Floods a Wake-Up Call on Climate Change

'Floods a Wake-Up Call on Climate Change, Scientist Says' (Source: Reuters, 8/27/02)

JOHANNESBURG - The devastating floods which have killed scores of people across central Europe are the wake-up call that could push industrial nations to act faster to stop the planet heating up, a leading scientist said on Tuesday.

Robert Watson, now the World Bank's chief scientist since he was ousted from the chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) in April due to U.S. opposition, insists dramatic floods and droughts will become more frequent.

'You don't have to identify each event with climate change. All you have to say is this is the type of world that may become more prevalent. It is the sort of wake-up call, I believe, that could have an impact,' he told reporters at the Earth Summit.

Scientists say 'greenhouse gases' produced by human activities during the past 100 years have made the world a warmer place and increased carbon dioxide emissions are set to linger in the earth's atmosphere for years to come.

As head of the IPPC, Watson predicted the Earth's temperature could rise by up to 10.4 Fahrenheit over the coming century, a change that he says would lead to more extreme weather patterns.

'(The floods are) the type of event which will become more prevalent in a warmer world. It's the sort of thing that can be a wake-up message to say 'If this becomes more frequent this is not the type of event we want to see in the future',' he said.

Besides the floods which swept across Europe this month, hundreds have died as torrential rain hit China, Nepal, Iran and the Philippines in recent weeks. Watson said as the globe heats up rainfall would become heavier and more frequent in areas where it already rains a lot while arid areas would suffer from more droughts.

On the positive side, crop yields would increase in more temperate zones, such as Europe and North America, but this would be offset by a decrease in the tropical zones where many of the world's poor live.

Climate change is notably absent from the agenda at the 10-day World Summit on Sustainable Development, a conference to find ways of hauling millions of poor out of economic despair without putting further strain on the planet's ecosystem.

The United States, which emits a quarter of the world's man-made greenhouse gases, has rejected the Kyoto protocol on cutting pollution and Watson says pressure from Washington ensured climate change was not on the agenda in Johannesburg.

Now all they have to do, Roger, is prove causality. A non-trivial exercise.

Yes, a non-trivial exercise which will require record of many years of similar floods preceded by many years without floods among other things.

Even then you would be hard-pressed to establish causality. You would have a mountain of anecdotal evidence but no smoking gun. Even in a simple situation, why did the temperature today reach the value it did, you would have a hard time finding the ONE thing that led to the result. Last night we agonized over whether there would be thunderstorm development on the southern Prairies this afternoon. It is there, but very isolated. Why didn't it form elsewhere when there is instablity up the wazoo? A low-level cap? Subsidence? Lack of suitable forcing? A combination of all of them? Weather is never clear-cut and figuring out why things happen the way they do is never as easy as it sounds.