As we reflect on 2011, a year of extreme weather all over the world, my thoughts have turned back to a very strange summer I experienced not long ago.
That summer, I met a government employee who was working in his office and received a frantic call from his wife. "The flood water is coming," she said.
At first, he didn't take much notice. Occasional floods are normal in our part of the world, where heavy rains come every year and help irrigate the crops.
It was only later, when he returned to his town and saw his home disappearing underwater, that he understood the world he knew had suddenly and irrevocably changed.
This story took place in Pakistan in 2010. But around the world, wherever you are, chances are good that you have lived through your own weather disaster. And if not, you may soon.
A report last fall from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that because of global warming, we can expect to see more and more catastrophic weather such as heat waves and heavy rains. For many of us, this news is not a surprise. The reality of climate change is catching up to us, and severe weather has become an increasingly common part of our lives.
In Pakistan, the 2010 flooding was an unprecedented disaster. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called the event a "slow-motion tsunami." One-fifth of the nation was covered in water, an area the size of England. Nearly 2,000 people died, 20 million were affected and 1.7 million homes were destroyed.
These events would have been traumatic enough; but last year, the floods returned." Unusually heavy monsoon rains brought flash floods that drove millions of people into poverty -- and international aid has been scarce.
I know many of you who are reading this live far from Pakistan. But in a fundamental way, our experience is the same whether we lived through the rains in my country or the famine in East Africa. Because of climate change, we have heightened our risk of disasters like the ongoing drought in the American South, or last spring's dramatic rainstorms that flooded the Mississippi River.
We are part of the same experience if we lived through events like last year's torrential rains over China that forced thousands of people from their homes, or the heat wave that crippled Russia two years ago. We have all reached a "new normal" -- but there is nothing normal about it.
During the Pakistan floods, I met people who saw their homes go underwater in an afternoon -- like the government employee who received a sudden call in his office. I met people who used to live comfortable lives who were standing in line to receive food. And I met others who would rather go hungry than accept the humiliation of charity.
I met local villagers who thought extreme weather was a sign they had done something wrong. They had never heard of carbon pollution or the greenhouse effect, so the only cause they could imagine was that God was punishing them for their sins.
That's the moment I learned that education must be the first step. For me, that means spending time traveling to remote villages to talk about extreme weather and climate change. I explain that bad weather has always been with us, but we expect global warming to make it far more frequent and more dangerous. Teaching people that their experience is part of a larger story is a way of showing them they are not alone.
The people I meet in Pakistan do not always accept climate change science right away. In that sense, they are no different than people elsewhere in the world. But it's clear to me that around the globe, there is a growing acceptance of the reality we face -- and an increasing readiness to find solutions.
Someday soon, Pakistan will recover from the floods -- just as I know the rest of the world will learn to confront the threat of extreme weather and climate change. This is an experience we all share, and it is a problem we can only solve together.
Follow Asif Iqbal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/asifoghi
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There is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that Earth is warming. Strong evidence also indicates that recent warming is largely caused by human activities, especially the release of greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels...
While much remains to be learned, the core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious scientific debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations.
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/Science-Report-Brief-final.pdf
Over-fishing.
Destruction of native habitats.
Slash&burn agriculture.
Pollution of riverways by agricultural and industrial run-off.
Ocean pollution.
Poaching endangered animals.
Lack of clean water the third world.
Preventable diseases, especially among children.
Under-education of girls.
Enslavement of children/mothers.
Human trafficking.
The selling of virginity.
Poverty.
Killing of innocent civilians in war.
These problems fester because those environmentally minded have been tricked into believing that global warming is due to human activity, is bad thing and more important than all of these other more pressing problems. Shame on them for embracing this drivel.
In a hundred years people will recall CAGW and shake their heads that people were tricked by the scoundrels. CAGW will be in the same category as Geocentrics, Cold Fusion, Piltdown Man and The Fountain of Youth. In future, the parallels between the IPCC the Yakuza will be studied by PhD candidates in the Humanities. Carbon emission reduction schemes will be likened to Medieval bleeding, Papal indulgences and witch burning.
Meanwhile, the real problems of the real world fester on. The truly environmentally minded find it so sickening.
Another of Orkney's favorite themes is IPCC bashing. Orkney flogs that one incessantly, as does her hero laframboise. One wonders who is who among those two.
The rest of this rant is fanciful denier fiction, wishful thinking, peddling of propaganda. It's all preposterous of course. It is like listening to a campaign manager when his guy is losing by 25 percentage points on election day. "We are doing well and feel good about the results."
Note all the propaganda points by Okney.
Somehow global warming is preventing action on all of her list of disasters.
Global warming is to be compared with the piltdown hoax and the other hoaxes.
You aren't truly environmentally minded if you speak for global warming.
Global warming science is not truly environmentally minded.
The IPCC fosters and peddles junk science.
We are throwing good money after bad in pursuing mitigation.
CO2 is plant food, not a pollutant.
Somehow Orkney is truly environmentally minded and those involved in climate science aren't. Truth is, Orkney has never mentioned anything that doesn't suit the interests of the climate disinformation outfits like fossil fuel PR firm The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. By the way, weren't NZCSC the one's caught lying for falsifying data?
Dear Orkneygal,
Isn't prominent global warming "skeptic" Dr. Robert M "Bob" Carter committing de facto global warming fraud by misrepresenting increasing global temperature trend lines as flat?*
Isn't that like a climate science scam, a global warming hoax, a blatant and indefensible lie?
If you disagree please provide a scientifically-valid explanation for Bob Carter's gross misrepresentation of scientific data.
Bob Carter is a leader of and/or major contributor to several of the most prominent organizations that are "skeptical" of man-made global warming, including:
* The Heartland Institute
* The International Climate Science Coalition
* The Science & Environmental Policy Project
* The Science and Public Policy Institute
* The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
Also:
You have indicated that you live in New Zealand - what relationship do you have with Bob Carter's global warming "skeptic" organization the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC)?
Please finally answer these questions, Orkneygal, instead of continuing to run away from them - thank you.
[ Que: continued avoidance of the truth from Orkneygal with respect to Bob Carter's de facto global warming fraud and her relationship to Bob Carter's NZCSC. ]
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* http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/07/bob_carters_trend_lines.php
"Almost at the last minute the programme-makers came up with the idea of a bet. It was for £100 that, using the HadCrut3 data set, there would be no new record set by 2011. It was made between climatologist James Annan and myself. His work involves analysing climatic data and validating climate models. He accepted enthusiastically as he has a perchant for taking on 'sceptics.' The presenter said that if the global temperature didn’t go up in the next few years, “there would be some explaining to do.”
Later today, January 13th, “More or Less” returns to the bet, which I am pleased to say I won, though I note that this bet, or its conclusion, is not yet mentioned on Annan’s Wikipedia entry despite his other climate bet being discussed." - David Whitehouse
As Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) demonstrate,* when El Niño and other short-term temperature influences are controlled for global warming has steadily continued in the 21st Century, and "all five [global land and sea] data sets show statistically significant warming even for the time span from 2000 to the present."
More from the study:
"The resultant adjusted data show clearly, both visually and when subjected to statistical analysis, that the rate of global warming due to other factors (most likely these are exclusively anthropogenic) has been remarkably steady during the 32 years from 1979 through 2010. There is no indication of any slowdown or acceleration of global warming, beyond the variability induced by these known natural factors."
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* http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022/fulltext/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-real-global-warming-signal/
London, 13 January: A climate bet proposed by the BBC’s radio programme “More or Less” four years ago has been won by Dr David Whitehouse, a former BBC Science Editor and a scientific adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
In 2008, the BBC programme-makers came up with the idea of a bet. It was for £100 that, using the Met Office’s data set (HadCrut3), there would be no new warming record set by 2011. It was made between Dr Whitehouse and climatologist Dr James Annan.
You still seam confused.
4 years is weather variation, not climate trends, wherein short-term influences like El Niño etc. can and do obscure the man-made global warming signal.
After all the time you say you've spent researching this topic one old think that you would have learned that by now.
Here, maybe this will help you understand what you still somehow don't seem to get:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif
HTH.