Flash Floods and Hot Cities

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.

Antarctica Appeal

We produce around 32 billion tons of CO2 each year .Out of that about 15 actually stays in the atmosphere contributing to climate change. The oceans, forests, vegetation and soil store the rest of that CO2. So obviously if this current storage facility starts declining we are in more trouble than before. Out of these carbon sinks about a quarter of the carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans... and the biggest ocean for this is the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica.

Recently scientists have reported that this large volume of water now only able to absorb a fraction of the CO2 it use to. CO2 needs to be stored at below 300 metres to stay there permanently. It is reckoned that the stormy seas being whipped up by higher wind speeds which are themselves a by-product of the changing climate is causing the mixing of deep water with the shallower water which absorbs less of this greenhouse gas. I

t is like some vicious circle - which we are looking desperately to address. While doing so we must galvanize ourselves and our Governments to work harder on reducing emissions.

Don't Snow Down on Kyoto

“How can we be experiencing global warming,” people ask , ‘When we have conditions like this and we are searching around for warm scarves and boots?”

Right now in the UK we have had the coldest snowiest spell for twenty years. But there are those who believe that despite these cold spells climate change is real and is our responsibility and we should be taking extreme action now and they say that the pattern of warming is long term and that there is obviously short term natural variation and in fact the tendency to look for signs of climate change in the form of temperature rise from year to year can play into the hands of climate sceptics who have used the recent cooler world temperatures as their evidence that global warming stopped in 1998 and that our heating globe is no more than a fantastic myth perpetrated for a dozen or so different reasons. ..but the fact is that we do know we are experiencing extremes in weather right across the world and possibly this is because of the distribution of the energy that has built up as a result of our heating up our globe.