The worst British wildfires in 30 years follow a record-breaking warm and dry 2011 April

Top Record Temperatures

Last month was the warmest April in the UK since records began in 1910. Provisional figures recently released by the Met Office indicate that many parts of the UK saw temperatures 3 to 5 degrees centigrade higher than it is normal for April. 2007 had already seen the warmest April since records began, so this sets a new and higher milestone only four years after the previous top record. In England, where official figures date back to 1659, April 2011 became the warmest April in 350 years.

The same month saw unusually low amounts of rainfall, with the average national rainfall at 36.7mm –approximately half of the normal amount of rainfall for the month. This has prompted various water suppliers companies throughout the country, such as Wales Water, to issue precautionary warnings asking customers to use water sparingly. During Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons on 4 May, the PM was informed that farmers in the South of England were ‘genuinely concerned’ about shortages of water and possible drought.

The heat wave has been caused by the persistence of a series of high pressure systems over the east of the British Isles. These weather systems have brought warm, dry air from the continent as well as from North African and the Saharan regions. The high pressure has kept away cooler winds that normally come at this time of the year from the Atlantic, bringing moisture and bands of rain over the UK. Whilst it is impossible to attribute any particular weather event directly and unequivocally to Global Warming, an increase in extreme weather patterns and weather events are regarded as a possible sign of Climate Change.

Wildfire Havoc

The unusually warm and dry weather has seen some of the worst wildfires seen in the UK in the last 30 years. Blazes have burned continuously for several days in areas of Wales, the Scottish Highlands, Berkshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. David Cameron has praised the efforts of fire crews up and down the country battling the blazes and has promised funds towards the countrywide fire fighting operation. In Ireland fire crews have had to deal with more than 1,000 gorse and forest fires over the last 5 days.

Whilst the police are investigating a number of individuals on suspicion of possible arson, many of the blazes are likely to have been initiated unpremeditatedly by the increasing use of Chinese lanterns at wedding ceremonies, country pick nicks and other celebratory events. Fire fighters have asked the public to be aware that Chinese lanterns must be used carefully as their embers can continue glowing for extended periods even after the flame has gone out. Abandoned pieces glass lying on the ground are also known to be the causes of fires when exposed to long spells of warm, dry and sunny weather, as dry leaves are highly flammable.

Whilst dozens of fire fighter crews continue to battle the flames through beatings and dropping water from helicopters, only rainfall is likely to completely quench the advancing blazes. However, showers are of limited help. Only sustained rain will have a lasting effect, as the longevity of the fires means that hot spots buried one meter deep in the undergrowth threaten to reignite the fires that have been put out. Whilst temperatures are expected to hit 26°C over the weekend, it is hoped that forecast thunderstorms offer the fire crews much needed help over the next few days.

Posted under Environmental News

Extreme Weather in the UK. Picture source: NASA

According to provisional figures released on 6 January 2011 by the UK’s MET Office, the official body charged with assessing meteorological and climatic conditions, last December unveiled the most extreme weather since records began in 1910. December was in fact the coldest month on record with its mean temperature averaging -1.0°C, well below the long-term average of 4.2°C, and dramatically lower than the second coldest December in 1981 which reached 0.1°C.

The top temperature also broke other previous extreme weather records: it became the coldest month in England and Wales since 1986; the coldest in Scotland since February 1947; and in Northern Ireland, it was the coolest month ever recorded.

The Cause of the Extreme Weather

The extreme temperatures were caused by an unusual event of high pressure which deflected the jet stream, a strong wind which brings warm and damp air from the west in an easterly direction, leaving much of Europe exposed to cold air from the North. As a whole, the UK’s mean temperature for the whole winter was 2.4 degrees centigrade which is the second coldest winter since 1985/1986.

The Effects of the Extreme Weather

The extreme weather and temperature drop saw significant amounts of snowfall during the month, caused widespread disruption to public transport, the aviation industry and essential local services. In Northern Ireland, record low temperatures were blamed for leaving 40,000 people without water for up to 12 days, following an unprecedented number of burst pipes. Councils up and down the country faced a backlog of rubbish waiting to be collected for more than two weeks, due to unsafe driving conditions.

By contrast, the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which collects temperature readings gathered by satellites, stated that last year was the second warmest year since satellite records began in 1979. Pending further analyses, the average global temperature for last year could beat 1998 as the warmest year on record. While it is hard to attribute any particular weather event solely to climate change many scientists consider such trends as consistent with the prospect of ongoing global warming.

Record breaking temperatures last year have been accompanied by a string of extreme weather events which have caused havoc to millions and devastated entire communities. In August, widespread wildfires around Moscow claimed more than 5000 lives, according to the Moscow Health Department. Concurrently, Pakistan experienced the worst flood in its history, affecting more than 20 million people and submerging one-fifth of its total land area. Floods also ravaged four Chinese provinces during the summer, displacing more than 10 million and killing thousands. These, however, are some of the worst examples of a large list of extreme weather events, from drought and heat wave to flood and big freezes which have affected people globally.

For more information you can visit the MET offices website or click on the link extreme weather to find more detailed statistical information.

Posted under Environmental News

More than ever before the Copenhagen climate Change Summit drew interest and scrutiny on the political side of climate change and global warming problems. Now, all eyes are fixed firmly on the negotiators, and the lack of development at the summit has angered many who would brand those negotiators as the culprits, and has been reported in newspapers, on blogs, news websites and social networks.

There was nothing of the sort in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol was a matter of great press interest, but nothing of the level of scrutiny reached other forms of expression. But the move towards the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit has coincided with the rise in blogging, and now a whole host of angry activists – neither politicians nor journalists – are getting in on the act.

Putting pressure on both the politicians involved and the journalists expected to deliver interpretation of those actions to the world, blogs and social networks have allowed for an explosion of public opinion on the summit. One such example comes from Radiohead front-man Thom Yorke, who attended the summit and kept the Radiohead website in a state of frequent flux with his thoughts on the talks.

In a final flurry of anger, he wrote as follows:

“i guess this time of year is a time for serious reflection and i have been doing a lot of that since coming back from copenhagen.
you know what has stunned me coming back is the anger you can taste in the air about this, everybody i meet wants to talk about it.. everyone is angry and despairing and i have tried to remain positive when i talk to them about it.. it has perhaps awakened something in the back of the mind of sane people throughout the world who perhaps naively assumed that something positive would come of these talks.”

And anger has been the reaction for so many that it will now be hoped that the unsatisfactory deal done at Copenhagen will not be met by an equally disappointed lack of protest and backlash from those who oppose its weaknesses.Still in the immediate aftermath, it is difficult to tell. Let’s hope, though, that at a grass-roots level, something can be done.

Posted under Articles, Climate

Today is the day that world leaders join the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and where talk will focus on emissions cuts, carbon trading schemes, the green ambitions for the US and China, it could easily be forgotten that the key to long term development lies in green resources.

Understandably, the conference and the lead up to it focused on the respective positions of the US, India, China and the European nations on immediate emissions cuts and CO2 emissions limits. Across the media the summit has been relayed as a ‘make or break’ fortnight in climate change policy and global warming politics; it must deal first with snap decisions, with catalysts and triggers – with the immediate problem – before it can discuss future development and sustainability.

In doing so, though, it risks losing sight of the climate change problem at its most problematic level: that of future generations. Certainly at current the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is looking to safeguard future generations by curbing the behaviour of current times, but it must also look to the development of a climate change policy that reflects a continued effort at keeping CO2 emissions.

Green resources are the key to that effort.

Green Resources Develop Continued Low Carbon Economies

In developing a long term goal for low carbon emissions and climate change policy, though, it is imperative that world leaders and environment ministers settle on some framework for green resources – renewable energy, potentially nuclear, and also carbon capture and storage (CCS) – so that any emissions limits put in place at Copenhagen can be sustained and developed.

Whilst green resources are implicit in any emissions cuts at the conference, it must also be remember that – much like the arguments about binding or non-binding emissions targets – green resources can only develop globally with a binding framework. If there’s no binding framework on development and implementation of green resources, then their inclusion and their development is only tacit.

And if their development is only tacit, then their development is slower. And if their development is slower, then the growth of green resources that will help major nation’s transition to low carbon economies is stunted.

Green Resources Must Grow as Part of a Binding Framework

Alongside pledges for emissions cuts at Copenhagen, then, should come a commitment to developing green resources across nations, as a means for achieving low carbon transition and CO2 emissions reductions.

Creating a framework for sustainability and further development too, it ensures that where Copenhagen addresses the needs of the short-term, it also safeguards longer term goals for climate change policy and global warming politics, in years to come.

Let us see then, whether the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference can set such long-term goals, as it struggles to set the short-term ones.

Posted under Articles, Climate

After much anticipation and discussion, the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is now less than one week away. World leaders and ministers – including US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minster Gordon Brown and Energy Minister Ed Miliband, and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh – have spoken of the ‘do or die’ nature of the talks.

But many environmentalists and greens are now beginning to speak out on what they see as a fundamental failure on the part of politicians to understand the nature of the problems that they face.

James Hansen, speaking to the Guardian Newspaper, has suggested that a deal at Copenhagen would be a disaster: he argues that the policies that leaders are touting, borne out of a lack of understanding, will create further and graver problems, and will be legislatively guaranteed.

Others have further argued that the system of carbon trading that was so prevalent in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 should be scrapped in its entirety at Copenhagen: carbon trading, they claim, is a system that has little effect on genuine carbon emissions reductions worldwide. It creates a system, so the argument goes, that rewards nations and organisations for a reduction that has little practical effect, and still more worryingly allows for an override of environmental commitments with financial power.

Interestingly, then, many environmental greens are arguing that the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference is designed for failure: politicians are calling for more ambitious deals, a great collective responsibility, and binding targets, but critics claim that the foundation for these principles is badly researched and will lead to disaster in any case.

It is a statement of futility that will not encourage politicians and those who are watching the talks with hope and anticipation.With the deal at Copenhagen expected to bind nations to its terms for at least a decade, any wrong steps could prove costly: it is the politicians themselves that are claiming that the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference represents the last great opportunity for an emissions reduction deal, and any fundamental mistakes could be dangerous indeed.

Nonetheless, people across the world will look to the 7th of December with great expectation.

Posted under Environmental News

The power of the US in the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, has led to its attribution as the world’s first ‘hyperpower’; not content with the term superpower, commentators and political thinkers have argued that the US, occupying a position of unrivalled global supremacy, is so dominant in political, cultural and economic matters that it requires the new term.

Indeed, US cultural and political hegemony is strong. One need only look to Hollywood as an example of cultural hegemony, and the Middle East as an example of political hegemony.

Of course the benefits of hegemony and hyperdom bring with them certain obligations; at least, that is to say, that other nations feel that their own loyalty to the line require something in return. That return comes quite often in terms of leadership: if a hegemonic power can tell others what to do, then it must also be prepared to take the bull by the horns when others will not.

Such is the criticism of the US in the lead up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, where political leaders have been calling on the US time and again to make solid financial as well as environmental commitments in order to set examples to other nations.

So far, of course, they have done nothing of the kind. With under just a month until the summit, many politicians are criticising the Obama administration publicly. Of these criticism, one seems particularly pertinent; Danish environment Connie Hedegaard will be one of the symbolic figureheads of the conference, as the environmental representative of the host nation. She stated as follows:

“I remind the US that it is not the only country in the world that has to have discussions with its domestic parliament…The expectation out there worldwide among populations and the young [is for] the US to deliver on one of the key challenges of our century. The Americans will have to come up [with an offer] one way or another“.

Hegemony, then, requires a certain sense of responsibility, and it requires an understanding of the hegemonic nation’s social commitment to leadership if  it wishes to enjoy the benefits of hegemonic status. At current, the US is now fulfilling that commitment, and the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit could fail as a result.

Posted under Environmental News

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference is fast approaching. The anticipation surrounding the event has generated a vast media landscape over the preceding months, so that the summit is now at the centre of political tensions. That anticipation, though, has slowly given way to a sense of resignation and even disappointment, over the apparent lack of cohesion and vision in the discussions of world leaders in their attempts to draw together common goals and aims before the opening of the conference proper.

In a new bout of criticism, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has condemned world leaders and their inability to see past their own national interests, thus hampering the opportunity for a global deal.

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made the following comments:

“I gave all the world’s leaders a very grim view of what the science tells us and that is what should be motivating us all, but I’m afraid I don’t see too much evidence of that at the current stage. Science has been moved aside and the space has been filled up with political myopia with every country now trying to protect its own narrow short-term interests. They are afraid to have negotiations go any further because they would have to compromise on those interests“.

This picture of the world leaders as narrow minded and self-serving is not one that will bring hope to those who see the Copenhagen Climate change Summit as a pertinent and still worse necessary opportunity for leader to come to a planet-saving climate change deal.

Indeed,with concrete figures for financial aid still missing, the gulf between developed and developing nations that has so threatened the global essence of the deal is set to persist; whilst developed nations argue that financial aid for poorer countries is a necessary component any potential agreements, none – except so far, Britain – are ready to commit to exact values, least of all the US.

If that problem persists, it will be indicative of the position of world leader in relation to global cooperation. That there are smaller issues, pertaining to individual countries, or between only a few nations or blocs, is further cause for concern.

Posted under Environmental News

So much talk about the problem of climate change and its effect is now so seeped into mainstream media, that more and more people are instead trying to tell stories of people who deal with it daily.

One such story, reported by the Guardian, tells the story of the lives of nomads in the Arctic Tundra. They wrote that,

It is one of the world’s last great wildernesses, a 435-mile long peninsula of lakes and squelching tundra stretching deep into the Arctic Ocean. For 1,000 years the indigenous Nenets people have migrated along the Yamal peninsula. In summer they wander northwards, taking their reindeer with them, across a landscape of boggy ponds, rhododendron-like shrubs and wind-blasted birch trees. In winter they return southwards.

But this remote region of north-west Siberia is now under heavy threat from global warming. Traditionally the Nenets travel across the frozen Ob River in November and set up camp in the southern forests around Nadym. These days, though, this annual winter pilgrimage is delayed. Last year the Nenets, together with many thousands of reindeer, had to wait until late December when the ice was finally thick enough to cross.

Here in one of the most remote parts of the planet there are clear signs the environment is under strain. Last year the Nenets arrived at a regular summer camping spot and discovered that half of their lake had disappeared. It had drained away after a landslide. While landslides can occur naturally, scientists say there is unmistakable evidence that Yamal’s ancient permafrost is melting. The Nenets report other curious changes – fewer mosquitoes and a puzzling increase in gadflies“.

An old pilgrimage threatened, they are nonetheless able to adapt. But the truth that the world is changing at its foundations – with groups who work with the land, still, and harbour a relationship with it – is telling indeed of the future problems that climate change might cause.

It is safe to say though that the Nenets won’t live in quite the same way now as once they did, and their lives set an example of how genuinely climate change can transform the lives of those who inhabit the world.

Posted under Articles, Environmental News

If a rich-poor divide is the biggest obstacle in the formation of a successful climate deal at Copenhagen in December, then British calls for a European-US commitment on financial aid less than 50 days from the conference are either the signs of a brave man but foolish man on a doomed and  sinking ship, or the rallying call of a captain setting new wind in the sails.

Whichever the British endeavours turn out to be, Gordon Brown – backed by Ed Miliband and Alistair Darling – is certainly making a concerted effort for a sense of cohesion in anticipation of the talks, and has backed his words up with a €1bn pledge. That move might lead others into a commitment on financial aid – seeing that some one, somewhere, is willing to front the cash – that so many claim is so badly needed if anything worthwhile can be agreed at the December conference.

For their part, the Guardian Newspaper have spoken of Alistair Darling’s own contribution to the debate, reporting as follows:

“The European Union should commit €10bn (£9.1bn) a year in direct funding to help developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change and reduce their emissions, Alistair Darling will say today. The chancellor will use a regular meeting in Luxembourg with his counterparts from across the EU to urge them to contribute to new funding ahead of the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. Britain will commit €1bn and wants the funding to be delivered by existing institutions, such as the World Bank.

Darling wants developed countries to agree to firm commitments ahead of the Copenhagen conference to convince developing countries the rest of the world is serious about supporting them to meet emissions targets.

“It’s in every country’s interest that we agree tough action on climate change at the Copenhagen conference in December. As the prime minister has said, there are now fewer than 50 days to set the course for that action. “We need to recognise there are responsibilities on both sides. Europe must play a critical role both by showing leadership and by bringing developed and developing nations together around a common action plan.”

Darling’s call for €10bn would represent the EU’s contribution to at least €30bn in direct public funding for developing countries, with the chancellor intending to call for the US to match the EU contribution. Britain estimates the developing world will need at least €100bn a year by 2020, if it is to meet recommended minimum targets to cut emissions to 50% of 1990 levels by 2050“.

The first step, it seems, is to foster some solidarity on the part of European nations, and the presence of a set figure might actually get the ball rolling. whether the US will be willing to match that contribution, and indeed whether Europe will put the money forward in time, is another matter entirely.

Posted under Articles, Climate

We are not far away now from the opening of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and progress has yet to be made, even in words.

India, along with China, are still at odds with the US – backed at least in part by European nations. China, separately have their own grievances with the European-American power block.

There have been similar indications of the futility of the talks from smaller nations. The Maldives have made their own point in odd fashion, by holding a cabinet meeting underwater, to vocalise the peril they face from rising sea levels.

And now, the US – who are reluctant to commit to pre-defined international emissions cuts – have themselves spoke of their fear for the lack of a deal.

In essence, it seems that the problem is one of a battle between established powers, seasoned negotiators who are used to having their own way in diplomatic negotiations, and the emerging but powerful nations of China and India, backed by smaller nations.

The Independent summarised the problem as follows:

“In the simplest terms, two sides have to come together to do a deal: the rich, mainly western countries of the developed world, such as the US and Britain, and the poorer (but rapidly growing) nations of the developing world, led by China and India. The argument is about responsibility and fairness, and it turns on the fact that most of the CO2 that is in the atmosphere now (and it remains for a century or more) has been put there by the rich countries, who have been pumping the stuff out since the industrial revolution 200 years ago; but most of the extra CO2 that will go into the atmosphere in the future will be put there by the developing nations, who are now embarked on a period of unprecedented, explosive economic growth, much of it powered by burning coal, with the principal purpose of drawing their peoples out of poverty.

Throughout the 20th- century the US was the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world; but in the last two years China has overtaken it, having doubled its carbon emissions from 3bn to 6bn tonnes in a mere decade, and they will continue to grow. So you might say that China, with India, Brazil, Indonesia and their fellow developing economies, are now making the problem worse – and they are; but that the US, with Britain, and Germany and France and the other rich countries, started the problem in the first place – and we did. (And we too are worsening the problem every day, of course, with our own carbon emissions.)“.

With a dichotomy over rich and poor, so often at the heart of so many problems, reconciliation at Copenhagen seems unlikely at best.

Posted under Articles, Climate