A couple of weeks ago I was in sunny La Napoule in France with my husband. Four days later, just up the road, 20 people were killed in the most extreme weather conditions the region has seen for twenty years.
Is this a side effect of global warming? And if it is, what can we do to prepare as it seems that nature has a way of selecting new and unexpected destinations to act out her wrath. Right across the world violent storms claim lives on an almost weekly basis. How many depends on the population.
No surprise city mayors in particular are concerned because of the vast numbers of people living in cities. A couple of years ago at the Institute of Physics we alerted London councillors to the possibility of an extra tropic cyclone hitting our city and the devastation that would cause.
New York has already had experience. In 2007 the Subway was paralysed during morning rush hour when flash floods deposited debris on the tracks; the same thing as happened in 1992.
Our problem? You can't climate-proof anywhere, no campsite, no village, no city.
But what you can do is continue to counter what we believe are the causes of many of these extreme weather incidents. And that’s global warming. Like reducing CO2.And you can also turn a disadvantage into a plus. Take city buildings. Buildings account for 75 % of city emissions. But much of the 150 million square meters of rooftop in New York is black tar. In the summer it bakes under the sun and compounds the heat warming of climate change. Then it the winter it cracks when it freezes. But it is also the perfect landscape for photovoltaic panels which produce clean, much needed city energy. So just one example of a win-win. Let’s hope we can find some more.
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