England under water: Scientists confirm global warming link to increased rain
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England Under Water: Scientists Confirm Global Warming Link to Increased Rain
By Michael McCarthy
The Independent UK
Monday 23 July 2007
It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.
The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.
The "major rainfall event" of last Friday fully predicted as such by the Met Office has given the country a quite exceptional battering, with the Thames still rising. In Gloucester water levels had reached 34 feet, just 12 inches below flood defences the same level as during the flood of 1947 although a police spokesman said last night that the River Severn had stopped rising.
Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.
About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.
Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.
The Great Flood of July is all the more remarkable for following right on from the Great Flood of June, which caused similar havoc in northern towns such as Doncaster and Hull, after a similar series of astonishingly torrential downpours on 24 June.
Meteorologists agree that the miserably wet British summer of 2007 has generally been caused by a southward shift towards Britain of the jetstream, the high-level airflow that brings depressions eastwards across the Atlantic. This is fairly normal. But debate is going on about whether climate change may be responsible for the intensity of the two freak rainfall episodes, which have caused flooding the like of which has never been seen in many places.
This is because the computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed, "extreme rainfall events", as one of its principal consequences.
The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.
But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, and its details are under embargo and cannot be reported until then. But its main findings have caused a stir, and are being freely discussed by climate scientists in the Met Office, the Hadley Centre and the Department for Environment For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns the increases in rainfall observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.
"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.
"Some people would argue that you can't take a single event and pin that on climate change, but what happened in Britain last Friday fits quite easily with these conclusions. It does seem to have a certain resonance with what they're finding in this research."
The Hadley Centre lead scientist involved with the study was Dr Peter Stott, who specialises in finding "human fingerprints" sometimes referred to as anthropogenic signals on the changing climate.
Last September Dr Stott, who was not available for comment yesterday, published research showing that the climate of central England had warmed by a full degree Celsius in the past 40 years, and that this could be directly linked to human causes the first time that man-made climate change had been identified at such a local level.
The human fingerprint is detected by making computer simulations of the recent past climate, with and without emissions of greenhouse gases and then comparing the results with what has actually been observed in the real world.
In Dr Stott's research, and in the study to be published on Wednesday, the observed rises in temperature and rainfall could be clearly accounted for by the scenario in which emissions were prominent.
The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model.
Global warming is likely to lead to higher rainfall because a warming atmosphere contains more water vapour and more energy. Since climate prediction began 20 years ago, heavier rainfall over Britain has been a consistent theme.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2793067.ece
By Michael McCarthy
The Independent UK
Monday 23 July 2007
It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.
The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.
The "major rainfall event" of last Friday fully predicted as such by the Met Office has given the country a quite exceptional battering, with the Thames still rising. In Gloucester water levels had reached 34 feet, just 12 inches below flood defences the same level as during the flood of 1947 although a police spokesman said last night that the River Severn had stopped rising.
Last night vast areas of the country around Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were still inundated, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, transport links were widely disrupted, and yet more householders were standing by to be flooded in their turn, in one of the biggest civil emergencies Britain has seen.
About 150,000 residents in Gloucestershire were left without drinking water when the Mythe Water Treatment Works in Tewkesbury became inoperable after flooding. Another 200,000 people are at risk of losing their supplies. The water shortages may last until Wednesday and 600 water tanks were being drafted to the area.
Panic buying of bottled water was reported, with supermarkets selling out of stocks, and there were contamination problems in south London, where 80,000 households and businesses in the Sutton area were advised to boil their water after rain got into a tank. Yet another potential danger was from car thieves; West Mercia police warned drivers who had abandoned their cars in the floodwater to collect them quickly to prevent theft.
The Great Flood of July is all the more remarkable for following right on from the Great Flood of June, which caused similar havoc in northern towns such as Doncaster and Hull, after a similar series of astonishingly torrential downpours on 24 June.
Meteorologists agree that the miserably wet British summer of 2007 has generally been caused by a southward shift towards Britain of the jetstream, the high-level airflow that brings depressions eastwards across the Atlantic. This is fairly normal. But debate is going on about whether climate change may be responsible for the intensity of the two freak rainfall episodes, which have caused flooding the like of which has never been seen in many places.
This is because the computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed, "extreme rainfall events", as one of its principal consequences.
The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.
But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, and its details are under embargo and cannot be reported until then. But its main findings have caused a stir, and are being freely discussed by climate scientists in the Met Office, the Hadley Centre and the Department for Environment For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns the increases in rainfall observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.
"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.
"Some people would argue that you can't take a single event and pin that on climate change, but what happened in Britain last Friday fits quite easily with these conclusions. It does seem to have a certain resonance with what they're finding in this research."
The Hadley Centre lead scientist involved with the study was Dr Peter Stott, who specialises in finding "human fingerprints" sometimes referred to as anthropogenic signals on the changing climate.
Last September Dr Stott, who was not available for comment yesterday, published research showing that the climate of central England had warmed by a full degree Celsius in the past 40 years, and that this could be directly linked to human causes the first time that man-made climate change had been identified at such a local level.
The human fingerprint is detected by making computer simulations of the recent past climate, with and without emissions of greenhouse gases and then comparing the results with what has actually been observed in the real world.
In Dr Stott's research, and in the study to be published on Wednesday, the observed rises in temperature and rainfall could be clearly accounted for by the scenario in which emissions were prominent.
The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model.
Global warming is likely to lead to higher rainfall because a warming atmosphere contains more water vapour and more energy. Since climate prediction began 20 years ago, heavier rainfall over Britain has been a consistent theme.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2793067.ece
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Comments
That's not true. You may not believe it to be caused by man, but the globe is getting warmer - global warming at work.:D
Haha, I saw some dude passing out tea in the rain during the floods over there. You Brits need to chill with the tea. It's REALLY not that good. Try orange soda. That's money.
-Enoch Powell
Are we being lied to?
It's a little worrying, to be honest. I'm not going to claim to know the ins and outs of the whole global warming argument. All I know is that our seasons are completely out of whack. It's been raining every day for probably 2 months straight here in Ireland, and even that's nothing compared to what we're seeing in England.
A scary thought is this: if it's not man-made, then there really is nothing we can do to stop it.
That's what you people were saying during the Little Ice Age. You got through that okay.
-Enoch Powell
no, you are being mislead by a bunch of people who think they have world climate figured out. personally, I dont think anyone truly knows how our climate works. the earth is too old and the world/universe is too complex.
should we conserve and protect our planet? sure, why not.
"You people"? I don't recall being around to say anything about a climate phenomenon that ended over a century before I was born.
But, y'know - sorry if my concern for the planet interferes with your personal rights somehow.
I love how the article just glosses over these two points.
Admin
Social awareness does not equal political activism!
5/23/2011- An utter embarrassment... ticketing failures too many to list.
People only read the headlines and the first two paragraphs. Everything else in the article is immaterial.
...are those who've helped us.
Right 'round the corner could be bigger than ourselves.
i read the entire thing good friend... i will bold what caught my eye
ah, more PROOF of global warming huh?? what a joke.
so what this is saying is that they cannot make a slam dunk direct correlation between these specific events and global warming... but what it is saying is that a shift in weather patterns and jet streams is being caused by global warming, which is going to change the weather in certain area's of the globe...
to sum it up, we could be seeing the predicted effects of global warming taking place... and this study and recent events are backing that up
sometimes 1+1=2 folks...
I wasn't around in 1590! Besides, my DNA was over, warmin' its balls in Ireland at the time.
By Anthony DePalma
The New York Times
Thursday 12 July 2007
By the end of this century, 100-year floods could hit New York City every 10 years, Long Island lobsters could disappear and New York apples could be hard to come by if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released yesterday by a group of scientists and economists.
"The Northeast can anticipate substantial - and often unwelcome or dangerous - changes during the rest of this century," concluded the report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which examined the impact of global warming on the region. "The very character of the Northeast is at stake."
The report, which covers nine states, is the product of a two-year collaboration between the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, and a team of several dozen independent scientists and economists.
Speaking at a news conference at the New York Botanical Garden, one of the authors of the report, James L. McCarthy, professor of biological oceanography at Harvard University and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said there could be droughts every summer in the Catskill Mountains, which supply drinking water for 9 million New Yorkers. At the same time, there could be heavy downpours that could turn the city's water more turbid and cause flooding.
With higher temperatures, smog would increase and air quality in the region would decline, significantly worsening conditions for people with asthma, and the amount of pollen produced would soar, making life miserable for people with allergies.
In a similar report released last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists laid out the regional climate changes that global warming could bring. Average temperatures could rise by more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit in both winter and summer by the end of the century, and New York City might have to swelter through 25 days a year with temperatures over 100 degrees.
In the report released yesterday, the group focused on the possible impact of those changes.
Earlier springs, longer summers and less snowy winters are already being felt in part because of heat-trapping gases that were released over the last 50 years. The region will have to adapt to those changes, the scientists said. But things could become far worse, and much more costly, they said, unless steps are taken now to mitigate the impact.
Two alternative futures are laid out in the study, which was reviewed by other scientists before being released. One projects what the future would look like if steps were taken to lower emissions; the other looks at what would happen if emissions continued to grow.
Without reductions in emissions, sea levels could rise, inundating coastal areas on southern Long Island and pushing water into parts of Lower Manhattan, flooding the financial district and swamping the subways, making them inoperable. Atlantic City could be flooded every other year by late century.
The impact on New York State's $3.5 billion-a-year agricultural industry could be devastating, said David W. Wolfe, a professor of plant ecology in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University and one of the scientists who contributed to the report.
While higher temperatures might at first be welcomed because they would extend the growing season, they would bring new plant and insect pests like the corn earworm that could ravage crops.
Unless emissions are reduced, the scientists warned, Long Island lobsters would disappear or move to cooler waters up north. Without a hard frost to set buds, New York apple trees would not produce as much fruit as before. Under stress from invasive species, maple, beech and birch trees could disappear from certain regions of the state, including the Adirondacks.
And since it would often be hotter than dairy cows like, milk production could decline by 15 percent or more in late summer months.
Professor McCarthy said those future effects could be eased substantially by efforts just now being put into place to curb emissions.
Those efforts include the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, in which all the northeastern states agreed to reduce power plant emissions and establish a carbon trading program. And New Jersey's global warming law, which Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed last Friday, commits the state to reducing all greenhouse gas emissions in the state by 80 percent by mid-century.
A separate news conference was held in Trenton yesterday, focusing on global warming's potential impact on New Jersey.
Mr. Corzine said that state and local efforts to reduce greenhouse gases are important, but controlling global warming requires a commitment on the national level, something the current administration has been reluctant to pursue.
"In absence of leadership on the federal level, the fight to reduce greenhouse gases has now fallen upon the states," Mr. Corzine said. The governor also called on individuals to do their share with simple acts like driving less and using mass transit.
The report did not include an analysis of the potential cost to business and consumers of the efforts of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But Rohit T. Aggarwala, New York City's director of long-term planning and stability, said at the New York news conference that cutting carbon emissions would not necessarily have a negative cost.
Mr. Aggarwala said that steps New York had already taken would improve the quality of life in the city and make New York more competitive. He said those efforts ranged from the relatively simple, like promoting the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs, to long-range strategic initiatives like congestion pricing.
The full report on climate change in the Northeast is available at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Web site, http://www.ucsusa.org.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/071307EB.shtml
By Katherine Harding
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday 03 July 2007
Water that existed for thousands of years is disappearing from Ellesmere Island's landscape, prompting scientists to sound the alarm.
John Smol had just landed at a remote scientific research base near the top of the world last summer, when he realized that something was terribly wrong.
"I remember getting off the helicopter and looking out and wondering: 'What the hell is going on here?'" Prof. Smol, one of Canada's top Arctic climate researchers, said in an interview.
It was early July, and where several shallow Arctic ponds had formed for thousands of years during the polar summer on Ellesmere Island's Cape Herschel, there was now only dirt. Others had dramatically reduced water levels.
Prof. Smol, a Queen's University biologist, and fellow researcher Marianne Douglas, a University of Alberta earth and atmospheric sciences professor, could conclude there was only one cause for the disappearance of these fixtures of the Arctic landscape: climate change.
The professors' alarming research, which was conducted over 24 years, was published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online journal. While they've been studying these ancient bodies of freshwater since 1983, Prof. Smol said 2006 was the first year that about seven of the 40 ponds they've been monitoring completely dried up. They also noted that the water chemistry was changing, with the ponds now containing higher levels of salt due to evaporation.
"A major threshold has passed," Prof. Smol warned. "These ponds are at best ephemeral, and maybe even worse, some are maybe just going into the land."
Prof. Smol said their study is another sign the Arctic is changing dramatically. But even he's surprised by the pace.
"I think it's worse than we thought it was," he said. "It's happening much faster than even we had anticipated.... It's happening right before my very eyes."
In 1994, Prof. Douglas and Prof. Smol first warned that Arctic ponds were in trouble, publishing controversial research that found that while the bodies of water had existed for millenniums, they had started undergoing marked ecological changes, consistent with climate change, in the past 150 years.
"Not a lot of people believed it," recalled Prof. Douglas, who directs the University of Alberta's Canadian Circumpolar Institute. However, Prof. Douglas said, scientific techniques, such as studying sediment cores taken from the bottom of the ponds, told a different story.
Prof. Douglas said many were skeptical that the Arctic started showing some of these changes brought on by higher temperatures "way back then."
She said that as signs of climate change in the Arctic have become more common in recent years, such as melting sea ice and permafrost, the public is increasingly convinced that the region is thawing.
"I think we are a tipping point," she said. "We never expected to see these ponds dry up so soon."
Prof. Douglas said that the loss of these fragile ecosystems in the Arctic could have profound negative effects on the plants, organisms and habitat, such as breeding seabirds, that depend on this freshwater source.
Millions of these ponds - none are formally named - pop up in the Arctic every summer, usually between July and September. They are less than two metres deep and range in size from several football fields to a small living room.
The research on these ubiquitous bodies of water happened almost by chance. In the early 1980s, Prof. Smol was working in the High Arctic on another research project when he realized that "virtually nothing" was known about them.
Prof. Smol, who is travelling with Prof. Douglas up to Cape Herschel this week to continue monitoring the Arctic ponds, is hopeful that Canadians are alarmed by their findings. "Changes are happening now and we have to move."
He said the Arctic, which is extremely sensitive to warming trends, is increasingly becoming the world's version of the miner's canary. "Typically what happens in the Arctic is an early warning of what's going to be happening in other places soon," he said. "What happens there affects us all."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070703.warctic03/BNStory/National/home
Erosion Slicing Arctic Alaska Habitat
By Yereth Rosen
Reuters
Tuesday 03 July 2007
Anchorage - A swath of marshy, wildlife-rich coastal land in Arctic Alaska being eyed for oil drilling is eroding rapidly probably because of the disappearance of sea ice that used to protect it from the ocean waves, according to a study released Monday.
Using satellite data and maps compiled from aerial photographs, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, found that land lost to erosion north of Teshekpuk Lake, Arctic Alaska's largest lake, was twice as fast in 1985 to 2005 period than in the previous 30 years.
The sea has pushed in half a mile in some places over past decades, the study said.
"Since beaches are absent or poorly developed along most of the studied coast, there is little, if any, protection against this increased wave energy. As a result, the waves undercut the mud-rich permafrost land, causing it to collapse into the sea," said USGS scientist John Mars in a statement released by the agency.
In addition, salty sea water has contaminated formerly freshwater lakes, migratory birds, caribou and other wildlife populations has lost habitat and the sparse human infrastructure along the coastline has been damaged, the study said.
The study is in the current issue of Geology, a periodical of the Geological Society of America.
Global warming has been pronounced in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic, with average winter temperatures rising as much as 5.4 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees or 4 degrees Celsius) over the last six decades, according to the international Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.
"The area (Teshekpuk Lake) is one of the most important areas in the entire Arctic, and I don't just mean in Arctic Alaska," said Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska. "It is simply the most important goose-molting area in the Arctic."
It is also believed to hold vast amounts of untapped oil. In recent years, the Bush administration lifted a decades-long ban on oil development and has tried to sell oil and gas exploration rights there.
Environmentalists and the region's Inupiat Eskimos have cited global warming impacts as a reason to oppose drilling in land near Teshekpuk Lake.
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=13067
Except for you, of course.
naděje umírá poslední
Well then your people had bigger worries than climate change back then. They were more concerned with England coming over and "raining down" on them, so to speak. Different kind of rain though.
-Enoch Powell
exactly ... he's funny ... he will critique everything that supports the notion but then turns around and writes things like that ...
By Steve Connor
The Independent UK
Friday 20 July 2007
The melting of mountain glaciers and ice caps as a result of global warming over the next century is likely to cause bigger than expected increases in sea levels.
An assessment of the volume of water running into the oceans from melting ice caps suggests that sea levels could rise by two to three times the amount previously expected from this source. The study used satellite monitoring to assess the contribution to sea levels made by all land-based ice, except for the two continental-sized ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
It found that the volume of water melting into the sea each year from glaciers and ice caps was 100 cubic miles (417 cubic km), which is almost equal in size to the amount of water in Lake Erie. However, this volume of meltwater is increasing by a further three cubic miles each year because of an acceleration in the rate at which ice caps and glaciers are melting, said Professor Mark Meier, of the University of Colorado. "One reason for doing this study is the widely held view that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be the principal cause of sea-level rise," Professor Meier said. "But we show that it is the glaciers and ice caps, not the two large ice sheets, that will be the big players in the sea rise for at least the next few generations."
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that melting ice caps and glaciers will add about three inches (7.6cm) to sea levels this century. But the latest assessment, published in the journal Science, suggests they are more likely to add between four inches and 9.5 inches to global sea levels.
This does not include the rise in sea levels caused by the thermal expansion of water, which could potentially double this figure. A 12-inch rise in sea level can typically cause a shoreline to retreat by 100ft (30m) or more. About 100 million people now live in areas within three feet of sea level.
"At the very least, our projections indicate that future sea-level rise may be larger than anticipated, and that the component due to glaciers and ice caps will continue to be substantial," Professor Meier said.
Asked why the last report of the IPCC estimates a lower increase in sea-level rise, Professor Meier said that the scientists had to deal with scientific data that was out of date by the time the latest report of the IPCC was published this year. "They were restricted to the use of numbers in the peer-reviewed literature that was published before early 2006. And some of that data was gathered long before that. We used data that was newer," he said.
The study covered several hundred thousand glaciers and ice caps in polar and temperate regions. The research also included vast mountain glaciers such as the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, which is discharging about two cubic-miles of water into Prince William sound; and the Bering Glacier, also in Alaska, which measures about 5,000 square-miles.
Professor Robert Anderson, of Colorado University, who took part in the study, said polar glaciers that run into the sea are retreating because of complex "dynamic" processes. "We need to acknowledge the role of all the ice masses and understand the physical mechanism by which they deliver water to the sea," he said.
Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey have found that the movement of about 300 glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsular had accelerated towards the sea. The scientists believe they were disintegrating at a faster rate than before.
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2785477.ece
Actually, lots of people didn't get through the Little Ice Age okay, lots of people had to move house, lots of people died, there was famine...
naděje umírá poslední
Yes, and let's not forget that those English were Christians.:p;)
nope. I never claimed that I did. in fact, I dont. but as my post CLEARLY said. I dont think anyone really does. have anything else stupid to say?
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley