Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  How can this threat be real if we have largely halted the release of CFCs? The potential difficulty this time is with natural chemical processes triggered by abnormally low temperatures in the stratosphere – due, perversely, to global warming affecting the atmosphere lower down. According to the environment writer Fred Pearce, the Arctic ozone layer is now on ‘a hair trigger’, with ‘many researchers’ expecting a ‘giant ozone hole to form’ as it did a generation ago over the Antarctic.7 But the hole is not there yet. Predictions of a large hole for 2005 were later said to have been ‘overstated’. The next year did see some worsening in the situation. But then in 2007, the hole shrank by 30 per cent. The folly here is to expect to see in each year’s tidings a clear sign of what will happen in the future, when the overall picture is one where any long-term trend must be picked out from amid a chaos of short-term variations. Succumbing to this temptation has led to some silly analysis not only by the media but also by partisan scientists and sociologists of science over-reacting to a given year’s new data.

  In case a new hole doesn’t appear – and the mechanisms of these processes are poorly understood at present – Pearce has another message of doom. Suppose we do successfully avoid or repair both ozone holes. This would once more ensure that less ultraviolet light reaches the lower atmosphere. This in turn would mean reduced production of another atmospheric constituent, hydroxyl, which mops up carbon monoxide and other pollutants. All of a sudden, it’s a problem to fix the problem!

  The ozone episode may or may not be over. So what are, or were, the costs? At the time of Montreal, the US Environmental Protection Agency predicted a 5 per cent rise in non-malignant melanomas for each 1 per cent loss of ozone, amounting to perhaps 20,000 extra American victims a year. The prediction for the life-threatening malignant melanomas was not so clear. Al Gore passed on reports that Patagonian fishermen were catching blind salmon. Yet others found there had been no ‘demonstrated harm to people or other living things’ by 1990.8

  Ozone depletion has continued since then until possibly stabilizing today, and melanoma rates have indeed risen widely. The effects of ultraviolet radiation on the body are better understood than they were, but the delayed emergence of melanomas means that it is hard to establish their cause. Australia has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world and is situated beneath the outer edges of the ozone hole when it is at its maximum in each Antarctic spring. But this apparent correlation may arise simply because the country’s largely Caucasian population is ill-suited to the sunny climate and enjoys spending too much time on the beach. Meanwhile, the advice is simple: put on plenty of sunscreen – the apparently cynical original retort of CFC manufacturers to claims that their product was the problem – and avoid, if you can, the temptation to travel to Antarctica in the spring.

  The Short, Hot Summer of 2006

  ‘New tornado terror today’ Daily Express

  July 2006 was glorious throughout much of Europe. For England and Wales, it proved to be not only the hottest and sunniest July but the hottest month since records began in 1914. Towards the end of the month, however, the novelty of the delightful weather was wearing off. On the 27th, having chronicled the heat wave relentlessly over the previous weeks, the Daily Express chose this headline for its front page: ‘August is going to be hotter than July’. On a day when other newspapers reported the news – Tony Blair being called to account over the Iraq war, intensified conflict following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon – the Express saw fit to predict the weather in 120-point type.

  ‘Britain’s record-breaking heat wave is set to sizzle on with forecasters predicting an August of “extreme heat”,’ the story began. Reading on, though, it seemed that the forecasters themselves weren’t so sure. ‘The hottest day ever recorded happened in early August and I wouldn’t rule out it happening again,’ said one cautiously.

  The headline was remarkable for two reasons. First, it showed how the British obsession with the weather could lead a national daily to forget itself so completely as to give up on reporting actual events in favour of entirely speculative prognostication. Second, August wasn’t hotter than July. Far from it. It was one of the most miserable Augusts in quite a while. (Weather statistics record the recordable – sunshine hours, rainfall, temperature – which does not always reveal subjective things like miserableness.)

  But the Express was not to be deterred by mere facts. On 19 September, there was once again so little going on in the world that the weather got the front page: ‘82°F Britain’s glorious Indian summer… but gales on way’. The gales never came. On 2 November, after the first autumn frost, the paper tried another tack. A large blue box on the front page had the legend ‘–14°C’ inscribed within it. (It helps to put warm temperatures in Fahrenheit and cool ones in Celsius if you want to make them look extreme.) Underneath the number was the warning: ‘Big freeze will hit Britain this month’.

  Well, did it? Did it hell. Temperatures for November were 1–2°C above average, rounding off what turned out to be Britain’s warmest autumn on record.

  Towards the end of the month, the Daily Mail observed that the weather had gone ‘Balmy and barmy’. The recorded data certainly attested to the first claim. And there was no shortage of bizarre observations to support the second, from flowering snowdrops to horses flying through the air, lifted aloft by a mini tornado. These weather phenomena are noteworthy, even newsworthy for some. But were they freakish?

  The most freakish-seeming event of the odd summer of 2006 was that September was warmer than August. This appears odd to us because it is not simply an extreme, but an anomaly, an upset to the natural order of things. Surely it can never have happened before that a summer month was trumped for temperature by an autumn one. Central England temperature records go back to 1659. September 2006 was warmer than the previous record holder, 1729, but there have been Septembers warmer than the preceding Augusts eight times before. It has happened on average every forty years or so – not that rare, after all.

  So what is freak weather? How often should we expect it? And is it becoming more frequent? Surprisingly, perhaps, weather agencies are reluctant to offer definitions. What determines a freak event depends entirely on what’s chosen as the normal range. Freak events therefore occur at a constant average rate, which is governed by the defined level of freakishness. When planning protective measures against floods and hurricane, governments find it convenient to talk in terms of ten-year events, or hundred-year events, for example.

  However, this model makes a number of possibly unrealistic assumptions. One is that we are dealing with a system in which, although individual events depart from the average, the average itself remains constant. Another is that this average is accurately known in the first place because we have a long record of data. Difficulties and misunderstanding arise if the record period is too short to be representative or if the underlying norms are changing. Public and media attitudes to such events, and towards policy designed to prepare for them and deal with them, may be coloured if this is felt to be the case. A former sense of fatalism will be replaced by outrage and demands to know ‘why weren’t we told?’ and ‘why wasn’t more done?’

  Thus, if global warming is a systematic trend influencing our weather, then we would expect that certain events – heat waves, hot summers, hot autumns, hot years, also droughts and floods – should begin to occur more often. Extremes may become greater, which is to say that the frequency of freak events may increase if our definition of what is a freak stays the same.

  It was not only Europe that saw exceptional weather in 2006. China experienced its worst typhoon for fifty years, and there were unusually frequent and severe tornadoes in Kansas. New York City and Japan were blanketed under the deepest snows on record, but Canada had its warmest winter. Phoenix, Arizona, and much of the south-western United States experienced severe drought. The worst floods for fifty years brought an abrupt end to drought in the Horn of Africa. Sydney had its hottest-ever New
Year’s day.

  And this is just one year. Yet according to the climatologist John Houghton, writing a few years ago about global warming, the 1980s and 1990s were also remarkable for the frequency and intensity of their extremes of weather. In 1987, for example, northern Europe experienced its strongest storm since 1703. The following year Bangladesh suffered its worst-ever floods. But, he adds, ‘a note of caution must be sounded. The range of normal natural climate variation is large. Climate extremes are nothing new. Climate records are continually being broken.’1 Lucky for the newspapers!

  Houghton is at pains to distinguish between individual weather events and the underlying climate trend. It is possible to show very simply that these may not be as closely coupled as we are led to think by a media increasingly prone to blame every meteorological oddity on global warming. (‘Summer heat waves may get much worse’, warned the Independent, citing climate change as the cause in September 2006. Six months earlier, towards the end of the winter rather than the summer, the same paper announced ‘UK winter storms “to get stronger” ’, also due to climate change.)

  Assuming for the moment that weather is a very simple system (which of course we know it is not), we can use statistical methods alone to predict temperature extremes against a background of steadily rising temperature. Say we expect a temperature rise of 3°C over a hundred years (the average estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001). How much more often should we then expect a heat wave such as the one that much of Britain enjoyed in July 2006, when the temperature was up by 3.6°C on the average for the month? The answer is that we can expect to see this temperature reached or surpassed about one summer in three – not every summer without fail.

  The European heat wave of 2006 prompted headlines, but also health warnings, something largely new in the media treatment of summer weather. These came in response to high temperatures three summers earlier. In 2003, 20,000 people are estimated to have died from heat-related causes in Italy, another 15,000 in France. The death rate in Paris was eight times the normal, many of those who died being neglected elderly relatives of families who had abandoned the city for their summer vacation. It was said to have been Europe’s hottest summer in 500 years. But this does not necessarily make it a freak. Average temperatures have risen since the mini ice age of the seventeenth century, so summers that seemed freakish then might not compete with very hot summers today.

  The fact that many people died as a direct consequence of the heat is nevertheless a serious matter. Calling it a freak event does them disservice as it appears to excuse us from responsibility for taking precautionary measures against a predictable and predicted event.

  The mismatch between the probability of an event and our preparedness for it can reach absurd levels. How can it be, for example, that Britain in 2006 can suffer ‘one of its worst droughts for 100 years after two years of below-average rainfall’? Is this remarkable at all? Is it fair enough that we have been caught unawares? Is it cause for outrage? We should expect (at least) two consecutive years of below-average rainfall twenty-five times in a century (on average). So there was nothing odd about this event, and the headlines proclaiming a drought were more a reflection of the increased demand for water due to population migration to drier parts of the country than of any genuine freak of the weather.

  This mismatch can also have tragic consequences. Katrina was ‘only’ a category three hurricane when it struck the city of New Orleans on 29 August 2005. Category three hurricanes make landfall in the United States every year or two. This one commanded attention first in the Gulf of Mexico, intensifying from category four to five as it turned north before weakening again only a hundred miles off the American coast. (Only three category five hurricanes have hit the US since records began in 1851.) Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and caused damage estimated at over $80 billion – making it America’s most expensive hurricane and worst natural disaster – because the scale and severity of the hurricane at sea produced an exceptional storm surge, up to 30 feet at some points along the coast, which breached the poorly maintained levees of New Orleans.

  But was it just a strong hurricane that took an unfortunate route, or is it a harbinger of worse to come? Prior to the European summer heat wave of 2003 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the environment campaigner Jonathon Porritt could write that ‘it would be extremely difficult to demonstrate that anyone had yet died from changes in the climate specifically brought about through pollution from our industrial economies’.2 But these extreme events have led some to stop equivocating. For the science writer Fred Pearce, the heat wave was ‘the first single weather event that climate scientists felt prepared to say was directly attributable to man-made climate change’.3 The evidence for Katrina is more ambiguous because it is the surface temperature of the sea that generates the hurricane. There had been spells of strong hurricanes long before other climate change effects began to be noticed.

  Given its profusion of wild weather, we might expect that 2006 overtook 2005 in Atlantic hurricanes as well, as it had been predicted to do. Yet by the official close of the hurricane season on 30 November not a single hurricane had made landfall in the US. This non-event is not rare either – the last year to draw a blank was 2001. Much of the media eagerly marked the day. ‘What hurricane season?’ Fox News demanded to know. ‘Storm predictions prove all wet as ’06 season ends’, exulted the Orlando Sentinel.

  But others simply couldn’t believe the good luck. The Miami Herald was so disaster-addicted as to keep faith with the discredited merchants of doom, warning, ‘Forecasters predict 7 hurricanes for 2007’. A more sophisticated version of this view came from Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘We may see some quiet years – this year may be quiet,’ he said, before the 2006 season had got underway. But he added, ‘We probably won’t see a quiet decade again in the Atlantic.’4

  Some scientists, including Emanuel, cautiously attribute the low Atlantic hurricane incidence in 2006 to the El Niño event, a warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean that affects winds in the Atlantic. (Others counter that similar conditions were present in hurricane-rich 2004.) The El Niño hypothesis was seized upon by the media, perhaps because the superstitiously named phenomenon hinted at the age-old tendency to attribute extreme natural events, or our deliverance from them, to supernatural causes. ‘Thank El Niño for mild Atlantic hurricane season’, entreated the Reuters news service.

  In short, hurricane frequency shows no change from the long-term average. Some studies suggest that the strongest storms, categories four and five, are increasing at the expense of weaker ones, which is consistent with the expectation that climate change will produce more severe weather events of many kinds. But the data are inadequate to be able to say for sure, and scientific opinion remains divided.

  Scientists expect that a major effect of climate change will be an increase in freak weather events, from the locally talk-worthy to major disaster-makers. But this does not mean that all freak weather – or even most freak weather events – can be blamed on climate change. For many, though, it remains a strong temptation to make the link anyway, as a lobby group of scientists did in the 2004 United States presidential election campaign in Florida. Battered already that season by Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, voters were then greeted by billboards with the slogan ‘Global warming = worse hurricanes. George Bush just doesn’t get it’.5

  Becoming Unsettled

  ‘You have been warmed’ Daily Mirror

  Climate change is arguably the most serious issue we confront in this book. It may not have a sudden or immediate impact but it does threaten to affect us all, which has made it the media’s most sustained, enduring and infectious panic story. Newspaper usage of the phrase ‘global warming’ has been increasing by a steady annual 60 per cent in recent years. It was mentioned 16,755 times in the British press alone during June–August 2006, but it’s the same everywhere.1

  ‘Be w
orried. Be very worried’, cautioned the cover of Time, showing a polar bear peering over the edge of a very small ice floe. Even the doughty Economist decided that ‘The heat is on’. Both magazines dedicated special surveys to the topic in 2006. The flow of alarmist headlines has become so copious that one think tank was prompted to lash out against ‘climate porn’.2

  How much should we worry? Is climate change a greater threat than terrorism, as the British government’s chief scientist David King has insisted in his effort to ram home the danger? Almost certainly, it is – and not only because the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is actually very small, as we saw in chapter 6. But threat of what? With terrorism the nature of the hazard is clear, but with climate change we don’t yet know quite what we face.

  There is, however, no shortage of respectable oracles to warn that the worst will happen. The wrist-slitting testament of James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, even Friends of the Earth found ‘gloomy’. For Lovelock, ‘the fever of global heating is real and deadly and might already have moved outside our and the Earth’s control’. It is too late for sustainable development – ‘what we need is a sustainable retreat’.3 Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth is hardly less bleak. ‘I look around for meaningful signs we are about to change,’ says the former American presidential candidate forlornly. ‘I don’t see it right now.’