wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  Yahoo News 24 Jul 07
Are Britain's Floods Linked to Global Warming?
Andrea Thompson and Ker Than

PlanetArk 23 Jul 07
Worldwide Floods Show Lessons Still Need Learning
Story by Peter Apps

Yahoo News 23 Jul 07
Floods force many to face climate change reality
By Douwe Miedema

Fisherman Peter Schneider knows the floods come each year and says they are good for business -- but few other people see any benefit as experts warn of more high water to come.

"We fishermen have always lived with that. We're happy when the floods come, because it can only be good for the fish," he said in his village close to the Oder river that forms the border between Germany and Poland.

Schneider's business almost went belly-up 10 years ago, when the river gushed through the dykes protecting a low-lying swath of land in this former East German region and immersed the building where he keeps his boats and nets.

The catastrophe forced thousands from their homes in Germany and elsewhere, and experts now say climate change may cause more disasters in Europe and across the world, with evidence increasing that global temperatures are rising.

"It would be wrong to deny the possible impact of climate change on flooding because if we (waited for more) statistical proof it may be too late," said Wolfgang Grabs at the World Meteorological Organisation of the United Nations.

Warmer air can hold more water and will unleash more energy when the weather turns bad, Grabs said, making storms heavier and boosting rainfall. That mechanism may well explain an observed rise in flash floods in Europe over the last decade, he said.

Fisherman Schneider said flooded meadows offer breeding fish warmer water and more food, but most people would struggle to find benefit in flooding.

In recent weeks, parts of China have seen the heaviest rainfall since records began, killing more than 400. Some 770 people have been killed by flooding in South Asia, with hundreds of thousands displaced by flash floods in southern Pakistan. Thousands of flood victims in Britain last week were clearing chaos and braced for more after floods in northern parts of the country, triggering the country's biggest peacetime rescue effort.

European grain prices have risen to their highest level for around 10 years on fears that bad weather will hit this summer's crops, stoking food price inflation.

Initially, a spring drought caused damage to wheat crops across Europe and in key grower Ukraine. Since June, heavy rain in western Europe has increased concerns over quality, which may leave bread-makers short of high-grade grain later this year.

'SOMETHING IS CHANGING'

Floods killed more than 7,000 people in the world last year, a recent study by reinsurance group Swiss Re study showed -- roughly a third of all victims of natural catastrophes such as storms, earthquakes, droughts and extreme cold or heat.

Statistics gathered by insurers -- who look at the cost of a catastrophe to measure its severity, not the death toll -- also indicate climate is changing.

"One single event can never be a sign of climate change," said Jens Mehlhorn, who heads a team of flood experts at the Zurich-based company. "But when you see a series of such events, and that's what it looks like at the moment ... it may be about time to say something is changing," he said.

This year's UK floods were an event statistical models say should happen once only every 30 to 50 years, Mehlhorn says: the floods in 2000 were a 25-30 years event.

Two such events in only seven years are not statistically impossible, but they are unlikely. Other countries have seen similar increases in such disasters.

FLOATING HOUSES

While Britons ponder whether homes should still be being built on flood plains, in the Netherlands -- where many live on land well below sea level -- people in some cities are building floating houses and houses on stilts.

The country is also upgrading a 30 km-long dyke at a cost of $1 billion that protects much of the land. If such protection is on offer, flood plains should not be a bad place to live most of the time, said Colin Thorne, head of physical geography at Britain's Nottingham University.

"Most of the world's great civilizations grew up along rivers -- people are always going to live there. But you have to have plans for flooding," he said. Near the Oder, Klaus Mueller proved the point.

"That dyke won't burst again," said the 69-year old retiree, who fled the rising water by walking his flock of sheep over a distance of more than 12 km (7.5 miles) in 1997. "It's at least 1.5 meters higher, if not two. And it's at least 10 meters wider," he said.

(Additional reporting by Peter Apps and David Evans in London)

PlanetArk 23 Jul 07
Worldwide Floods Show Lessons Still Need Learning
Story by Peter Apps

LONDON - As communities around the world battle the worst floods in living memory, experts warn such events may become more frequent due to climate change and that lessons still need to be learnt to limit losses.

Floods may result in lower death tolls than earthquakes, wars or tsunamis -- and therefore gain less international attention -- but they can cause similar devastation.

Recent weeks have seen a string of such disasters. Parts of China had the heaviest rainfall since records began, killing more than 400. Some 770 people have been killed by flooding in South Asia with hundreds of thousands displaced by flash floods in southern Pakistan.

"They had no time to react," said UNICEF spokeswoman Kathryn Grusovin from the affected province of Baluchistan. "They hadn't seen rains like this in living memory. There had been episodes of flooding but this was right off the map. You are talking massive amounts of rain that has never been seen before."

It is a similar story around the globe. More than 50 people were killed in Sudan. Hundreds had to flee homes in northern England as the water rose. In Colombia, slums disappeared under rising floodwaters and some 50,000 people were displaced.

PROBABLE LINK

Experts say the worldwide floods are probably linked. One explanation could be strong waves in the jetstream, high in the atmosphere.

"There are certain configurations that can produce flooding simultaneously in different parts of the world," said Professor Colin Thorne, head of physical geography at England's Nottingham University.

Climate change could make the problem worse, he warned.

Many scientists say the world is warming because of carbon emissions from human activity, making weather more unpredictable.

"You can't attribute particular events to climate change," Thorne said. "But on the other hand, the conditions that promote serious flooding will become much more frequent than they are now so the probability is we will have more extreme events."

Huge strides have been made in coping with the consequences.

A couple of decades ago, floods in Bangladesh used to kill thousands, almost all from disease. Now, cholera outbreaks after floods have been almost eradicated, mainly through better access to sanitation and public education.

When floods hit Mozambique earlier this year, aid workers say the government was swift to broadcast radio warnings and evacuate people from vulnerable areas. Some 45 people died, compared to 700 in 2000-2001.

LESSONS

But experts say many lessons still need to be learned and warn that flood defences have sometimes created a false sense of security, particularly in the most developed countries.

"With floods, the first thing to learn is that you cannot stop them," said Professor Graham Chapman at Lancaster University. "You have to have a society that learns to live with them."

Rural communities from the Zambezi in southern Africa to Bangladesh traditionally used small mounds of raised ground to escape floodwater, but rapid urbanisation and reliance on dykes and embankments built by European colonisers have reduced the emphasis on traditional coping strategies.

Raised railway lines or roads can limit drainage and stop water escaping -- which is why they are so often swept away, experts say. And yet post-disaster Western aid frequently concentrates on rebuilding them exactly as they were before.

Drainage is often inadequate, while building is carried out without regard to flood patterns.

Sometimes there is no long-term flood planning at all.

Experts recommend building houses that are more durable and survivable as well as capable of being brought back into use within a couple of months instead of over a year.

Failings in the response to 2005's Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans showed that even a developed country like the United States could fall short in the face of widespread flooding if it is not fully prepared.

"Flood plains are not bad places to live 99 per cent of the time," said Nottingham University's Thorne. "Most of the world's great civilisations grew up along rivers -- people are always going to live there. But you have to have plans for flooding."

Yahoo News 24 Jul 07
Are Britain's Floods Linked to Global Warming?
Andrea Thompson and Ker Than

Though Britain is known for its typically rainy climate, the torrential downpours of the past month have been anything but typical.

The relentless rains have brought central Britain the worst floods it's seen in half a century, and some wonder whether global warming might be to blame.

But that link is hard to make, scientists say. "We can't link any particular event to climate change," said Jay Larimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch for the U.S. National Climatic Data Center.

But the downpours and floods are consistent with what climate change models predict will happen, said Tim Evans of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management in the United Kingdom.

Poor land use practices, such as paving large parking lots that make it easier for water to flow across the land, also play a part in increasing the severity of floods, Evans added.

Jeffrey Yin, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) explained that patterns and changes have to be observed over long periods of time before they can be linked to something like global warming, which acts over longer time scales than any single weather event.

"I would want to see sort of a sustained pattern over a longer period of time, at least 10 to 20 years," Yin told LiveScience. "The issue with extreme kinds of events is that because they're rare, it's hard to say statistically that there's been a shift or a change."

Extremes to become the norm?

Long periods of rain like this are nothing new and occur when certain air patterns persist and keep strong low-pressure systems, associated with heavy rain, over an area for days or weeks on end, Larimore explained.

"They've happened before in the past, they'll happen again in the future," he told LiveScience.

But even though deluges will happen, global warming will increase the likelihood of their happening by changing the environment, said NCAR climatologist Kevin Trenberth.

"In particular, the water vapor in the atmosphere has increased about 4 percent over the oceans since 1970 on average, and this leads to heavier rainfall events by about double that amount," Trenberth said in an email.

Global warming might also make future floods worse.

"This is consistent with the kinds of things we expect from global climate change warming," Trenberth said.

Scientists predict that extreme weather events like the floods in Britain will become more frequent in places all over the world--China too has seen intense rains and flooding this summer.

"People should get used to them," Larimore said.
links
Related articles on climate change
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com