Heavy rainfall is result of climate change: community resilience is answer

Photo: Slad Road in Stroud under feet of water: Coop, GP surgery and Pharmacy nearly flooded to ceilings

The Independent today notes a major new scientific study that shows the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change.

The details are below but perhaps a key issue that comes out of all this is what Molly Scott Cato writes in her letter to the SNJ today....."However good the official response, there is only so much that politicians and emergency planners can do. We are going to have to learn to rely on ourselves and each other more and more in the coming years. Building up resilient local economies and strengthening our communities is the most positive route we can take to protect ourselves against the effects of climate change."

Infact coming home on those various trains - see previous blog item - I read a review of the new book by Thomas Homer-Dixon entitled: "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation" (This link also has excerpts and a short video although I couldn't get it to work).

The apocalyptic picture painted in this book is grounded in much research - he argues that life is going to get very much harder for everyone. The reasons for this pessimistic outlook include most of what Greens have been banging on about for years - population growth (or differences in population growth rates between rich and poor countries), climate change and the increasing scarcity of high-quality energy sources such as oil.

Homer-Dixon also looks at other threats that tend could exacerbate the effects of the ones mentioned above. Again Greens have been trying to highlight these issues like the rising connectivity of our technological and transport networks, which increases the risk that a failure in one part of a system will cascade further and faster to other parts of the system.

Similarly energy grids - during the past decade, regional electricity production and distribution systems have been increasingly integrated- yet the result is that whole networks can collapse, as happened in the American power meltdown of 2003 in which 50 million people were affected, and the recent European blackout in 2006, in which millions of Belgian, French, Italian and Spanish homes were left in the dark. This is one of the many key reasons Greens want to see localised energy production/grids.

Anyway reflecting the point Molly made above - it's too late to avert disaster so the most sensible strategy is to be prepared. As Homer-Dixon points out, the idea of making our technological and social systems more resilient, so they can deal more successfully with future disasters, is hardly addressed by governments. To Greens this is all about building stronger local communities and economies - surely that is just commonsense?

In looking up Homer-Dixon I also came across the Utopia project in the Highlands - read more here - it is an experiment with volunteers to figure out how life in Britain will be affected by climate change and the end of cheap oil during the next few decades - Dylan Evans who set the project up also writes a column in The Times about their experiences - to me it is projects like this and our own Transition Stroud that will help build what is needed to make the difference.

Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor of The Independent writes in todays paper:

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.