For the first time, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has ranked an environmental risk--climate change--as the most severe economic risk facing the world. Global Risks Report 2016 says climate change is compounding and intensifying other social, economic, and humanitarian stresses such as mass migration, which it ranked as the threat most likely to materialize in the next 18 months.
"Climate change is exacerbating more risks than ever before in terms of water crises, food shortages, constrained economic growth, weaker societal cohesion and increased security risks," said Cecilia Reyes, chief risk officer of Zurich Insurance Groups, one of the report collaborators.
Along with interaction with other risks, Margareta Drzeniek-Hanouz, head of global competitiveness and risks at the WEF, pointed to recent weather events and the frequency of natural disasters as justification for climate change's top ranking this year. "We do see more severe and more likely weather events," she said. "There are more droughts and floods. We have a higher and higher assessment of climate change."
Among the priority actions outlined in the report: modifying financial systems to "unleash climate-resilient, low-carbon investments." The authors found that incentives for such investments have yet to be incorporated into financial decision making despite increasing recognition of climate-change-related economic risks.
The report is based on a survey of 750 experts from economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and tech sectors about the perceived impact and likelihood of 29 prevalent global risks over a 10-year period.
Study: Rate of Man-Made Heat Energy Absorbed by Oceans Has Doubled
A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that since 1997 heat uptake by the world's oceans has nearly doubled by comparison with that uptake in the previous industrial era and that heat is mixing into deeper ocean layers, rather than remaining near the surface.
The study tracked how much man-made heat energy has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years using ocean-observing data dating as far back as the 1870s. It included readings from high-tech underwater monitors and results of computer models.
Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of man-made heat energy. Since the industrial revolution, deepwater heat content has increased by "several tenths of a degree" when averaged out across the globe, according to Peter Gleckler, the study's lead author. Although that energy is equivalent to less than 0.5 Celsius of warming averaged across the upper reaches of the ocean, Gleckler said it is still a "huge increase," adding that "if we want to really understand how much heat is being trapped, we can't just look at the upper ocean anymore, we need to look deeper."
The study found that a third of the recent ocean heat buildup occurred at depths of 700 meters or greater, possibly explaining a pause in warming at the sea surface since the end of the 20th century. Why deeper waters may be absorbing greater amounts of heat is not fully understood, according to the study.
The University of California reported that the Nature Climate Change study "found that estimates of ocean warming over a range of times and depths are consistent with results from the latest generation of climate models, building confidence that the climate models are providing useful information."
Official Numbers: 2015 Was the Hottest Year
Independent analyses by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.K. Met Office found that Earth's surface temperatures were the warmest they have been since record-keeping began.
NASA calculated the rise at 0.23 degree Fahrenheit above 2014 and suggested that 1998 was the only year that a new record was greater than the old record by such a large margin. NOAA put the increase at 0.29 degree Fahrenheit. The U.K. Met Office expects 2016 to set another record.
"A lot of times, you actually look at these numbers, when you break a record, you break it by a few hundredths of a degree," said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "But this record, we literally smashed. It was over a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit, and that's a lot for the global temperature."
Although 2015 temperatures were assisted by an ongoing El Nino weather pattern--which brings heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said "it is the cumulative effect of the long-term trend that has resulted in the record warming that we are seeing."
NASA used surface temperature measurements from more than 6,000 weather and research stations as well as ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures for its analysis. NOAA uses similar temperature data, but it also uses different baseline periods and methods.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.