Another wakeup call on climate change
Super typhoon Haiyan, which smashed into the Philippines at the weekend, was the strongest storm ever recorded, with winds speeds of up to 220 miles an hour. It has created an apocalyptic situation in which no one knows how many are dead. The current figure is 10,000 and rising fast. There are close to a million people homeless and 10 million are effected to one extent or another. A state of national calamity has been declared by the Philippines government.
Much of the devastation is similar to the boxing day tsunami in 2004, but there is a crucial difference. The boxing day tsunami was a natural phenomenon caused by an under sea earth quake. This is a super typhoon created by anthropogenic global warming and the resulting climate change. In other words it’s the fault of human activity and we can do something about it.
There have always been typhoons hurricanes, of course, but global warming makes them more powerful and more frequent. As carbon is pumped into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels the greenhouse effect pushes up the global temperature including that of the oceans. The rising ocean temperature then feed the typhoons and the hurricanes making them more powerful and more frequent. Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012, which hit the USA, are obvious examples.
Fortunately the authorities in the Philippines are drawing the direct connection between the severity of Haiyn and global warming. The Philippines representative on the International Panel on Climate Change has denounced what he called the madness of climate change and has appealed to the world to start taking it seriously.
But how many extreme whether events do we have to have before this takes place?
Nor is it just big storms. The global weather systems are disrupted in many ways. Droughts are also getting more severe, as are heatwaves and therefore forest fires. The ice caps are melting and the sea level is rising. Water is getting more scarce.
Meanwhile it is the poor and the most vulnerable who suffer the most. They are the ones who live in the most vulnerable locations and in the most flimsy buildings. They are the ones who do not have the resources to put their lives back together. They are the last in the queue for the water.
In Britain much of the media is frightened to make the link with climate change other than in the most apologetic way because they have been bullied by the climate deniers and cave in every time. This has to stop.
But we have a responsibility as well. We have to make sure that we do not make this mistake in LU. We have to take climate change seriously and we have to make it central to our campaigning priorities.
Alan Thornett (12.11.03)
7 comments
7 responses to “Another wakeup call on climate change”
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Sorry guys, Left Unity is over before it started. This piece of global warming/climate change propaganda is the kind of thing to lose credibility. The casualty figures are questionable, and a radical new political movement is best removed from the green/climate scam. But even worse has been the utterly boring and irrelevant debate on the meaning of socialism; you guys are really trying to re-create the failed socialist/Trot attempts to build the leadership of a revolutionary party or worse re-create the God-awful bureaucratic welfare system of the post war Labour Government. Nothing new here, nothing to inspire.
Well thanks for sharing – cheerio.
the Uber rich fund various think tanks and lobbyist groups to influence politicians and policy. One of the other things they do is to hire a few people to spend 40-60 hours per week to simply troll newspaper discussion forums with right wing rhetoric.It must be an incredibly sad life – probably failed Daily Mail journalists, with all dreams lost and simply scraping a living by being online vermin.
The important thing however is that their appearance on the LU site means it is gaining in both importance and prominence.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100245522/environmentalism-wont-save-people-from-typhoons-like-in-the-philippines-the-precise-opposite-will-industry/
Im with Brendan on this one …
For those who want to extend international solidarity to those affected by the typhoon but ensure money gets to those on the ground an appeal has been launched here http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article30299 by an european solidarity group working directly with a Philippines led group.
Socialists in the Philippines dont agree with the climate sceptics who are posting here – this archipelago is probably the worst place in the world for extreme weather and it IS getting worse.
Not according to the IPCC ; you need to get off this doomsterism riff the facts dont bear you out
Alan,
Although I agree with the thrust of what you have written in the article, I think you do yourself a discredit with statements like:
“In Britain much of the media is frightened to make the link with climate change other than in the most apologetic way because they have been bullied by the climate deniers”
This is simply not true! Proper journalists, even if biased are supposed to question and not make statements stronger than they are. What you are asking is for the Mirror/Guardian/Indy to make inverted Daily Mail type headline: “Climate Change causes thousands of lives to be lost in the Philippines”. This would be a terrible oversimplificaiton would disengage those of us in the scientific community.
Typhoon’s are fundamentally powered by large amounts of solar energy delivered into the sea coupled with atmospheric conditions. A particularly strong one could occur anyway (storm of the century) from time to time. What we can say is the probability and severity of future events will increase.
It is worth thinking about what needs to be done. I would personally suggest 4 things:
1. All the world’s countries need to develop a Manhatten type project on the issue. Set up Climate change research centres in each major scientific country which share data and facilities to generate the next generation of non-carbon emitting fuels. In addition, the overall research budgets need to stop falling 5% year on year in real terms – at least give us inflation!
2. We need to build infrastructure to better utilise alternative fuels and power. The big energy companies are blocking this – e.g. feed in tarifs, distributed energy supplies and thus should be brought into public ownership. Local Nimbyism on wind turbines needs to be countered with the national and international need – i.e. there needs to be a good reason not to build wind turbines, heat pumps, solar thermal/pvc etc rather than the other way around. Additionally there needs to be an integration and expansion of public transport.
3. We all need to consider our own energy uses. We do not have a god given right to run around in a T-shirt and underwear in our homes in the middle of winter! I would be against rationing, but the government should be giving guidelines that could become personal targets with regards energy use.
4. Japan gets Typhoon’s all the time, but is much less affected than the Phillippines because it has massively bulletproofed its environment with an intricate (albeit at times ugly) system of dams, waterfalls, reservoirs etc. It is the duty of richer countries to support such building works in those countries which will be greatest hit by climate change.