Believe in climate change or not, wild weather is coming to get us
Perhaps it is only when more extreme weather events inflict massive loss of life and cause billions of pounds’ worth of damage that we’ll wake up to the realities of climate change.
The terrible flooding which has hit southern Texas was followed by even more devastation in south Asia, where monsoon rains have taken the lives of more than 1,000 people so far.
At least 41 million are affected by flooding in India, Nepal and Bangladesh after record rainfall across the region. The storm has just reached Pakistan, where parts of Karachi are inundated and 11 people have died so far.
The scale of devastation in Asia well eclipses that in Houston – countless villages in remote regions have been flooded by the torrential rains, mega-cities such as Mumbai are submerged.
In this part of the world it is not just flooding that causes devastation, it is the polluting effects of those floods – with vast quantities of rubbish and waste stirred and circulated around densely populated areas.
There are fears the death toll will rise further. It almost certainly will, it is a matter of by how much.
The fact that, after New Orleans, another US city has been so dramatically affected by flooding is perhaps more significant in efforts to do something about climate change.
While the death toll here is eclipsed by that in Asia, the financial impact of Hurricane Harvey on one of America’s largest cities could be of greater political consequence.
There is no way either event can clearly be attributed to climate change. After all, it is monsoon season and hurricane season. Powerful storms hit the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico at this time of year, every year.
Heavy rainfall always falls during the rainy season in India and Bangladesh. But it is the sheer power of the hurricanes, the sheer amount of rain in the monsoons, that is most worrying.
The models predict that a world with warmer temperatures means a world with more wet and more powerful storms.
Taken by themselves, such events cannot be attributed to climate change, but they form a wider pattern which is concerning climate scientists.
Pradeep Mujumdar, chairman of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Water Research (ICWaR) at the Indian Institute of Science, says: “Though it is difficult to attribute any one event to climate change, there is much research results from across the world that is showing that the pattern of multiple extreme events in a season is happening due to the changing climate.”
He’s backed up by Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, who told the Guardian: “For large countries like the United States, we can expect further rainfall records – and not just for hurricanes.
“For the globe, we’ll see heat and extreme rainfall records for the foreseeable future.”
The Met Office suggests that extreme weather events are likely to hit the British Isles with more frequency in the coming years, with research showing that “even with the current climate, it is likely that there will be one or more monthly regional rainfall record events in the coming decade”.
Trends matter in climate science, individual events do not.
In human terms, however, individual events can be catalysts for change.
We have in the White House a President who does not believe in climate change, who is pulling his country out of a treaty which is the world’s best hope of arresting catastrophic climate change and is cutting funding for climate change research.
The very worst effects of a warming planet are being inflicted on the poorest parts of the world, but rare and horrific storms such as Harvey – and wild, wet and flood-filled winters in Britain – show that climate change is hitting us too.
Eventually, it won’t be experts with their science and charts who change the minds of deniers, but cataclysmic events at home.