Yes, the world's biggest geopolitical threat is climate change
by David Atkins
The world's greatest geopolitical threat bar none is climate change. Droughts due to climate change have often been cited as the source of the uprisings that became the Arab Spring, which in turn has directly led to the mess in Syria. There will be more such instability in the near future.
Now, there is more evidence that climate change is a key factor behind at least half of last year's extreme weather events:
new report plumbing 12 extreme weather events from 2012 for the degree to which human factors, especially carbon dioxide emissions, contributed to the disasters has identified anthropogenic underpinnings in some of the events, but not others.
The paper, a collaborative effort between 18 different research teams, is the latest effort to pinpoint the causes behind the storms, droughts, and warm spells that befell countries all over the world last year, in hopes of better understanding what climate trends can be expected in the future.
In recent years, how much climate change has been a factor in the hurricanes slamming into the US East Coast or the droughts parching farmland in the Midwest has been an outstanding question in climate science. Answering that question has acquired high-octane urgency, as scientists now suggest that better understanding the human origins of extreme weather could help scientists predict when, where, and how those events might impact people.
“People can actually use some of this information to make decisions,” says Thomas Peterson, principal scientist at the National Climactic Data Center and one of the lead editors on the report. For example, it makes a difference to a Midwestern farmer who has just weathered a punishing drought whether or not that experience is rare event or part of a long-term trend toward a drier climate, he said.
The report cautions against the idea that climate change causes extreme weather, suggesting that while climate change is a factor in such events, it is in none of the studied cases the sole factor. In the paper, the team likens the influence of climate change on superstorms to speeding while driving: If a crash happens, it might be because the driver was texting or because the roads were wet, but the speeding made it more likely that the crash would happen or be more catastrophic.
That in mind, climate change did not necessarily cause Hurricane Sandy, but it did contribute to its severity, the scientists said. The report, looking at just the hurricane’s flooding patterns, said that sea levels up from their 1950 values caused a storm surge that was also unusually high, plunging low-lying areas along the East coast under a barrage of water: storm tide levels broke 16 records along western Atlantic coastline.
The results also suggest that future storms, whirling in on the backs of swelled-up seas, could do increasingly catastrophic damage within longer and longer ranges.
Both as a matter of geopolitical stability and economic growth, the world could do with a lot more solar panels and a lot fewer guns and bombs. It's just common sense.
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