THE destructive energy from a cyclone comes as water evaporates from the ocean and the saturated air rises. As it condenses it releases energy, some of it in the form of wind.
Of course, the warmer the ocean, the easier it is for water to evaporate. And the warmer the surrounding air, the more water it is capable of holding. And the greater the amount of evaporated water that condenses, the more powerful the cyclone.
In short, the warmer the ocean and the warmer the air, the more powerful the cyclone.
Worse, the rise in temperature works exponentially on the cyclone’s force.
The question is not: was Cyclone Yasi caused by global warming. The answer any scientist will give is that we do not know and that it is unscientific to put single weather events down to global warming.
The real question is: did global warming cause Cyclone Yasi to be more powerful than it otherwise would have been? The answer is an unqualified Yes.
As to the Queensland floods, it seems that as global warming is giving rise to more extreme weather events, they could have been made more severe by global warming.
Yes, there is a natural cycle of El Nino (dry) and La Nina (wet) effects in the Pacific Ocean which for eons has produced the “droughts and flooding rains” of the sunburnt country – and the opposite cycle in South America. But it is quite likely that global warming is making both effects more extreme and the floods, cyclones, droughts and fires worse.
Expect more of them.
The levy for the floods (which might be increased because of the cyclone) will be chicken faeces compared to the tax dollars needed to repair damage by weather events made worse by climate change in the future.
It seems odd that aside from the levy, the Federal Government is to fund the infrastructure repair by cutting back on alternative-energy-research programs. It might be fine to cut some of the policy-on-the-run idiocies like the cash for clunkers, but it is counter-productive to cut the basic research into producing solar, wind and even carbon-retention technology.
In the height of the drought in the lead up to the 2007 election aspiring Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was right to say that climate change was “the greatest moral challenge of our time”. It is now even more so.
We are seeing that climate change goes beyond the popular view of global warming. The phrase global warming implies a warmer planet and therefore a drier one with more drought and fires. It meant that as the drought broke people thought they did not have to worry anymore.
But global warming caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will have different effects in different parts of the world. In Australia’s tropics, as we have seen this week, it means wetter conditions with more violent storms. In western Europe it means much colder winters as cold waters from the melting Greenland icecap prevent the warm Gulf Stream from making Western Europe, particularly Britain, reasonably livable in winter. London is more than 10 degrees closer to the pole than New York, yet has a milder winter.
We are in for more extremes and they are costly.
As Ross Garnaut pointed out in his criminally ignored report, it is going to cost more not to do anything about global warming than to do something.
The nations of the world are like 150 people of varying fitness and strength in a life boat. Many of the smallish passengers are saying: “Why should we row? None of us can make a difference.” Each of the largest passengers is saying: “I am not going to row unless all the other large passengers row.” And many other passengers are saying: “We did not cause the impending disaster, so why should we row at all.”
So the life boat becomes a death boat. Each passenger selfishly conserving strength for its own well-being and thereby sealing the fate of them all. But if they all rowed without squabbling over the precise division of effort, they could be saved. Even if some just started to row in the hope (without any guarantees) that others would join in, they would have a better chance of being saved.
The policy treatment of climate change in Australia, which got such a boost with John Howard’s Government finally accepting then Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s argument for a carbon tax and then the Garnaut report under Rudd, has now shattered into a hotch-potch of weakness and opportunism.
Surely the floods and cyclone could be triggers for a coherent, bold national plan to respond to climate change.
The floods and cyclone also illustrate another point about Australia’s moral challenge on climate change. Very few people were killed. In less affluent, more over-populated societies events like this usually result in horrific death tolls. Wealthy Australia has avoided that because of our more developed transport and communications, better building standards and better police and search and rescue services.
We have a moral duty to starting rowing. We should not be shrugging our shoulders and saying we can make no difference. We can. If we row, others might join us. And if they didn’t, it still would not have cost us much.
We should not be whinging about a levy like Tony Abbott who once called the science behind climate change “absolute crap”. We should be demanding our government do more to reduce our carbon footprint and we should be doing things ourselves to reduce our own footprint.
The events in Queensland were not just freak natural disasters. Their severity can be put down to man-induced climate change. If that message comes out of these disasters it might turn around the polling which shows that since 2006 more Australians are becoming less concerned about climate change — the one matter which is likely to have greater impact on their lives than any other. We should be up to the moral challenge.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 5 February 2011.
Nasty as it was, Yasi was not the most aggro of cyclones.
From the Bureau of Meteorology, regarding the infamous March 1918 cyclone (following one in January that year) in the Tully/Ingham area:
“Mission Beach was covered by 3.6 m of water, extending hundreds of metres inland, with the debris reaching a height of 7 m in the trees. All buildings and structures were destroyed by the storm surge in the Bingil Bay to Mission beach area.”
From AGSO Cities Hazard program for SE QLD:
“Damaging storm tides have been experienced in South-East Queensland. In February 1954, for example, a severe cyclone that crossed the coast at Coolangatta created a surge in Moreton Bay that left boats in the tree tops at Beachmere. Waves at Kirra brought 2m of water onto the highway, picking up cars.” — “There have been only sixteen tropical cyclones come within 500 km of Brisbane since the 1974-75 season, about half the long-term average frequency. None has approached as close as 100 km in that time. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is common view that the region does not have a cyclone problem.”
Things have been crook before, and could be crook again often enough under the normal climate regime. It is not pleasant to contemplate the prospects that lie before us under a climate changing for the worse. That politicians can dedicate themselves to so wholeheartedly ensuring delay in taking effective action does them no credit. They bring Neville Chamberlain and Edvard Quisling to mind.
Thanks Crispin, you have managed to put into words in a logical way what I have been thinking recently re. the recent cyclone and plethora of other natural disasters in Aus.
Would you mind if I include a reference to your article on my blog?