“What this report and other reports show is that the world is headed for an environmental tsunami . . . Sitting back and doing nothing about dangerous climate change is simply not an option.“

Link to Australian government document mentioned in story

Climate change wake-up call

Milanda Rout, environment reporter
27jul05

CLIMATE change is inevitable and is likely to cause an increase in heat exhaustion, stroke, heart attacks and asthma.

A Federal Government study says Australia should expect higher temperatures, more droughts and severe storms. Temperatures could rise by up to 6C by 2070, affecting native plants and animals, damaging urban areas and threatening agriculture.

“There is little doubt Australia will face some degree of climate change over the next 30 to 50 years,” it said.

“Irrespective of global or local efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions.”

Environment Minister Ian Campbell said the report was a wake-up call but he denied Australia needed to sign the Kyoto protocol.

The Opposition called on the Government to do something immediately to reduce greenhouse gases or risk being responsible for an environmental tsunami.

The Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office found climate change was likely to increase illnesses that occur with higher temperatures.

This includes heatstroke and heart attacks, especially among the elderly, as well as malaria and ross river fever.

Higher temperatures could also mean more cases of food poisoning and an increase in the risk of skin cancer.

“Climatic conditions have wide-ranging impacts of human health, including heatstroke and the patterns of diseases and allergies,” the report said.

The risk of water-borne diseases could also increase with more rainfall and huge storms.

The report calls for better building design to help prevent climate-related illnesses and providing more information to the public.

“Public health prevention measures may need to be enhanced to reduce the impact of heat-related illness and death,” it said.

The report, titled Climate Change Risks and Vulnerability, also identified areas most vulnerable, including the Great Barrier Reef, the Murray/Darling basin, and the east coast, where cities and suburbs border the beaches.

Senator Campbell said the report was vital for addressing the causes of climate change.

“This report is telling us that regardless of what we do in the future, climate change is a reality . . . and we have to start adapting to it,” he said.

Opposition environment spokesman Anthony Albanese called on the Government to do more, including ratifying the Kyoto protocol.

“What this report and other reports show is that the world is headed for an environmental tsunami,” he said. “Sitting back and doing nothing about dangerous climate change is simply not an option.”

Study: Warming Making Hurricanes Stronger-

By JOSEPH B.VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer 2 hours, 29 minutes ago

Is global warming making hurricanes more ferocious? New research suggests the answer is yes. Scientists call the findings both surprising and “alarming” because they suggest global warming is influencing storms now — rather than in the distant future.

However, the research doesn’t suggest global warming is generating more hurricanes and typhoons.

The analysis by climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows for the first time that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific since the 1970s have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent.

These trends are closely linked to increases in the average temperatures of the ocean surface and also correspond to increases in global average atmospheric temperatures during the same period.

“When I look at these results at face value, they are rather alarming,” said research meteorologist Tom Knutson. “These are very big changes.”

Knutson, who wasn’t involved in the study, works in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J.

Emanuel reached his conclusions by analyzing data collected from actual storms rather than using computer models to predict future storm behavior.

Before this study, most researchers believed global warming’s contribution to powerful hurricanes was too slight to accurately measure. Most forecasts don’t have climate change making a real difference in tropical storms until 2050 or later.

But some scientists questioned Emanuel’s methods. For example, the MIT researcher did not consider wind speed information from some powerful storms in the 1950s and 1960s because the details of those storms are inconsistent.

Researchers are using new methods to analyze those storms and others going back as far as 1851. If early storms turn out to be more powerful than originally thought, Emmanuel’s findings on global warming’s influence on recent tropical storms might not hold up, they said.

“I’m not convinced that it’s happening,” said Christopher W. Landsea, another research meteorologist with NOAA, who works at a different lab, the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. Landsea is a director of the historical hurricane reanalysis.

“His conclusions are contingent on a very large bias removal that is large or larger than the global warming signal itself,” Landsea said.

Details of Emanuel’s study appear Sunday in the online version of the journal Nature.

Theories and computer simulations indicate that global warming should generate an increase in storm intensity, in part because warmer temperatures would heat up the surface of the oceans. Especially in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins, pools of warming seawater provide energy for storms as they swirl and grow over the open oceans.

Emanuel analyzed records of storm measurements made by aircraft and satellites since the 1950s. He found the amount of energy released in these storms in both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans has increased, especially since the mid-1970s.

In the Atlantic, the sea surface temperatures show a pronounced upward trend. The same is true in the North Pacific, though the data there is more variable, he said.

“This is the first time I have been convinced we are seeing a signal in the actual hurricane data,” Emanuel said in an e-mail exchange.

“The total energy dissipated by hurricanes turns out to be well correlated with tropical sea surface temperatures,” he said. “The large upswing in the past decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effects of global warming.”

This year marked the first time on record that the Atlantic spawned four named storms by early July, as well as the earliest category 4 storm on record. Hurricanes are ranked on an intensity scale of 1 to 5.

In the past decade, the southeastern United States and the Caribbean basin have been pummeled by the most active hurricane cycle on record. Forecasters expect the stormy trend to continue for another 20 years or more.

Even without global warming, hurricane cycles tend to be a consequence of natural salinity and temperature changes in the Atlantic’s deep current circulation that shift back and forth every 40 to 60 years.

Since the 1970s, hurricanes have caused more property damage and casualties. Researchers disagree over whether this destructiveness is a consequence of the storms’ growing intensity or the population boom along vulnerable coastlines.

“The damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future,” Emanuel said.

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NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/

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