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Global Warming: Pakistan Floods, Russia Heat Match Climate Trends
Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia's heat wave match projected trends of ever more extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists said.
RUSSIAN SMOG DEATHS SOAR -- Smog obscures St. Basil's cathedral on Red Square in Moscow. The toxic smog smothering Moscow showed little sign of abating Monday as media accused officials of covering up the scale of the disaster and the authorities raced to put out a fire near a nuclear site.
(AFP/Natalia Kolesnikova) This year is on track to be the warmest since reliable temperature records began in the mid-19th century, beating 1998, mainly due to a build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
"We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes," said Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at WMO headquarters in Geneva.
"It is too early to point to a human fingerprint" behind individual weather events, he said. Recent extremes include mudslides in China or temperature heat records from Finland to Kuwait.
Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist."
The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.
"Global warming is one reason" for the rare spate of recent weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
He pointed to the heat wave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. "We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom," he said.
RARE RAINS
Russia's worst drought in decades has led to fires that have almost doubled death rates in Moscow to around 700 per day, an official said. [ID:nLDE67811E] Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a grain export ban from August 15 to December 31.
Nearly 1,500 people have died in landslides and flooding caused by months of torrential rains across China, the ministry of Civil Affairs said.
Baddour said one cause of a shift in monsoon rains in Asia seemed to be a knock-on effect of La Nina, a natural cooling of the Pacific region.
Scientists say it is impossible to pin the blame for individual events from hurricanes to sandstorms solely on human activities led by burning of fossil fuels that release heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Still, one study concluded that global warming had doubled the chances of heat waves similar to a scorching 2003 summer in Europe, in which 35,000 people died. Those temperatures could not convincingly be explained by natural variations.
"It may be possible to use climate models to determine whether human influences have changed the likelihood of certain types of extreme events," the U.N. panel of climate scientists said in its latest 2007 report.
That report concluded it was at least 90 percent likely that most warming in the past 50 years was caused by mankind.
"Warming of the climate is likely to bring more events of this sort," said Henning Rodhe, professor emeritus of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, of Russian forest fires.
"But you can't draw the conclusion that this is caused by global warming," he said.
Most countries agreed at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen last year to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times, a tough goal since temperatures already rose 0.7C in the 20th century.
46 Comments so far
Show AllThis is an infuriating article. Humanity is the proverbial frog boiling in a pot, denying the obvious. This writer goes out of his way FOUR times in this one short article to quote individuals who assure the reader that "you can't draw the conclusion that this is caused by global warming." I suppose those in the scientific community who still use language that tiptoes around the issue of human caused global warming, also share the blame with the cowards in the media.
You state that climate-change scientists share the blame with the media....blame for what? Isn't that shooting the messenger? The blame for CC rests on OUR shoulders, thee and me. Conversely, the solution rests with thee and me.
There is no smoking gun, no causal evidence that proves anthropogenic CC; all we have is (lots of) circumstantial evidence. Yes, the evidence for CC is overwhelming, but evidence that it is caused by human activity is far from conclusive. Few scientists are prepared to risk their career in science for this platform.
Scientists and media are doing what they can to inform the public. Certainly the information considerably outweighs the mis-information. Yet the two groups of people who can take control of the situation, consumers and law-makers, choose to dally.
Perhaps a paradigm change is necessary. Instead of telling people to opt for a minimalist environmental footprint because we have to, a better approach to selling the minimal footprint message is that it is the RIGHT thing to do.
Sorry. You can't suggest that people do the right thing and expect that will take care of the problem. It should be clear by now that changing behavior in any significant way requires legislating it. There is no good reason that anyone anywhere should have the freedom to have a carbon footprint larger than whatever global average is deemed acceptable scientifically. The idea that one's carbon energy consumption should only be limited by how much money one has, is lunacy. The survival of the species would require us to give up a plethora of freedoms--which is why it won't happen.
I think he is speaking scientifically that you cannot deduce one cause for an event. All you can do is look at the trend over time and say there is an increase or decrease in events. You don't know that someone didn't go light these all on purpose to clear land for condos around Moscow or that this is, in fact, THE hotest day of the century and that future years won't be as hot. Point being is that you can't prove any causal relationship, all you can do is correlate data after the fact.
I think it is from Global warming, but a *scientist* that said it was proven is a scientist that you shouldn't listen to...
nosurrender, I completely agree. The science is overwhelming that mankind is causing climate change. All reputable scientists acknowledge this. It seems the media only listens to fringe "scientists" who don't or only quote the legit scientists if they imply scientific doubt (and scientific doubt isn't the same thing as normal everyday regular person doubt, for you skeptics).
The media has been brainwashed into believing that every article must have "balance" if the topic departs from the oligarchy's talking points. the talking points are always reported as fact.
And if you are not feeling too depressed right now, surf on over to Cryophere Today and look at the massive rift developing in the polar ice cap. it goes from the pacific to the atlantic through the pole.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
"And if you are not feeling too depressed right now"
that got the first smile out of me today.
Climate change is now becoming such a strong contributor to these hitherto unimaginable events that the language must change from one of “climate change increased the chances of this event” to “without climate change this event could not have occurred”.
Hi Everybody - While it's indeed true that what we're witnessing at this time is exactly what the climate research community has been warning us about for the last 20+ years, let us not discount the value of our own observations. I mean, anyone who has been paying attention has known for awhile now that our regional weather patterns have been trending toward the more frequently extreme and unpredictable since the early 90's.
Direct observation is a valuable and absolutely necessary component of the scientific process. I really appreciate it when people post (so-called) anecdotal observations on what is going on in their areas.
The fossil-fuel-funded media have been working overtime for decades now in the public perception management department, reliably sowing doubt on climate destabilization-related issues where in fact there is no doubt whatsoever as to what is occurring before our eyes. But their handiwork doesn't for a minute undermine the physical reality of what we are and have been directly observing.
I just read an update on the situation in Russia. It's pretty bad...
Search "Chemtrails Videos" !!!!! You can learn a lot about "The New World Order" and their leaders' abilities to alter weather and weather patterns. Even the "History Channel" did a show on The British Experiment that went wrong in 1952 and the DOD's use of seeding clouds to increase the monsoon season over the Ho Chi Minh Trail....
Guess what is planned for Iran? And, Russia is out of the picture right now and Pakistan too!
here's an anecdotal observation from my neck of the woods in southern europe:
three winters ago it was the warmest winter on record for 90 years.........
two winters ago it was the coldest winter on record..............
last winter it was the wettest winter on record: it rained every day for 3 months solid. (and i'm not talking just normal rainfall. it was a deluge.)
this july has been the hottest since 1931.....................
at 3.30 am this morning it was 26 degs c................
what's next???...................
The heat and fires in Russia and the floods in Pakistan are casuing major crop failures of wheet and rice. Unafforable food prices, food shortages and mas sfamines in the global south - all kept off the media of course, will follow.
I't really pretty simple. Every mile you drive a car, every hour that that AC in your home is running, you are murdering a dozen peple in the developing world.
Wait for the big agricultural collapse to come after 2030. Billion-person famines with millions dying daily. They will be talking about mercy-nuking parts of africa then -- just let that sink in. Mercy-nuke. imagine the press conference with President Chelsea Clinton making that announcment.
Absurd comments ("mercy nuking") doesn't do anyone any good.
Starvaton is less painful, and here in the US we have already been culturally indoctrinated into a state of zero-compassison for anyone but me-me-me. So, whole nations will starve in anomynity.
"Mercy-nuke"? Are you volunteering to be at one of the Ground Zeroes?
You know I agree with your passion, but stupid statements regarding numbers are really damaging to a cause. They make you look stupid and they taint those around you that believe in your root cause.
If I were killing 12 people in the developing world for every mile I drive, I would personally be killing about 86,000 people every year. In the Bay Area that would mean that, if we assume only 1/5 of the people drive, a gross underestimation, then we here would be killing 17,280,000,000 people every year.
It reminds me of the joke about Bush being shattered when he heard that 3 Brazilian soldiers had been killed in Iraq. He hung his head and looked shocked and then looked up and asked, "just how many is a brazillon anyway."
Don't be a Bush...
I am aware of this fact, but the sickening level of apparent "necessity" keeps first-worlders, in affect hostage in their own countries, adhered so intimately to the system the idea of separation unfathomable.
'global warming is one reason'...........said mr. gerstengarbe
i wish he'd tell us what other reasons it might be then.....
has ANYONE come up with another alternative yet??.........
To think that Russia has been one of the countries that has been sabotaging progress on climate change negotiations to limiting GHG emissions...
Russia was one of the countries that obstructed serious progress prior to the Copenhagen meeting. Instead of calling for a moratorium on drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic, Russia is one of the strongest claimants and has already staked out its claim. The Russians are also making plans to make use of the shipping route along the Northeast Passage which could become ice-free for most part of the year. Apart from benefiting economically, there is speculation that this would become yet another tool to exert their control over European nations - such as they have over the natural gas supply.
I don't care for their geopolitical ambitions nor the legitimacy of such ambition, given that almost every damned country would like to dominate others if they had the chance. It's the cynical disregard for climate change, in the pursuit of such an ambition I'm talking about. If you want to point out there are other culprits, go ahead - I won't dispute that at all.
Check out the 'Russia Today' channel on youtube.com
Slickly done, obviously with money behind it, when the subject turns to Global Warming they are to the right of Glenn Beck, if that is possible. Apparently, according to Russia Today, there is no such thing as Global Warming, but there IS such a thing as a global cabal of leftwing climatologists that want to advance their Luddite beliefs even if it kills the rest of us.
In the interests of 'fairness', Russia Today is busy interviewing people so completely debunked as to be incapable of interview by responsible journalists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEmUS7PAWFw&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKrw6ih8Gto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TbEgSj4Izk
Obviously, the money behind Russia Today is oil money, and they've learned a few tricks from Faux News.
Who would have thought that American conservatives would have had this much in common with Russian socialists?
No, these are NOT Russian socialists. They don't even call themselves that.
Well yeah, it's man made global warming. This article is from Reuters. Whadya' expect? Count the number of times they said it wasn't global warming; it makes it more of an editorial.
Climate science is not at the point where it can say whether a given weather event in a given part of the world is a result of global warming. Yes, it is consistent, but it would also be consistent to have normal summer weather at that location, or even colder weather.
So Henning Rodhe is of course correct.
What makes this article so invidious is that the headline says "Global Warming" and then you have extremely respectable scientists saying "we don't know." And then people reading the article say to themselves, "the scientists don't know", which is of course true, but spins everything against global warming.
It capitalizes on further scientific uncertainty about the effects of global warming, again something scientists can't predict with certainty, but can assess after they have happened as a collective whole with certainty. For example, glaciers melting all over the world is certain, but predicting the strength of any particular future storm or drought, or even storms or droughts for a region is still uncertain.
and whilst we are on the subject of cc, there was an article on the web today about the decline of u.s. bats............
apparently a fungus has attacked them and they are dying off in their thousands.........at least one million have already died.............
first it was the bees and birds and now it's the bats..........
That's terrible news coco! Many species of bats are considered to be keystone species (i.e. many other species depend on them or what they do for their survival)
you can read about it here:
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Bats-threatened-with-regional-extinction-605975.php
Actually there is considerable doubt that it is the fungus (which is common fungus that was always in the caves) that is killing them. More likely, the fungus is just opportunistically growing on weakened bats and something else is killing the bats.
I was once an avid sport caver, but haven't entered a cave for a few years now. There has been a complete moratorium on entering all caves for more than a year now in all eastern US states. But many are beginning to doubt that human activity in the caves has anything to do with it, as the disease has spread to caves that were always closed to protect rare bat species.
fungus's and other pests once subject to winter die-back are no longer as controlled by that. That's what is killing the lodgepole pines in British Columbia, a beetle that used to experience winter die-back.
well the article i originally read stated that the fungus could be from people entering the caves..........
so what is it i wonder?.............
like the bees/birds, no-one seems to know what's killing them..............
The ban on caving is, at this time, purely precautionary - although some do claim that the disease is most advanced in the heavily-visited caves.
When the Europeans came to America, they killed millions of Indians over the years with their germs. We just seem to Naturally pollute and destroy everything we come in contact with. It's a shame because there are smarter, better ways we could be utilizing, but greed is always in the way.
Major die-backs of keystone species are happening all over.
Riding the "Empire Builder" (AMTRAK's northern route from Seattle / Portland to Chicago) across Western Montana, i see millions and millions of dying / dead trees from pine-bark beetle and fungus. These trees define these ecosystems, and the trees are dying off. This is not some minor thing. And this is not some unique situation.
Just like with the bats, it's not really the fungus that is the ultimate "cause" of death. It is the destabilized systems of the living Earth. Destabilized by humans.
Yet still so many, so many, do not want to look, not want to see, not want to know.
i do not want to know, BUT IT IS. To "not know" is to abet ongoing destabilization. Only by looking, seeing, knowing, can we be accountable for what we do.
Then, looking and seeing and knowing - what do we do? How do we live? Not theoretically - RIGHT NOW. Today. What do we do? How do we live?
(Aside to who might rip me for being individualist or consumerist or elitist or whatever - being accountable for what we do and how we live INCLUDES accountability for political and economic structures, for resistance and revolution.)
This article sounds like they're not sure about global warming. I believe it some but what changes have people in Pakistan and Russia done to cause this or was it just nature itself?
You can never be sure a single event is due to global warming, there are too many other variables.
"Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980..." THAT statement you can put down to global warming, cuz its talking about a long term global trend.
Well you have natural disaster/climate change being compounded by economic and social disasters. The National fire service in Russia was privatized in 2007, a fact that is playing a large part in the inability of the Russian state to arrest the raging forest fires. In Pakistan, you have of course the social dislocation caused by the war on the frontier. A lot of the victims are actually refugees from the fighting.
The same of course could have been said for Katrina or Haiti.
The Planet is totally connected. What happens in any part of the world effects the whole Planet. With pollution ,those industrial smoke towers dotted all over the place, the Smoke goes into the atmosephere and travels with the winds, to all parts of the Earth, and on into the Ozone, depleating that more, and more. The Deforestation totally effects our air, and oxygen. So Pakistan, doesn't have to do anything different, as long as they have their neighbors around the world polluting the air, water and land. These things are all connected. Yes the Earth is big on one level, but it is very small on another.
You might be interested to know that Michael claims to have been a recently graduated physics major (see immediately preceding global warming thread comments.) But I'm not sure they taught about the physics of gasses at his school.
I don't doubt for one minute that all the burning that mankind has done over the past couple of hundred years is increasing the CO2 levels on the planet. However, another component of the human misery is the sheer number of humans themselves. What might in the past have killed hundreds now kills thousands, or tens of thousands. This makes the disasters appear increasingly cataclysmic.
People people everywhere (and not a bite to eat?), and all clutching babies. And in future? Ever more people I suppose. Or not, maybe.
its not the numbers we should worry about (yet). I think the statistic still works out that if you gave every 4 people in the world a single family home and yard, you could fit the earths population in the state of texas.
The problem is they all eventually want a U.S. standard of living.
Well, the US standard of living seems to have very little to do with quality of life. Europeans enjoy a better living standard with half the CO2 emissions. Does a Lincoln Navigator really add to someone's quality of life? Does AC turned down to 70F instead of a more reasonable 78-80F - or not not using it at all above N 40 latitude. Once acclimated, 72F is uncomfortably cool. Sweating is healthy.
I've used my AC about 4 days so far this summer. Our house is bzarely 1000 sq ft. My car was used for the first time in a month yesterday. I've got a fine living standard and enjoy the hell out of life.
It is not about a "living standard" - it is about a culture of deliberate arrogant swaggering waste.
That's a small house ! What State do you live in ? What city,this all impacts if you use your car or not. Most people have bigger houses, and lots live in the country, or outer burbs, were there usually is no transit authority. Not using a rail system in this country has really added to why people have to drive individual cars. That desicion was made by the car, and oil companies back in the 40's. Plans were made to rail the country, but bought out by the big guys. 1000 ft ...thats a small house...
Yup, we're all going to die...Thanks America!
Here's an interesting political take on why the fires in Russia have been so devastating. In brief, the fire fighting preparation in the country has been mandated by greedy operators to be suppressed for the sake of profits.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/smok-a10.shtml
"Flawed Human Decisions Cause Misery" might be the right headline.
Or how about "Sometime You Go For Results, and Instead You Get Consequences."
Somehow I seem reminded of the stories about how BP got into such trouble in the Gulf, at their Bay City refinery and on the North Slope. Bubris seems to be stalking humanity and extracting a severe revenge on a foolish species.
Belief in global warming like belief in jesus, or the invisible hand of the market, misses the point. Belief has consequence without substance. If we are to survive we must get beyond belief and begin acting on knowledge. The science supporting GW deniers could barely fill a sanican at a Walmart construction site, and is funded by the planets biggest polluters. If understanding ever replaces belief we may have a chance.
We are watching a mass amount of species becoming extinct, the sea levels steadily rising, important ice structures melting, glaciers disappearing and we know the CO2 has a devestating effect on our atmosphere; yet, there are still people whining that global warming is a fraud?
Ask the polar bears if it is a fraud? I think they would beg to differ.
We have prolonged droughts in places that have never seen droughts before, storms suddenly intensifying when moving out over warmer oceans, food supplies and water supplies dwindling, even our own energy supplies are dwindling; yet overconsumtion is not a problem and surely couldn't accelerate global warming?
Please. Get a grip. Global warming is real and I am more inclined to think it is the beginning of Mother Nature putting the human race back in its rightful place. She is tired of us destroying her and her bounty of creatures. She is just getting geared up folks.
We are in trouble folks, but we choose to sit back and watch this play out without acting. That is just sickening. Honestly we deserve what we have coming to us for our arrogance, aggression and abuse.
Either change our ways or Mother Nature will be striking in full force and we won't have a choice.