The Royal Meteorological Society has produced a media briefing about the rapidly strengthening and record-breaking “super” El Niño that is now underway. Tbney sent me a briefing on this yesterday. Their full document is available here.
As they put it in the email to me:
It is essential that messaging around El Niño includes the context of fossil fuel-driven climate heating.
The key points in their report, which I am not seeing reported elsewhere, are:
- A powerful El Niño on a hotter planet means greater risks. The current El Niño is the strongest in the modern observational record. It will influence weather around the world, but its impacts are unfolding against a background of unprecedented human-induced warming, meaning extreme weather can now have more damaging consequences.
- El Niño may push global temperatures towards new records, but fossil fuels are driving the long-term warming. The impact of climate change on global temperatures is more than ten times the short-term boost associated with a typical El Niño event. Climate change is already affecting extreme weather risk, the cost of living, and food systems and supply chains in the UK. This year's El Niño could temporarily push temperatures to 1.6 -1.8°C, a long-term level of heating we will reach within 10-15 years at current emission rates.
- A warmer world can amplify El Niño's disruption. El Niño shifts rainfall and atmospheric circulation, increasing heatwaves and droughts in some regions, and extreme rainfall and floods in others. The warmer atmosphere from climate change intensifies heat and rainfall extremes, worsening the consequences for people, agriculture, water supplies, and infrastructure. However, impacts vary considerably between regions and individual events.
- The UK is not insulated from the consequences. El Niño can influence North Atlantic weather patterns, potentially affecting winter storms and rainfall, although its effects on UK weather are less predictable than in the tropics. The UK is also exposed through global food production, commodity prices, supply chains and economic disruption. Climate change is already increasing the UK's exposure to extreme heat and intense rainfall.
- We cannot stop El Niño, but we can limit the warming that makes its impacts more dangerous. There is growing evidence that climate change increases the severity of El Niño events and amplifies its impacts, and there is high confidence that continued warming will intensify extreme heat and rainfall. Rapidly cutting fossil fuel emissions and investing in climate resilience are essential to limiting future risks.
I added the emphasis in the fourth of those paragraphs.
I know people think my outlook is gloomy right now.
I think that is justified. What I want us to do is manage the risks, and my concern is that we are not.
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Don’t worry, it will be in the Ten Year Plan, which will be ready very soon, well, fairly soon, well, to be honest, not sure when it will be ready, but “GROWTH, GROWTH, GROWTH!!”. That’s it, we will GROW our way out of climate collapse. We’re already seeing spectacular growth in interest rates and bank profits. REJOICE!”
🙂
‘manage the risks’?<p>
We ordered highland venison steaks from Sainsbury’s knowing the over population of red deer in the highlands, but got Ostrich instead<p>
Could it have been a signal for how we are ‘managing the risks’?
There is a Scottish travel vlogger, who on one of his recent videos, expressed he was taking more interest in the carbon emissions that travel entails and how he was planning to book his trips wisely because of that – and the comments were stuffed to the brim with climate change denialism! Climate change IS happening before our very eyes, at the history-of-the-Earth equivalent of the speed of light, as yet there are STILL LOADS of people who have fallen lock, stock, and barrel for anti-climate change propaganda!
Much to agree with
Well, I’ve repainted the house externally, cleared all the gutters and strengthened the fencing (I live on a hill).
Here we go.
And may I extend my thanks to Thatcher’s great car economy that finished off the road lobby’s destruction of electric trolley buses and the tram system throughout this country as well as the railway system that was never comprehensively electrified.
And here we are, putting some of it back at great cost.
The conclusion I can only come to is that we have been so stupid at a huge cost.
Much to agree with