940s and in the mid-70s. The correspond with the 'synchronization' of the behaviour of some of the primary modes of climate variability, the main thrust of the paper. Between 1910 and 1940, the temperature increases. From the 40s to the 70s, the trend is around zero, or even slightly negative. It again begins to increase from then until now. The timings of the synchronization and the trend changes are very close, which provides strong evidence in favor of their hypothesis.

The authors then use 'state-of-the-art' climate model to see if they can detect similar signals there. Two simulations are used: one with constant pre-industrial CO2 levels, the other a business-as-usual 21^st century simulation. The vertical axes on the plots are a bit misleading (they change between observations and simulations...), but the models show an effect that is much smaller than seen in the observations by at least a factor of 2. Also noted in the text: the authors removed a 2^oC/century trend due to radiative effects in the 21^st century simulation for clarity in the figures. This radiative trend would swamp the relatively small signal of the natural climate shift.

All in all, the paper provides a nice hypothesis for understanding the mechanisms of natural interdecadal climate variability, but the work is far from complete. For instance, there is no discussion of what it means physically when the indices synchronize. Can we observe it as it happens, or is it something that can only be determined after the fact? However, this hypothesis in no way refutes or invalidates the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change through CO2, nor do the authors intend to do so. Here is the closing line from the paper:

...the climate shifted after the 1970s event to a different state of a warmer climate, which may be superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend.

I think that is a pretty clear statement of the authors meaning.