Extreme weather is already frequent but is becoming the new normal, according to the country's climate change commission
Simon Tisdall theguardian.com 11 Nov 13;
As one of the world's poorest and least developed countries, the Philippines is handicapped by a chronic lack of resources, poor or non-existent infrastructure, and a far-flung archipelagic geography when dealing with the natural catastrophes that regularly afflict it.
But hard-won experience is also forcing Filipino government administrators and agencies, and their international collaborators, to examine and create new strategies for disaster preparedness, response and mitigation that have important potential applications in other parts of the world.
As the impact of climate change grows ever more marked, the ill-starred Philippines, lying prone and vulnerable at the windswept eastern end of the Pacific, is becoming a hothouse for developing new methods and systems in the growing business of disaster relief. But as super-typhoon Haiyan cruelly demonstrated, it still has a long way to go.
The Philippines averages about 20 typhoons a year, including three super-typhoons plus numerous incidents of flooding, drought, earthquakes and tremors and occasional volcanic eruptions, making it one of the most naturally disaster-prone countries in the world.
According to the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), the Philippines has recorded 182 disasters since 2002, in which almost 11,000 people have died. This figure does not include super-typhoon Bopha, known locally as Pablo, which hit the southern Philippines last December, killing more than 1,000 people, nor last Friday's super-typhoon Haiyan.
Bopha produced wind speeds of 160mph, gusting to 195mph and was the world's deadliest typhoon in 2012. More than 6.2 million people were affected. The cost of the damage was estimated at more than $1bn. Haiyan topped those wind speeds and has reportedly claimed 10 times the number of victims. Early estimates suggest 4.5 million people have been affected. The financial cost is so far incalculable.
The appearance that these storms are getting bigger and more damaging reflects rapidly deteriorating climatic trends. The five most devastating typhoons ever recorded in the Philippines have occurred since 1990, affecting 23 million people. Four of the costliest typhoons anywhere occurred in the same period, according to Oxfam.
The inter-governmental panel on climate change says mean temperatures in the Philippines are rising by 0.14C a decade. Scientists are also registering steadily rising sea levels around the Philippines, and a falling water table. All of this appears to increase the likelihood and incidence of extreme weather events, analysts say.
Mary Ann Lucille Sering, head of the Philippine government's climate change commission, warned in an interview with the Guardian in Manila earlier this year that her country faced a deepening crisis that it could ill afford financially and in human terms. Typhoon-related costs in 2009, the year the commission was created, amounted to 2.9% of GDP, she said, and have been rising each year since.
"Extreme weather is becoming more frequent, you could even call it the new normal," Sering said. "Last year one typhoon [Bopha] hurt us very much. If this continues we are looking at a big drain on resources." Human activity-related "slow-onset impacts" included over-fishing, over-dependence on certain crops, over-extraction of ground water, and an expanding population (the Philippines has about 95 million people and a median age of 23).
"Altogether this could eventually lead to disaster," Sering said. And her fears are widely shared. Opinion surveys showed that Filipinos rated global warming as a bigger threat than rising food and fuel prices, she said.
To deal with these enormous challenges, the Philippines government has created the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), which works with the UN and relief agencies to try to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events and other disasters.
The response to a storm such as Haiyan in theory comprises three phases: immediate help, including the provision of shelter and clean water, sanitation and hygiene facilities; rebuilding and relocation; and mitigation and prevention measures.
Supplying emergency toilets and water bladders is essential in preventing diseases such as cholera, and, for example, dehydration among babies and young children, aid workers say. Shelter in the form of tents is also a first priority and for this and other key supplies the Philippines will rely on airlifts by the UN and international donor governments such as Britain, which in some cases pre-position supplies.
The NDRRMC has produced a national disaster risk reduction and management plan for the period 2011 to 2028 that takes a holistic and long-term approach to disaster relief. Factored into its strategies are considerations of pre- and post-disaster sustainable development, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, and physical security. The idea is to "build back better" once the clear-up begins.
The plan also focuses, with charities such as Oxfam, on training networks of first responders – local people who know what to do when disaster strikes without waiting for the emergency services to arrive, which can take days or weeks. Unfortunately, with a disaster the magnitude of Haiyan, such systems may be initially overwhelmed.
Examples of longer-term projects following on from disasters include the building, if funds allow, of waste management plants, setting up markets at relocation sites, and working on disaster risk reduction programmes, so that when the next typhoon hits, local people may be better prepared.
For this to work, aid agency workers say, it is essential that the international community remains committed, financially and otherwise, once the initial drama of the human emergency subsides.
One success story in the Philippines is to be found in the Lumbia resettlement project outside Cagayan de Oro, in northern Mindanao. Here, victims of tropical storm Washi, which swept through the area in 2011, killing 1,200 people and causing nearly $50m in damage, have been offered newly built homes on land owned by a university away from the local river's flood plain. The Lumbia project's slogan is "build a community, not just homes".
Benito Ramos, the former executive director of the NDRRMC, told the Guardian in February that the bigger challenge of climate change was becoming more dangerous. Climate change, he said, posed an existential threat to the Philippines. "We are mainstreaming climate change in all government departments and policies. If we don't adapt and adjust, we all agree we are heading for disaster."
Typhoon Haiyan and climate change Q&A
How could climate change affect typhoons, hurricanes and tropical storms and is it possible to calculate this impact?
Damian Carrington theguardian.com 11 Nov 13;
Is typhoon Haiyan linked to climate change?
As the devastating storm has only just happened, it is too soon for any research to have been done on whether global warming influenced typhoon Haiyan. But there are good reasons for expecting that it has (see below). Furthermore, the tools exist to determine how much climate change may have intensified the typhoon. They have already been used on other extreme weather events, giving a clear scientific answer that climate change had dramatically increased the risk of heatwaves and floods, for example.
How could climate change affect typhoons?
Typhoons, hurricanes and all tropical storms draw their vast energy from the warmth of the sea. As Prof Will Steffen, at the Australian National University, says: "We know sea-surface temperatures are warming pretty much around the planet, so that's a pretty direct influence of climate change on the nature of the storm."
Another key factor is the temperature difference between sea level and the top of the storm, as this gradient is the heat engine that drives storm. Scientists think that climate change is increasing this difference.
Has scientific research made a link between climate change and more severe cyclones?
Yes. Prof Myles Allen, at the University of Oxford, says: "The current consensus is that climate change is not making the risk of hurricanes any greater, but there are physical arguments and evidence that there is a risk of more intense hurricanes." A Nature Geoscience research paper from 2010 found that global warming will increase the average intensity of the storms while the total number of storms will fall, meaning fewer but more severe cyclones. It also found that rainfall in the heart of the storms will increase by 20%.
A 2013 study by MIT's Prof Kerry Emmanuel agreed that the most intense cyclones – category 3 to 5 – will increase, but the work suggested smaller cyclones would also increase. It also found that "increases in tropical cyclones are most prominent in the western North Pacific", ie where typhoon Haiyan struck.
In 2011, a synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the average wind speeds in cyclones are likely to increase, as was the frequency of heavy rainfall, but it noted the difficulty of linking changes in complex events like cyclones to climate change.
What does this mean for the loss of life and damage caused by the storms?
It will get worse. Rising sea levels already means that the storm surges – the huge waves that crash on to coastal areas and are the most deadly feature of cyclones – have a headstart. As climate change intensifies cyclones, the storm surges get bigger. The greater downpours during the cyclones also adds to the risk of flooding.
You said some extreme weather events can be directly linked to climate change. How is that done?
It is called attribution and uses detailed computer modelling to replicate the heatwave, flood or other meteorological disaster. Then the models are run again – often thousands of times, but without the additional heat in the system trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuel burning. The differences between the results shows the effect of climate change.
A study by Allen showed that the severe flooding in the UK in 2000 was made two to three times more likely by global warming. Another study showed the extreme Russian heatwave of 2010, which resulted in 50,000 deaths, was made three times more likely by climate change,
Allen said the influence of climate change on typhoon Haiyan could be calculated. "This is a question we could answer if we diverted the right resources to it," he said. "If we used the same tools as are used now to make seasonal weather forecasts, there would be a straightforward answer."
Allen said such attribution studies should be prioritised. "It's first things first: we should know now how climate change is affecting us rather than how it will affect us in 100 years' time. It is a common misconception that climate change affects everyone. It affects some people a lot and others not very much – but we don't know who is who."
Typhoon Haiyan: what really alarms Filipinos is the rich world ignoring climate change
As Haiyan batters the Phillipines, the political elites at the UN climate talks will again leave poor countries to go it alone
John Vidal theguardian.com 8 Nov 13;
I met Naderev Saño last year in Doha, when the world's governments were meeting for the annual UN climate talks. The chief negotiator of the Filipino delegation was distraught. Typhoon Bopha, a category five "super-typhoon" with 175mph winds (282km/h) had just ripped through the island of Mindanao. It was the 16th major storm of the year, hundreds of thousands of people had lost their homes and more than 1,000 had died. Saño and his team knew well the places where it had hit the hardest.
"Each destructive typhoon season costs us 2% of our GDP, and the reconstruction costs a further 2%, which means we lose nearly 5% of our economy every year to storms. We have received no climate finance to adapt or to prepare ourselves for typhoons and other extreme weather we are now experiencing. We have not seen any money from the rich countries to help us to adapt ... We cannot go on like this. It cannot be a way of life that we end up running always from storms," he said. He later told the assembly: "Climate change negotiations cannot be based on the way we currently measure progress. It is a clear sign of planetary and economic and environmental dysfunction ... The whole world, especially developing countries struggling to address poverty and achieve social and human development, confronts these same realities.
"I speak on behalf of 100 million Filipinos, not as a leader of my delegation, but as a Filipino …" At this point he broke down.
Saño was uncontactable today, because phone lines to Manila were down, but he was thought to be on his way to Warsaw for the UN talks, which resume on Monday. This time, with uncanny timing, his country has been battered by the even stronger super-typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful ever recorded anywhere – 25 miles (40km) wide and reaching astonishing speeds of possibly 200mph (322km/h).
We don't yet know the death toll or damage done, but we do know that the strength of tropical storms such as Haiyan or Bopha is linked to sea temperature. As the oceans warm with climate change, there is extra energy in the system. Storms may not be increasing in frequency but Pacific ocean waters are warming faster than expected, and there is a broad scientific consensus that typhoons are now increasing in strength.
Typhoon Haiyan, like Bopha, will be seen widely in developing countries as a taste of what is to come, along with rising sea levels and water shortages. But what alarms the governments of vulnerable countries the most is that they believe rich countries have lost the political will to address climate change at the speed needed to avoid catastrophic change in years to come.
From being top of the global political agenda just four years ago, climate change is now barely mentioned by the political elites in London or Washington, Tokyo or Paris. Australia is not even sending a junior minister to Warsaw. The host, Poland, will be using the meeting to celebrate its coal industry. The pitifully small pledges of money made by rich countries to help countries such as the Philippines or Bangladesh to adapt to climate change have barely materialised. Meanwhile, fossil fuel subsidies are running at more than $500bn (£311bn) a year, and vested commercial interests are increasingly influencing the talks.
As the magnitude of the adverse impacts of human-induced climate change becomes apparent, the most vulnerable countries say they have no option but to go it alone. The good news is that places such as Bangladesh, Nepal, the small island states of the Pacific and Caribbean, and many African nations, are all starting to adapt their farming, fishing and cities.
But coping with major storms, as well as sea level rise and water shortages, is expected to cost poor countriues trillions of dollars, which they do not have. "Time is running out," Saño told the world last year. "Please, let this year be remembered as the year the world found the courage to take responsibility for the future we want. I ask of all of us here, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?"
Experts: Man, nature share typhoon tragedy blame
Seth Borenstein Associated Press Yahoo News 12 Nov 13;
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nature and man together cooked up the disaster in the Philippines.
Geography, meteorology, poverty, shoddy construction, a booming population, and, to a much lesser degree, climate change combine to make the Philippines the nation most vulnerable to killer typhoons, according to several scientific studies.
And Typhoon Haiyan was one mighty storm.
Haiyan slammed the island nation with a storm surge two stories high and some of the highest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone — 195 mph as clocked by U.S. satellites, or 147 mph based on local reports. An untold number of homes were blown away, and thousands of people are feared dead.
"You have a very intense event hitting a very susceptible part of the world. It's that combination of nature and man," said MIT tropical meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel. "If one of those ingredients were missing, you wouldn't have a disaster."
The 7,000 islands of the Philippines sit in the middle of the world's most storm-prone region, which gets some of the biggest typhoons because of vast expanses of warm water that act as fuel and few pieces of land to slow storms down.
Half the storms on an informal list of the strongest ones to hit land in the 20th and 21st centuries ended up striking the Philippines, according to research by Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the Weather Underground.
Storms often hit after they've peaked in strength or before they get a chance to, but Haiyan struck when it was at its most powerful, based on U.S. satellite observations, Emanuel said.
Humans played a big role in this disaster, too — probably bigger than nature's, meteorologists said. University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy figures that 75 to 80 percent of the devastation can be blamed on the human factor.
Meteorologists point to extreme poverty and huge growth in population — much of it in vulnerable coastal areas with poor construction, including storm shelters that didn't hold up against Haiyan.
More than 4 out of 10 Filipinos live in a storm-prone vulnerable city of more than 100,000, according to a 2012 World Bank study. The Haiyan-devastated provincial capital of Tacloban nearly tripled from about 76,000 to 221,000 in just 40 years.
About one-third of Tacloban's homes have wooden exterior walls. And 1 in 7 homes have grass roofs, according to the census office.
Those factors — especially flimsy construction — were so important that a weaker storm would have still caused almost as much devastation, McNoldy said.
"You end up with these kind of urban time bombs, where cities have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size in 50 years" without good building standards, said Richard Olson, director of the Extreme Events Institute at Florida International University. "It is, I hate to say, an all-too-familiar pattern."
Scientists say man-made global warming has contributed to rising seas and a general increase in strength in the most powerful tropical cyclones. But they won't specifically apply these factors to Haiyan, saying it is impossible to attribute single weather events, like the typhoon, to climate change.
A 2008 study found that in the northwestern Pacific where Haiyan formed, the top 1 percent of the strongest tropical cyclones over the past 30 years are getting on average about 1 mph stronger each year — a phenomenon some scientists suspect is a consequence of global warming.
"The strongest storms are getting stronger" said study co-author James Kossin of the National Climatic Data Center. Haiyan "is what potentially could be a good example of the kind of the things we're finding."
Similarly, the Philippines has seen its sea rise nearly half an inch in the past 20 years — about triple the global increase, according to R. Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado. Higher sea levels can add to storm surge, creating slightly greater flooding.
Just as human factors can worsen a disaster, they can also lessen it, through stronger buildings, better warnings and a quicker government response.
Emanuel said poverty-stricken Bangladesh had much bigger losses of life from cyclones in the 1970s than it does now. The international community built strong evacuation shelters that get used frequently, he said.
"The Philippines is one of the most disaster-prone places on Earth," said Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. "They've got it all. They've got earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tropical cyclones, landslides."
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Online:
Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado: http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/
MIT's Kerry Emanuel tropical meteorology site: http://eaps4.mit.edu/faculty/Emanuel/
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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears
Why Typhoon Haiyan Caused So Much Damage
Richard Harris NPR 11 Nov 13;
The deadly typhoon that swept through the Philippines was one of the strongest ever recorded. But storms nearly this powerful are actually common in the eastern Pacific. Typhoon Haiyan's devastation can be chalked up to a series of bad coincidences.
Typhoons — known in our part of the world as hurricanes — gain their strength by drawing heat out of the ocean. Tropical oceans are especially warm, which is why the biggest storms, Category 4 and Category 5, emerge there. These storms also intensify when there's cool air over that hot ocean.
"The Pacific at this time of year is very ripe and juicy for big typhoons," says Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Once or twice a year we get a Category 5 typhoon out there."
"But it's a great rarity, fortunately, that a storm just happens to reach peak intensity when it's making landfall. And that's what happened in this case."
As it approached one large island in the Philippines, the storm pushed up into a broad bay. That created a 13-foot storm surge that caused widespread devastation at the head of that bay, in the city of Tacloban.
Mountains also wring rainwater out of storms like these. And then there's the wind.
"So we had a triple whammy, of surge, very high winds and strong rainfall," Emanuel says.
Super Typhoon Haiyan could be the strongest on record, but scientists can't say for sure because they don't have direct measurements of the wind speed. Hurricane scientists usually fly into storms heading toward the United States to measure wind speed and barometric pressure. And the U.S. Navy used to do that for storms in the western Pacific. But Emanuel says budget cuts ended that practice decades ago.
"Since then, we've had to rely on satellites, mostly, to estimate typhoon intensity," he says. "And satellites are very good at detecting the presence of typhoons but they're not so great when it comes to estimating how strong they are."
Scientists at the U.S. Navy/Air Force's Joint Typhoon Warning Center infer that Haiyan produced sustained wind speeds of around 190 or 195 mph at its peak. John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist at Texas A&M University, says gusts blew up to 230 mph, which is as fast as a speeding race car.
"Imagine instead of having just one car, imagine millions of raindrops and debris moving at the same speed past you, and you're trying to stand in the middle of it," Nielsen-Gammon says. "That's the kind of force such a hurricane can generate."
The strongest hurricane or typhoon winds on record were from Camille, which struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 1969. But its 190 mph winds don't tell the whole story. The diameter of the storm matters as well.
"Camille was a very small storm, maybe about one-fifth the size of Haiyan," he says. "So it caused a lot of devastation but over a relatively limited area."
To find out whether Haiyan had record-breaking winds, scientists may turn to amateurs for information.
"Any major storm will attract storm chasers, and Haiyan was no different," Nielsen-Gammon says. "So there were people who traveled to Tacloban specifically to get footage of the storm, and they took along some instruments. So we'll probably get some data out of that."
Of course, that number is only one way to measure the overall severity of a typhoon. The mounting death toll will be another.
And climate scientists like Nielsen-Gammon and Emanuel say that as the planet continues to heat up, so will the oceans. And that means there will be more energy available for storms — and likely more Class 4 and 5 typhoons.
Did Climate Change Cause Typhoon Haiyan?
There is limited evidence that warming oceans could make superstorms more likely
Quirin Schiermeier and Nature magazine Scientific American 11 Nov 13;
As the Philippines assesses the havoc caused by super-typhoon Haiyan, which according to some reports killed as many as 10,000 people, speculation is heating up as to whether the disaster might be a manifestation of climate change. Speaking today at the first day of UN climate talks in Warsaw, the head of the Philippines delegation, Yeb Sano, said he will stop eating until negotiators make "meaningful" progress.
But can the devastating storm be linked to the changing global climate? Nature wades into the evidence.
Was Haiyan the strongest storm ever measured?
Apparently, yes. With sustained wind speeds of more than 310 kilometers per hour, Haiyan was the most powerful tropical cyclone to make landfall in recorded history. The previous record was held by Hurricane Camille, which in 1969 hit the state of Mississippi with wind speeds of just over 300 km/h.
It is the third time that disaster has struck the Philippine archipelago in less than 12 months. In August, typhoon Trami caused massive flooding on the island of Luzon. And in December 2012, typhoon Bopha killed up to 2,000 and caused some $1.7 billion in damage on the island of Mindanao. Haiyan could easily surpass that figure: according to a report by a senior analyst at Bloomberg Industries, citing Kinetic Analysis Corp., Typhoon Haiyan’s total economic impact may reach $14 billion.
The death toll might have been much bigger had many Philippines not heeded the storm warnings and fled at-risk areas in time.
What's the difference between a cyclone, a typhoon and a hurricane?
Are such storms getting worse in a warming world?They are basically just different names for the same extreme weather phenomena in different parts of the world. These storms are called ‘hurricanes’ In the Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, "typhoons" in the Northwest Pacific and "cyclones" in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.
This is the one-million-dollar question, and there is no scientific consensus on how to answer it yet. Storms receive their energy from the ocean, so it would seem logical that they would get stronger, and perhaps also more frequent, as the upper layers of the tropical oceans warm. Indeed, the potential intensity of tropical storms does increase with warmer sea-surface temperatures. However, the effect of warming seas could be counteracted by the apparent increase in the strength of shear winds—winds blowing in different directions and varying strength at different altitudes. Shear winds tend to hinder the formation of storms, or tear them apart before they can reach extreme strength.
On balance, many climate researchers think it is plausible to assume that tropical storm activity will rise. Some evidence exists that storm intensity has indeed increased, but it is limited to the North Atlantic, where observations are most abundant. In other places, the available evidence is not yet conclusive.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its last report cautiously summarizes the state of knowledge as follows:
“Time series of cyclone indices such as power dissipation, an aggregate compound of tropical cyclone frequency, duration, and intensity that measures total wind energy by tropical cyclones, show upward trends in the North Atlantic and weaker upward trends in the western North Pacific since the late 1970s, but interpretation of longer-term trends is again constrained by data quality concerns.”
What are the models saying?
Global climate models are too coarse to resolve relatively small-scale atmospheric disturbances such as tropical storms—despite how prominently these phenomena feature on weather maps. Scientists therefore need to infer the effect of global warming on storm activity from general patterns of atmospheric circulation.
For example, hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has used a new technique for simulating large numbers of tropical cyclones in climate models. When applied to scenarios of historical and future climate described by six state-of-the-art climate models, his method forecast that both the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones will increase during the 21st century in all tropical oceans regions, except the south-western Pacific. Emanuel’s study was published too late for inclusion in the last IPCC report.
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