Report: Climate Change To Bring More Worldwide Havoc

According to a recently leaked report from the International Panel on Climate Change, poverty,  starvation, disease and economic disruptions will increase worldwide as a result of a warming world.

Will drought and other disasters made stronger
by global warming contribute to war, disease and
economy suffering?  

Oh joy!

Interestingly, the leaked report turned up on a climate skeptic's website. The report wasn't supposed to come out until March.

According to the Associated Press, the report has what it calls the following "key risks"

• People dying from warming and sea-rise related flooding, especially in big cities (Lower Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy, anyone?_
• Famine because of temperature and rain chanes, especially in poorer nations. 
• Farmers going broke for lack of water.
• Infrastructure failures due to extreme weather
• Increasingly dangerous and deadly heat waves
• Some failing land and marine ecosystems.   

Here's the problem for everyone with these issues: Clearly, policymakers, people in charge, basically, need to figure out how to deal with all these potential crises.

But the risks are broad brush. We don't have specifics. How bad will they get? Where? Can they be prevented? 

And then if you do manage to come up with a plan, you've got to sell the blueprint to everybody.

People naturally react when the problem is clear and you know how to respond.  If you're unaware a bus is about to run you over, and somebody warns you, it's pretty clear what the problem is, the person warning you is (hopefully) easy to understand, and it's very obvious what you need to do to avert disaster.

Climate change, by contrast,  is still something of an abstraction, even if we have experienced hotter weather or more extreme storms.

That's because it's hard for anyone, including climate scientists, to tease apart how much of a particular weather disaster would have happened anyway, and how much of it was worsened by climate change.

Let's take relatively safe Vermont, where I live as a small example.

Here in Vermont, Tropical Storm Irene struck in August, 2011 and the resulting flood was one of the worst disasters in the state's history.

Vermont has always had tropical storms and destructive floods, so the fact we had another disaster wasn't that surprising. But was Tropical Storm Irene wetter than a "normal" storm because a warmer atmosphere holds more water?

And there was a summer's worth of very unusually heavy rain that preceded Irene, that soaked the soil and primed the state for big time flooding from the tropical storm. Was part of that heavy rain due to climate change? How much of it? And how much of all this was just bad luck?

What of the high frequency of wind storms and floods that maybe weren't as bad as Irene, but still destructive, that have hit Vermont repeatedly since 2011?  How much of that was influenced by climate change, and how much of it was just bad luck?

Clearly something odd is going on. The weather and climate in Vermont surely is different than it was decades ago. So you know you have to adapt.  But again, how much of this weird weather is just a fluke, and how much is climate change? The balance influences how you react.

As you can see, the nature of the risk is not nearly as plain and obvious as that speeding bus bearing down on you.

Now look at your utility bill. It's gone up some. Part of the reason might be because electric utilities like Green Mountain Power are constantly fixing storm-damaged transmission lines.  That costs money.

GMP and other utilities are looking for ways to make their systems more resilient. In the long run, adapting to climate change like that is cheaper than constantly going out and fixing storm damage. But the adaption still costs money. Which will no doubt show up in your electric bill.

That's what the leaked IPCC report is getting at. Climate change will affect us one way or another. Probably through sticker shock.

In more vulnerable parts of the world, the consequences are a lot more dire than trying to figure out how to pay your electric bill.

If disruptions such as crop failures, giant heat waves, droughts and massive storms hit areas of the globe already teetering on the edge, that's where you get the wars, diseases, economic  chaos and death the IPCC is warning about.

We have examples. The terrible civil war in Syria has a variety of causes and plenty of bad players doing ugly things. But there's tantilizing evidence an unprecedented drought in Syria between 2006 and 2011 caused many farms to fail, and those farmers to participate in a mass migration to cities to find ways to earn a living.

That caused some social instability. Even if the drought was caused by climate change, the drought wasn't the cause of the civil war, but it set up conditions that made the war that much more possible, 

Again, you can see how complicated this is. There is no obvious, straight line cause and effect here. All we have is indications, and it's hard to make policy decisions based on murky cause and effect.

In addition to making it harder to make decisions on how to respond to climate change, the iffiness of the whole issue makes things easier for people who don't think climate change is real or a threat, to convince us to not do anything.

After all, why respond to something so shadowy and full of questions. You know there are going to be effects from climate change, but pinning down exactly what those effects are is tricky.

So, with every weather disaster, every war, every economic calamity in the near future anyway, we'll always wonder. How much, if any of this, was due to climate change? And how do we respond?

I'm sure we'll get more recommendations from the experts, but the leaked report shows that we, meaning all of us on earth, might have a pretty rough road ahead of us