Flooding and Climate Change

On the news tonight I discover that we have had a months rain in twenty four hours, sixty two mm. The flooding in the region is receding and my heart goes out to those affected by this in Morpeth and Pickering as well as other locations.

While this incident of flooding is over, in so far as the waters are receding, there is another day of heavy rain forecast for Tuesday. So the difficulties will return, and my thoughts will be with the people who will be impacted by this. While for many people they will be stoic in the face of flooding, I can understand the fear that the risk of flooding will induce for some.

While no single event can be pinpointed to Climate Change, the frequency of these events are happening as a result of damaging human induced climate change. All around the world the predicted effects of Damaging Climate Change are there to be seen. In Australia they are suffering from a drought they call the “Big Dry”, in Japan average temperatures are five degrees Celsius higher, in the Arctic the polar ice cap is now a free floating island. All predicted by climate models, the only aspect that models don't always agree on is the timing of these events.

If we look at the Arctic, the ice cap was never expected to melt until 2050. It was only the models that were dismissed as alarmist that said that the Arctic would be Ice free by the early years of this century. Yet events have proved these models are correct, or at least more than reasonably accurate. Part of the difficulty is that many of the events that we are experiencing are unique. Never in human history have we seen them, and in some cases never in the planets history have these events occurred. Therefore find accurate data to base predictions on is just not there.

When the IPCC gave its report on the science of climate change, it reported an expected sea level rise of up to eighty centimetres. It made this very cautious prediction based on the fact that there are some serious holes in our knowledge and understanding of the physics of the movement of glaciers. Yet in the journal Science is a paper that has extended the science of the flow of glaciers, and remaining cautious they are predicting a sea level rise in the range of eighty centimetres to two meters. There is nothing that can be faulted with the article (paper) as the science is fully sound and I can understand the authors being cautious about the predictions made as they can be backed up by sound science.

Now if we try to imagine what the flooding would have been like if that rise in sea level had actually happened already. I can even walk to the spot where the water would have been some two hundred meters from the river bank.

I just wish that all governments start taking climate change seriously so that there is a future worth living.