Worldwide, leaders are waking up to the fact that climate change is real. But can the recent spurge of natural disasters and harsh weather conditions be used as evidence to plead this case?

As the United States prepared for Christmas in 2010, its East Coast was buried under the avalanche of gale-force blizzards. This record snowfall was a reprise of a wintry assault that devastated major cities in the mid-Atlantic region in February last year.

In a different turn off weather events, in July last year, an intense heat wave spread from Maine to Pennsylvania. By the following month, the continuing drought shrank Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir in Nevada and Arizona, by a significant margin. Then in spring that year, torrential rains unleashed floods across southeast America even as summer heat waves ravaged much of the northern hemisphere. And the US is not the only country being affected as we in South Africa are experiencing our own set of weather disasters including thunderstorms in the Highveld in the middle of winter. While Mother Nature continues to unleash her fury, environmentalists continue on their work of proving the connection between climate change, global warming, and raging natural disasters. But is there a link or are ‘green’ fundi simply off track? And how ‘fine’ is the line between natural and man-made disasters?

The UN opinion
According to reports in the UK Sunday Times and other mainstream international media, the United Nations (UN) climate science panel wrongly linked global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters. The claims were apparently based on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny, and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link was too weak. The Sunday Times stated that the UN report’s authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate, and was central to discussions at the 2010 Copenhagen climate summit.

Following this controversy, the IPCC was also forced to retract claims from its 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. The claim was allegedly taken from a magazine extract and no conclusive results were established by the IPCC.

When the paper was eventually published in 2008, it had a new angle. This time it stated: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses”.

Despite these recent events, Professor Jean-Pascal Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, reiterated in media statements that the IPCC process remains rigorous and scientific.

Flip side of the coin
Walter Amman, president of the Global Risk Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is convinced that climate change will lead to more natural disasters resulting from extreme weather conditions. He attributes his claims to the increase in natural disasters over the past ten years.

And it appears that Amman is not the only person convinced of this theory. Gerd Tetzlaff, head of the advisory board of the German Committee on Disaster Prevention, also sees the link between climate change and natural disasters. In 2009 the organisation demanded greater coordination between disaster prevention and climate change adaptation. Tetzlaff says that rare and destructive events should not be overlooked; and that countries across the globe are equally affected by climate change-induced natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina, which struck the US country of New Orleans in 2005, made international headlines, and got scientists rattled as the year marked a record high in the number of storms experienced within the area. Professor Mojib Latif of the marine sciences institute GEOMAR in Kiel reported that although 2005 saw a record number of storms, there have been large fluctuations in hurricane activity across decades, citing the 1950s as another very active period. Despite this, he believes that the connection between climate change and natural disasters is certainly there from a scientific point of view. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Latif stated: “Take the Southern Atlantic Ocean as an example. Due to colder waters coming to the surface, it has, so far, been the only tropical ocean which produces no significant hurricanes.”

“But if global warming proceeds,” he explained, “and if in addition the ocean circulation changes in a way that the Southern tropical Atlantic gets much warmer, then this will become a region which will favour hurricanes.” Although there may be disagreement over the present impact of climate change on particular types of disasters, the prospect that things may change for the worse in the future are reason enough to turn attention towards preparing and adapting.

Objectively speaking
Nowhere has the war over the causes of climate change been waged more aggressively than in the land down under – Australia. The country has an exceptionally fragile ecology, rendering it very vulnerable. Floods in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales, Cyclone Yasi, and recent bushfires around Perth in Western Australia, have made disaster control and prevention in the country top priorities.

However, without accurate scientific evidence, it is difficult to determine which disasters can be classified as natural and which are man-induced. While climate change and global warming are realities that should not be dismissed, is it not, perhaps, a tad bit early for us to experience the effects? Hurricanes, tornados, floods, heat waves – these are all natural disasters that have been around for centuries, so how do we directly relate the incidents to climate change especially when the UN has gone off on a tangent, releasing reports to the public without proper evidence to support their theories? Yet on the other hand, we have scientific experts who have compared the results from natural disasters from decades ago to the disasters we experience today, and can confidently state that the two are indeed connected.

The Australian government is not taking any chances. In February this year Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced plans to implement a fixed price on carbon emissions by June 2012. The new carbon tax will not only help in reducing the country’s carbon emissions output, but will also help boost the economy. Financial models showed that making deep cuts in carbon pollution would not cripple the economy, with growth in real national income rising at an estimated average annual rate of 1.1% per person until 2050 (with the introduction of a carbon tax). This compares with growth of 1.2% without a levy on pollution. By 2020, national employment in Australia is projected to increase by 1.6 million jobs, while at the same time growth in domestically-produced pollution should decrease.

But of course everything in government has to be turned into a political spin-off with Gillard’s opposition party in New South Wales having campaigned against the carbon tax ahead of the March 2011 ballot, the results of which I would rather not discuss in this article.

Conclusions
Climate change exists. It may not be a realisation now but in time the effects will surface. And although we might miss the effects thereof, future generations will not be so lucky. Whether or not one believes in the concept of climate change, there’s no disputing that recent weather patterns have been way off track. And before scientists do connect the inconclusive dots that join climate change and natural disasters, remember a conscientious decision can be made to avoid the inevitable