The US felt the full impact of Super Storm Sandy, but it was a warning for Asia. The combination of coastal development, climate change and storm patterns has reached a point where the UN calculates that the Asia-Pacific region now “experiences more than 85% of global economic exposure to tropical cyclones.” And the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, say the latest climate report, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather. Read More

By Michael Richardson in The Straits Times (5 November 2012):

As Hurricane Sandy, with its devastating winds, rain, and ocean surges battered New York and other areas along the US Atlantic coast last week, another fierce tropical storm was sweeping through the South China Sea, hitting the Philippines, Vietnam and China.

Meanwhile, a cyclone churned across the Bay of Bengal, veering away from Sri Lanka at the last minute before striking southeast India, causing extensive damage.

Although much smaller in strength and size than Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Son-tinh that smashed into the northern Philippines, Vietnam and southern China killed as many as 30 people, forced more than 176,000 to leave their homes, and caused an estimated US$145 million in economic damage as electricity supplies, floods, and landslides disrupted normal life.

It was a reminder that cyclonic storms, drawing their destructive power from warming tropical waters and the moisture-laden atmosphere, are more of a menace in the Asia-Pacific region than anywhere else in the world.

Known as hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea and near the Atlantic Ocean coast of North America, and cyclones or typhoons in the South China Sea, Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, these periodic storms are posing a major economic and social challenge to the Asia-Pacific region, according to a recent United Nations report.

Presented to a ministerial conference in Indonesia last month (23 October) on disaster risk reduction, the report warned that as regional growth and urbanisation have exploded in the past few decades, the number of people living in cyclone-prone areas has nearly doubled, to about 121 million.

Most new development in the region has been along coastlines and in floodplains, locations highly exposed to sea level rise, storm surges and inundation.

Sea levels are slowly rising from thermal expansion as the water warms and from the melting of land-based ice, particularly at the polar caps.

The combination of coastal development, climate change and storm patterns has reached a point where the UN calculates that the Asia-Pacific region now “experiences more than 85 per cent of global economic exposure to tropical cyclones.”

The Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2012 was published by the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). It received little attention in the media at the time.

But many climate scientists have warned in the wake of Hurricane Sandy that climate change and global warming caused by increasing global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels and clearing tropical forests, are intensifying extreme weather, including tropical storms.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in the US, put it this way:

“The sea surface temperatures along the Atlantic coast (of the US) have been running at over 3 degrees Celsius above normal for a region extending 800 kilometres offshore all the way from Florida to Canada. Global warming contributes 0.6 C to this.

“With every degree C, the water holding of the atmosphere goes up 7 per cent, and the moisture provides the fuel for the tropical storm, increases its intensity, and magnifies the rainfall by double that amount compared to normalconditions.”

Summarising recent scientific research, the UN report said that the effects of climate extremes and variation suggest that while the number of tropical cyclones are not increasing in number, more of them are stronger.

With more than one third of the 305 Asia-Pacific cities in coastal areas, this makes the region more susceptible to ever greater potential losses from severe storms.

“Our shared challenge in Asia and the Pacific is to control both the growing rate of exposure and rising vulnerability,” said Singaporean NoeleenHeyzer, ESCAP’s executive secretary, when the UN report was released.

“Exposure to hazards has multiplied as urban centres grow and people and economic activities expand into increasingly exposed and hazard-prone land,” she added.

Some Asia-Pacific countries that have been hit hard by cyclones in the past have taken steps to better protect their coastal populations and economic assets.

For example, Bangladesh has invested over US$10 billion in coastal management and flood control, resulting in lower disaster losses.

However, many Asia-Pacific coastal cities are expanding chaotically, with many slums and little effective urban planning.

The lesson for the region from Hurricane Sandy must be to improve coastal urban planning, storm protection, and relief and recovery when disaster strikes.

This is expensive and will take time. But with so much economic growth at stake, tropical storm mitigation measures are an essential investment in Asia’s future.

The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies.

SOURCE: www.iseas.edu.sg

By Brian Vastag in Washington Post (9 November 2012):

Climate scientists agree the Earth will be hotter by the end of the century, but their simulations don’t agree on how much. Now a study suggests the gloomier predictions may be closer to the mark.

“Warming is likely to be on the high side of the projections,” said John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the report, which was based on satellite measurements of the atmosphere.

That means the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather.

Such an increase would substantially overshoot what the world’s leaders have identified as the threshold for triggering catastrophic consequences. In 2009, heads of state agreed to try to limit warming to 3.6 degrees, and many countries want a tighter limit.

Climate scientists around the world use supercomputers to simulate the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Sophisticated programs attempt to predict how climate will change as society continues burning coal, oil and gas, the main sources of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide.

But these simulations spit out a wide range of warming estimates. All foresee an overheated planet in 2100, but some predict just three degrees of warming while others estimate eight or more degrees of extra heat.

“This problem has been around for 30 years,” Fasullo said. “As long as climate models have existed, there’s been this spread in projections of the future.”

One source of uncertainty involves the impact of cloud cover, especially clouds that form in the tropical and subtropical regions between about 30 degrees north and south of the equator.

“Tropical clouds are so important to climate,” Fasullo said. “Small changes in clouds near the equator have a big effect on where you end up” for temperature predictions.

As sunlight pours onto the tropics, clouds bounce some of that heat back into space. Fewer clouds open up the atmosphere “like an iris,” Fasullo said, allowing more heat to beam onto Earth’s surface.

No supercomputer is powerful enough to predict cloud cover decades into the future, so Fasullo and colleague Kevin Trenberth struck on another method to test which of the many climate simulations most accurately predicted clouds: They looked at relative humidity. When humidity rises, clouds form; drier air produces fewer clouds. That makes humidity a good proxy for cloud cover.

Looking back at 10 years of atmospheric humidity data from NASA satellites, the pair examined two dozen of the world’s most sophisticated climate simulations. They found the simulations that most closely matched humidity measurements were also the ones that predicted the most extreme global warming.

In other words, by using real data, the scientists picked simulation winners and losers.

“The models at the higher end of temperature predictions uniformly did a better job,” Fasullo said. The simulations that fared worse — the ones predicting smaller temperature rises — “should be outright discounted,” he said.

The most accurate climate simulations were run by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, a consortium in Japan and a facility at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“The biggest benefit of this study is really just a reminder to go back” and see how well climate models match reality, said Jimmy Booth, a post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who was not involved in the study. Booth works on a climate model called E2, and he said his team can now reexamine how well it simulates humidity in the tropics.

The study is part of a quickening trend to improve climate simulations. Over the past decade, these computer programs have become “tremendously more sophisticated,” said Stephen Lord of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. International groups collaborate on simulations even as available computing power soars.

The first climate models, about 30 years old, simulated only the Earth’s atmosphere. The latest generation add the effects of ocean currents, the dwindling planetary ice cover, and even how plants and animals take up and release carbon.

“As you make those improvements,” Lord said, “the ability to simulate long-term climate gets better.”

Scientists not involved in the research said the report, funded by NASA and scheduled for publication Friday in the journal Science, could improve the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its next comprehensive report, due in 2013. The panel is a world body organized by the United Nations to guide policymakers as they struggle to curb and adapt to climate change. The world has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, a rise scientists nearly uniformly attribute to carbon pollution from fossil fuels.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com