Commentary: A decade of climate change has had devastating impact. But there’s hope yet
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Commentary: A decade of climate alter has had devastating bear on. But there'due south hope yet
In simply a few short years we accept gone from thinking of climatic change as a scientific concept to acknowledging it every bit an existential threat. This shift means there's promise, says NTU climate scientist Benjamin Horton.
A cyclist rides along the Marina Bay Waterfront Promenade, Apr 29, 2020. (Photo: Jeremy Long)
03 Jan 2022 06:01AM (Updated: 21 Dec 2022 03:59PM)
SINGAPORE: 2022 may get down in history equally the year of the coronavirus, but it'due south also seen some of the most tragic natural disasters.
In January, Jakarta was in a country of panic, as some of the heaviest rains on record left threescore dead and a further 170,000 people homeless.
Authorities were resorting to the unreliable geoengineering technique of cloud seeding to try to end more rain falling.
READ: Commentary: Jakarta, the fastest sinking city in the world faces the biggest flooding challenge
READ: Every bit yearly floods loom, Jakarta residents fearfulness shelters are potential COVID-19 'breeding grounds'
Meanwhile in Australia, thousands of people fled from towns at risk of existence engulfed past wildfires. It was the largest peacetime evacuation in the country's history.
Record-breaking temperatures, extended drought and strong winds converged to create tragic burn down atmospheric condition, which have acquired 445 deaths due to smoke inhalation, the destruction of thousands of homes and of millions of acres – with nearly 3 billion animals killed or displaced.
It was one of the worst fire seasons on record, with more than 15,000 bushfires across every Australian country.
READ: Forget a 'new normal': Experts say Australia's worst bushfires withal prevarication ahead
The 2022 Atlantic hurricane season has likewise broken records. It has surpassed 2005 every bit one with the almost named storms on tape: 29. This is just the second time that the official alphabetical list of hurricane names has been used up, meaning forecasters have had to move to the supplementary list of Greek letter names.
Here in Southeast Asia, Draft Vamco killed at least 67 people in the Philippines in Nov, making it the state's deadliest tempest of the year.
It then barrelled into Vietnam, the latest in a serial of storms that have ravaged the country. At least 192 people accept died in Vietnam from natural disasters over the past two months, with hundreds of thousands more displaced.
The earth's 10 costliest weather disasters of 2022 also saw insured damages worth US$150 billion, topping the figure for 2019.
DISASTERS COMPOUNDED By CLIMATE CHANGE AND Homo Action
Climatic change, fuelled by greenhouse gas emissions from energy use and industrial processes, has increased global surface temperatures, producing more droughts and increased intensity of storms.
As more than h2o vapour evaporates into the atmosphere, it becomes fuel for more powerful storms to develop. Rising body of water levels expose higher locations non usually at mercy to the ocean and its erosive forces of waves and currents.
Though these events are called natural disasters, the toll they accept comes in part from human actions. The build-up of communities in vulnerable areas puts more people in damage's way.
The warning signs of climate change has been clear over the last decade, with each new emergency topping its precedent.
READ: Commentary: Rising temperatures, fires and floods highlight importance of agreement weather condition extremes
READ: Commentary: We can no longer ignore the health risks of climate change in Asia
Warning SIGNS Articulate IN SINGAPORE TOO
While Singapore has been spared from disaster, the signs are obvious hither too.
2019 was Singapore's joint hottest yr (with 2016) on record, at about one degree Celsius in a higher place pre-industrial temperatures of the 1880s. 2010 to 2022 was the hottest decade ever.
This is consistent with global temperature patterns. 2022 was the Earth's 2d-hottest yr on tape. Worldwide temperatures were just 0.04 degrees Celsius lower than in 2016, the warmest year on record.
To the human-on-the-street, the increase in boilerplate temperatures might not audio similar much, but its effects are large. Each fiddling shift increases the likelihood of extreme events, including heatwaves on country and in the ocean, record rainfall and flooding, massive fires and heat-charged tropical cyclones.
Here in Singapore, in that location is a significant increasing tendency in rainfall totals from the 1980s to the present day. From 1980 onwards, rainfall totals increased at approximately 1cm per yr.
This year's June to September monsoon was the wettest flavour in terms of well-nigh rainy days in the terminal 18 years.
Rainfall events have as well become shorter in duration and higher in intensity, leading to greater frequency of urban flash floods. The flash floods caused by intense storms in Singapore are signs of the worsening impacts of climate change.
READ: Commentary: Why that unusually high rainfall in Singapore during the last summer monsoon may exist our new normal
READ: Commentary: How prepared is Singapore for the next flash alluvion?
WHY THE Ice SHEETS TELL A SCARY STORY
These shifts in the overall corporeality of heat stored in the oceans and atmosphere tin can have huge furnishings on the planet, in detail, on glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.
During this last decade, Arctic sea water ice reached its smallest area since record keeping began. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have also been losing mass, with an acceleration of loss in just the concluding decade.
Greenland went from dumping only about 51 billion tonnes of ice into the ocean between 1980 and 1990, to losing 286 billion tonnes betwixt 2010 and 2018.
Ice loss leads to rising seas. The rate of global sea level rising has been accelerating. Between 2010 and 2018, sea level rising grew to over 4 mm per year, ascent most 5 cm overall in the past decade.
In 2019, global hateful sea level was the highest in the satellite record.
Unfortunately for united states of america, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Chill. As a depression-lying island, the rise in ocean level poses the virtually immediate threat to Singapore.
Nearly 30 per cent of our island volition be subject to flooding in decades, if nosotros don't reply to the existential threat of climate change.
READ: Commentary: Relieve forests or build 4-rooms? It's not a zero-sum game
WHERE THERE IS Hope, THERE IS A CHANCE
The underlying forcefulness beneath the changes is indisputable.
But in that location is hope. We have a growing understanding of the causes of climatic change and their solutions.
Climate researchers, such as those at the World Observatory of Singapore (EOS) at NTU, have been filling in gaps in their data on by and present climates. EOS is using such information to improve models that predict the hereafter.
READ: Commentary: Singapore could exist a model for cooler cities in a world heating upwardly
The National Sea Level Programme awarded South$2.seven 1000000 to EOS to written report past and present sea-level rise. Such funding goes towards strengthening climate science capabilities in Singapore to tackle the potential impact of climatic change.
Attitudes across the world toward climatic change have shifted in the last decade. Where one time there was ignorance, inattention and atheism nigh environmental issues, now there is business organization.
The recent groundswell of denizen action is unprecedented, with millions effectually the world taking to the streets, engaging in climate action and demanding greater activity from decision-makers.
A 2022 survey of Singaporeans found that over 90 per cent of Singapore residents are aware of climatic change and its impact. Close to 80 per cent are prepared to practise more to fight climatic change, and are willing to bear actress costs or inconveniences to do so.
POLITICAL ACTION IN FULL SWING
In that location has been a political reaction to climatic change over the last decade as well. In 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement was signed by 195 countries in an aggressive attempt to forestall global temperatures rising 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, and therefore avert the worst climate impacts.
China, EU, Japan, and South Korea – and now the Us too, with Joe Biden'southward ballot – have pledged to achieve net-null greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. These countries form 2-thirds of the earth economic system and account for over 50 per cent of global emissions.
This puts the Paris Agreement's two degrees Celsius limit within striking distance. We could prevent minor isle states from sinking, avert the disasters of farthermost weather condition for millions, and limit the chance of ice-free Arctic summers.
READ: Commentary: Joe Biden takes office in pivotal moment for climate activeness. Tin he deliver?
READ: Commentary: 5 years since Paris Agreement, world must get aggressive on climate action
Hither in Singapore, the government has pledged to stabilise emissions by around 2030.
Business concern and industry have responded. The growth of renewables has far exceeded expectations. The toll of solar energy has dropped 81 per cent since 2009.
This has far-reaching implications for humanity's transition from the age of hydrocarbons to the historic period of electrification. By 2017, the majority of new power-generating capacity added worldwide came from renewables.
In the reinsurance industry, AXIS said in 2022 it would no longer provide insurance or facultative reinsurance for new thermal coal or tar sands extraction, nor for pipeline projects and their dedicated infrastructure.
While these examples and others show remarkable progress in the last decade, our climate organisation is showing u.s. we aren't interim quickly enough. We can't stop climate change because information technology's already here, simply it is not too late to reverse many of its catastrophic effects.
Policymakers, scientists, and the thinking public now have to detect solutions – be they engineering, financial, or institutional – to make sure we don't wake upwardly 1 mean solar day and find out it is much as well late to save what we dear and cherish.
Listen to the author interruption downward how climatic change is destabilising oceans, and what that ways for us:
ProfessorBenjamin Horton is Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore and a professor at the Asian School of the Environment in Nanyang Technological University.
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