Filipinas pedem que se lute contra as alterações climáticas
Enquanto o país está a tentar sobreviver aos efeitos de um tufão que poderá
ter morto 10.000 pessoas, a delegada das Filipinas na Conferência do Clima em
Varsóvia pede que se aja em conjunto contra as mudanças climáticas.
“De cada vez que voltamos a uma conferência [do
clima], estamos a enfrentar uma nova catástrofe”, desabafou Alicia Ilaga,
delegada das Filipinas. “Peço aos dirigentes do mundo que passem à acção em
Varsóvia”, disse, numa conferência de imprensa. “Que outra coisa podemos pedir
nesta conferência, senão que as negociações e os compromissos se transformem em
acção?”, acrescentou a delegada, citada pela agência noticiosa AFP. “O meu país
acaba de ser atingido por mais um tufão de categoria 5, estamos a contar os
nossos mortos. Eles foram tragados por esta abominação da qual não temos
culpa.”
Typhoon Haiyan: is climate change to blame?
The Philippines has been hit
by 24 typhoons in the past year but the power of Haiyan was off the scale,
killing thousands and leaving millions homeless. Is there even worse
devastation to come?
 |
People walk among the debris of Tacloban, the Philippine
city devastated by Typhoon Haiyan. Photograph: Erik De Castro/Reuters
John Vidal and Damian Carrington
The Guardian, Tuesday 12 November 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/12/typhoon-haiyan-climate-change-blame-philippines
Just as the world was beginning to take in the almost
unimaginable devastation wrought by typhoon Haiyan, a young Filipino diplomat,
Naderev Sano, was getting ready to lead his country's negotiations in the UN
climate talks in Warsaw, Poland. Yeb, as he is known, is a scientist and head
of his country's national climate commission and had flown out of Manila just
hours before the vastness of Haiyan had become apparent.
By Monday morning, Sano knew that the Philippines had been
struck by possibly the strongest storm ever measured, killing many thousands of
people and making millions homeless. He took the floor and, in some trepidation
in front of the delegates of 190 countries, gave an extraordinary, passionate
speech in which he clearly linked super typhoon Haiyan to manmade climate
change and urged the world to wake up to the reality of what he said was
happening from latin America to south east Asia and the US. He lambasted the
rich countries, and dared climate change deniers to go to his country to see for
themselves what was happening.
When he sat down, sobbing, he was given a standing ovation.
This was not just diplomatic theatricals or righteous
grandstanding by a developing-country diplomat about the snail-like speed of
the climate talks, which have dragged on for years and are not likely to
conclude until 2015. What few people in Warsaw knew until Sano had nearly finished
his speech was that even as he was addressing the UN, his brother was digging
people out of the rubble of the ruined city of Tacloban and he and his family
still did not know the fate of other relatives.
Normally stone-hearted diplomats broke down, and Sano, who
calls himself a "revolutionary" and a "philosopher" on
Twitter [@yebsano], said later he would go on hunger strike for the whole of
the two-week meeting. In the last 24 hours he has been joined by 30 activists.
Just as significantly, his speech has reopened the growing
debate about whether the extreme weather events seen around the world over the
past few years, including Hurricane Sandy, the melting of the Arctic sea ice
and heatwaves in the US, Russia and Australia, can be attributed to manmade
climate change. If they can, the argument goes, then the urgency of addressing
the problem becomes incontrovertible; if it doesn't, then it allows countries
to continue delaying action or reducing their commitments.
Logic, at least, suggests a clear link between Haiyan and a
warming world. Storms receive their energy from the ocean and the warming
oceans that we can expect from global warming should therefore make superstorms
such as Haiyan more likely. New research suggests that the Pacific is, indeed,
warming – possibly at its fastest rate in 10,000 years. If the extra heat
stored in the oceans is released into the atmosphere, then the severity of
storms will inevitably increase. In short, a warmer world will probably feature
more extreme weather.
This week, atmospheric scientists were clear.
"Typhoons, hurricanes and all tropical storms draw their vast energy from
the warmth of the sea. We know sea-surface temperatures are warming pretty much
around the planet, so that's a pretty direct influence of climate change on the
nature of the storm," said Will Steffen, director of the Australian
National University (ANU) climate change institute.
"The current consensus is that climate change is not
making the risk of hurricanes any greater, but there are physical arguments and
evidence that there is a risk of more intense hurricanes," says Myles
Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford.
The consensus of climate scientists is increasingly that
super storms will become more frequent. According to a recent special report by
the Intergovernmental panel on climate change: "The average tropical
cyclone maximum wind speed is likely to increase, but the global frequency of
tropical cyclones is likely to decrease or remain unchanged."
In September, the IPCC's fifth assessment stated, more
cautiously: "Time series of cyclone indices such as power dissipation, an
aggregate compound of tropical cyclone frequency, duration, and intensity that
measures total wind energy by tropical cyclones, show upward trends in the
North Atlantic and weaker upward trends in the western North Pacific since the
late 1970s, but interpretation of longer-term trends is again constrained by
data quality concerns."
In other words, the best science says there is some evidence
that storm intensity has already increased, at least in the North Atlantic, but
there's not enough data to say categorically that any particular weather event
can be linked to climate change.
But the science is moving on quickly and it is now possible,
with new modelling methods, to quantify and attribute the changed odds of any
given event happening. "Because of the random nature of weather, it had
been assumed until recently that no single event can be attributed to climate
change. However, with new research methods and better quality data, scientists
are increasingly able to connect the dots between extreme weather events and
climate change," says James Bradbury, formerly a researcher with the World
Resources Institute in Washington and now with the US department of energy.
"For example, one can quantify the odds of a typical
heatwave happening and estimate how much a warmer world would load the dice
toward the more frequent occurrence of a similar event. Or, to understand the
causes of melting sea-ice or severe drought, researchers can use sophisticated
climate models to help identify – and potentially isolate – various factors
that could individually contribute or dynamically interact to influence climate
conditions in a particular region," he says.
Evidence that climate change makes heatwaves, superstorms
and droughts far more likely is growing. Earlier this year, scientists at the
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the UK's Met Office,
and the research teams from 16 other global institutions tried to calculate how
much climate change had possibly influenced 12 extreme weather events that
occurred in 2012. By no means all could be linked, they concluded, but they
agreed that it had helped raise the temperatures during the run of 100F (37.7C ) days in last year's US
heatwave, and was behind the record loss of Arctic sea ice and the storm surge
of hurricane Sandy, plus several other extremes. They were less certain about
Britain's wet summer and the drought in Spain.
 |
Russians wear facemasks in Moscow to protect themselves from
forest fire smog during the 2010 heatwave. Photograph: Natalia
Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images
"Determining the causes of extreme events remains
challenging," says Thomas R Karl, director of the national climate data
centre. Allen, whose work has shown that global warming tripled the odds of the
severe 2010 Russian heatwave and tripled the risk of the widespread flooding in
England in 2000, says extreme weather can be linked to climate change given
enough computer time. He says the influence of climate change on typhoon Haiyan
could be calculated in future: "If we used the same tools as are used now
to make seasonal weather forecasts, there would be a straightforward
answer."
A 2013 study by MIT's Prof Kerry Emmanuel found that the
most intense cyclones – category 3 to 5 – will increase with climate change and
also found that "increases in tropical cyclones are most prominent in the
western North Pacific", ie where typhoon Haiyan struck.
Ordinary people have less trouble untangling climate change
from natural events. Talk to farmers in the Philippines, Nepal, south east
Asia, Latin America, much of Africa and Latin America, and most will say that
they are seeing more extreme storms, unseasonal rains, and more droughts and heatwaves.
Their observations are not "peer-reviewed" by scientists, but their
memory is usually good, and invariably supports national records.
The Philippines has been particularly hard hit by extreme
events, being the first land mass that typhoons encounter on their usual track
westwards from the mid Pacific. Haiyan was the third superstorm to strike the
archipelago in a year, coming after seven major typhoons in October alone.
Typhoon Trami caused massive flooding on the island of Luzon in August, while
Bopha killed around 2,000 people in December last year.
Moreover, the Philippine government's raw statistics suggest
the region's typhoons are getting stronger. From 1947 to 1960, the strongest to
hit the country was Amy in December 1951, with a highest wind speed recorded at
240kph in Cebu. From 1961 to 1980, the highest wind speed recorded was 275kph
in October 1970. In
the past 13 years, the highest wind speed has soared to 320kph, recorded by
Reming in November to December 2006. "Menacingly, the Philippine typhoons
are getting stronger and stronger. If this is due to climate change, we'd
better be prepared for even stronger ones in the future," says Romulo
Virola, head of the government's national statistics board.
 |
Damage in New Jersey in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy in
2012. Photograph: Reuters
What is certain is that extreme weather events are on the
rise globally and that greenhouse gas emissions are rising inexorably. The US
alone has experienced 25 extreme weather events since 2011 that each caused
more than $1bn in damages. A new report by the Norwegian met office shows that
precipitation in Europe has become more severe and more frequent, that winter
rainfall has decreased over southern Europe and the Middle East and that there
are more and longer heatwaves and fewer extremely cold days and nights.
The evidence is overwhelming that climate change is
happening in developing countries, says Oxfam, which works in most of the
world's most vulnerable nations. "In 2012 the drought in Russia cut the
grain harvest by nearly 25%, in Pakistan the devastating 2010 flood destroyed
over 570,000
hectares of crop land and affected more than 20m people.
The 2011 drought in East Africa affected over 13 million people and led to a
famine in Somalia," says a recent Oxfam report.
According to NOAA, July 2013 marked the 341st consecutive
month with a global temperature above the 20th-century average. Thomas Karl,
director of NOAA's climate office said: "We believe there is an important
human component explaining these record-breaking temperatures, and that's the
increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
Extreme weather killed 530,000 people last year and caused
more than $2.5tn of damage, according to an annual risk report published on
Tuesday by Germanwatch, a thinktank partly funded by the German government. The
Philippines was rated second most affected country after Haiti, which lost 9.5%
of its economy, just above Pakistan, which was hit by immense floods.
Sano, now on hunger strike, called for a redefinition of
"disaster". "We must stop calling events like these as natural
disasters," he told the UN. "It is not natural when science already
tells us that global warming will induce more intense storms. It is not natural
when the human species has already profoundly changed the climate."
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário