Super Typhoons and the Human Cost of Climate Change in the Philippines

The Philippines is facing stronger and more frequent typhoons, driven by warming oceans, making this the country’s most urgent climate challenge. These intensified storms not only destroy homes and communities but also tear families apart—forcing millions to evacuate, rebuild, or even relocate entirely. The effects are deeply personal: parents struggle to keep their children safe, provide food, and find secure shelter, while livelihoods are often wiped out in an instant. The economic impact is immense, with projections suggesting the country could lose over 13% of its economy by 2040. These storms also worsen food shortages, spread diseases like dengue and cholera, and threaten the safety of millions, especially those living in coastal areas. The growing intensity of typhoons highlights how climate change is making life increasingly difficult for Filipino families each year.

Philippines Climate Risk Profile

Land use change and global warming

An interesting tidbit that showed up over at Nature's "Nature Reports: Climate Change" in a story on what might be the discovery of the missing carbon sink.

Albedo effect

Other scientists have also recently come to the conclusion that northern forests, although critically important in maintaining biodiversity, might be less important in slowing climate change than tropical forests. Govindasamy Bala and Ken Caldeira found that tropical forests help cool the Earth in two ways: by storing carbon and also by reflecting the suns warming rays back to space⁵. "Unlike tropical forests, high latitude forests darken the Earth's surface, causing the earth to absorb more sunlight, an effect that is most pronounced in snowy regions. This darkening of the surface has a warming influence that can be stronger than the cooling influence of carbon storage in these forests," says Caldeira. This suggests that removing high-latitude forests would have a net cooling effect on the planet, whereas removal of tropical forests would result in warming.

What is interesting here is what has been happening for the past 30 to 50 years. Northern forests have been growing and tropical forests have been shrinking. Thus, according to the above, this should lead to warming. How much of this land use change impact is included in the models of climate change? Not sure.

New Model: Some near term offset of anthropogenic warming

A new model, published in Science, that includes more information about the internal variability of the Earth system (e.g. El Ninos, etc.) predicts some potential for ameliorating anthropogenic warming in the next tens years (yet about 50% of the years after 2009 are still predicted to be warmer than 1998 (the warmest so far)).

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Science 10 August 2007:

Vol. 317. no. 5839, pp. 796 - 799
DOI: 10.1126/science.1139540

Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model
Doug M. Smith,* Stephen Cusack, Andrew W. Colman, Chris K. Folland, Glen R. Harris, James M. Murphy

Previous climate model projections of climate change accounted for
external forcing from natural and anthropogenic sources but did not
attempt to predict internally generated natural variability. We
present a new modeling system that predicts both internal variability
and externally forced changes and hence forecasts surface temperature
with substantially improved skill throughout a decade, both globally
and in many regions. Our system predicts that internal variability
will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the
next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least
half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year
currently on record.


Fig. 4. Globally averaged annual mean surface temperature
anomaly (relative to 1979–2001) forecast by DePreSys starting from June
2005. The CI (red shading) is diagnosed from the standard deviation of
the DePreSys ensemble, assuming a t distribution centered on
the ensemble mean (white curve). Also shown are DePreSys and ensemble
mean NoAssim (blue curves) hindcasts starting from June 1985 and June
1995, together with observations from HadCRUT2vOA (black curve).
Rolling annual mean values are plotted seasonally from March, June,
September, and December. The mean bias as a function of lead time was
computed from those DePreSys hindcasts that were unaffected by Mount
Pinatubo (SOM text) and removed from the DePreSys forecast (but not the
hindcasts).


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Climate Change: Smoke & Mirrors?

Smoke & Mirrors

New studies show that aerosol particles have a far greater impact on global climate than was originally believed. This is due to how aerosols change the pattern of heating and cooling regionally.

Aerosols impact on surface heating depends largely on the type of aerosol. Some are very effective reflectors leading to localized cooling. These type of aerosols were the more widely known and studied until recently. The most common reflective aerosol is derived from sulfur emissions from power plants which were greatly reduced by the late 1990s by sulfur reduction regulations.

The other type of aerosol absorbs heat and can lead to warming over a region. These types, called black carbon, are more typical of fossil fuel (and other fire) emissions. A lot less is know about the hows and wheres of this aerosol with respect to localized warming.

What the latest round of studies show is that these aerosols, by altering the regional pattern of heating and cooling, have a larger (zonal and global) impact by altering the patterns of winds and ocean circulation.

What does this mean for anthropogenic climate change?

Well it potentially complicates attribution to the source of climate change in that more seems to be attributable to changes in circulation stemming from these aerosols but not necessarily. But this complication does not necessarily reduce the impact on climate of greenhouse gases, only complicates the picture. That said these studies only add fuel to the fire since humans are likely overwhelmingly responsible for the increase in aerosol load due to fossil fuel and other burning.

What does this mean for alternative fuels?

Another complication since alternative fuels are no less likely to produce the aerosols when burned than are fossil fuels. This speaks to increasing solar and wind power and centralizing burning fuel use so as to reduce emissions of particulates.

Excepts from : http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/5816/1217

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New studies show aerosols from burning fuels altering everything from rainfall to great ocean currents, with effects that can girdle the globe

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The microscopic aerosol particle has long been recognized as a mighty agent of climate change. At a micrometer or less in size, this bit of combustion crud from power plant, tailpipe, or farmer's fire can reflect sunlight back to space and cool the polluted eastern United States. Or it could suppress rainfall over smoggy Houston, Texas. But for years, atmospheric scientists generally assumed that pollutant aerosols worked locally or regionally. Most dramatically, the brown haze over Asia weakens both the Indian and Asian monsoons that bring essential rains to the continent.

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So far, the expanding reach of aerosols is being documented primarily in global climate models, with tantalizing parallels with what's been happening in the real world in recent decades. In the case of Australia, Rotstayn and colleagues ran a global climate model to simulate the changing climate of the 20th century. In the past decade or two, production of aerosols over Asia has soared as developing economies cranked up, especially those of India and China. When Rotstayn and colleagues plugged increasing Asian aerosols into their model along with increasing greenhouse gases, rainfall and cloud cover increased over Australia, especially in the northwest. Yet when they omitted the distant aerosols, rainfall and cloudiness decreased, contrary to observations.

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North American aerosols seem to hold sway over a far more massive moisture flow: the great "conveyor belt" of currents that carries heat from the Southern Hemisphere into the far North Atlantic, called the meridional overturning circulation (MOC). That's according to modeling reported in a January 2006 paper in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) by Thomas Delworth and Keith Dixon of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. Increasing greenhouse gases should be slowing the MOC, according to a raft of models, but in their model, Delworth and Dixon found that aerosols counter the effect of the strengthening greenhouse on the MOC. By counteracting the greenhouse's warming and its enhancement of precipitation at high latitudes, the aerosols have delayed the MOC's slowing by roughly 40 years, they find. Modeler Wenju Cai of CSIRO Aspendale and colleagues found a similar aerosol-induced MOC slowing in their model, as they reported last No vember in GRL.

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Untangling the web of aerosol effects will take a while. In the meantime, aerosol emissions are changing. North American and western European hazes have faded as developed countries reduced their emissions for health reasons. When will the developing nations of Asia follow suit? What will be the effects? Researchers will likely still be playing catch-up as the air clears.

Milankovitch is spot-on

This looks like a very interesting article. From reading the abstract the author makes a logical argument that, with respect to Milankovitch forcing (The change in incoming solar radiation due to changes in how the Earth is situated relative to the sun), one should consider ice volume dynamics (changes in ice volume) rather than ice volume total. In doing so the Milankovitch forcing is revealed without lag (there is often thousands of years of lag between forcing change and equivalent ice volume change). The author also finds that variations in CO2 appear to lag the rate of change in ice volume which gives CO2 a secondary role in ice volume change.



This finding helps make sense of the role that orbital changes play in ice volume. Up to this point there has been some confusion since ice volume has not always followed orbital parameters with any consistency. With this finding we see that orbital parameters play a role in how quickly the ice volume changes.



That CO2 has a secondary role to orbital parameters has been known to climate scientists for some time. The role of CO2 has been considered one of a positive feedback to orbital parameters with increased warming form changes in solar energy leading to more CO2 which leads to more warming.



Further research:

The impact of this research on how understanding of climate sensitivity.

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS,VOL. 33, L24703, doi:10.1029/2006GL027817,2006

In defense of Milankovitch

Gerard Roe
Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

Technorati Tags: climate change, global warming, climate, paleoclimate, global ice volume, milankovitch

Good news about global warming

Well sort of. An interesting finding written up in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR). Using climate models the investigators looked at what the impact of climate change would be on particulate matter and tropospheric (bad) ozone. Seems that due to the increase in water vapor associated with climate change both these pollutants decrease. Particulate matter due to rain out and ozone due to increased reactive gases (OH) derived from water vapor.



Abstract:

Sensitivity of global tropospheric ozone and fine

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 111, D24103, doi:10.1029/2005JD006939, 2006

Technorati Tags: climate change, global warming, pollution

World Ocean Heat Content

The mystery of the world ocean heat content(1,2) continues. We heard this year that the world oceans had cooled between 2003 and 2005. Recently we are getting reports out of AGU fall meeting that the latest data set shows the world oceans warming since 2004 (though statistically not confirmed). If it pans out the we are still left with a big question as to what is going on.

From:
http://www.jodc.go.jp/project/GODAR/workshop2006/wscr339.pdf

Warming of the World Ocean, 1955-2006

Sydney Levitus

Director, World Data Center for Oceanography, Silver Spring

We describe the most recent estimates of the global integral of ocean
heat content through the third quarter of 2006. After cooling during
2003-2004 the ocean has begin to warm again although the warming is
not yet statistically significant.

with a little more (not much) information available from their AGU fall meeting abstract



I'm looking forward to an actual publication to read. Until then and to catch up to speed we should read this possibly key document (PDF). Updates to come.

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