Most of us are weather watchers. We observe the weather. We make our own conclusions, and often they are based around how close any damage is to our own homes, how much it affects our lives. Distant weather, just as distant climate change, doesn't hit us nearly as hard as that on our doorstep.
We don’t know yet whether a storm of the sort we just saw over the weekend, in which two weeks of rain was seen in hours, was the product in some way of climate change. Only a scientist could tell you that, a research organisation like World Weather Attribution, which crunches figures, using past data, to give a sense of whether global heating made the event more likely.
But we do know that Scotland was just hit by something extraordinary. With parts of Scotland still under water or cut off, we have seen dramatic scenes on the news and social media. Giant hay bales swept along the River Aray. Cars marooned in the lake of the car park at Oban Tesco. The A9 running like a fragile bridge between fields of water. A powerful landslide ripping across the A83. People being airlifted to safety. Some of the highest hydrometry readings in UK history.
I'm tempted to blame it all on those greenhouse gases. But the problem is the story is not that simple. Some storms, globally, have been linked to climate change, and others have not. For instance, a study that looked into the rainstorms that caused landslides and flooding in Emilia Romagna, Italy, found that they were not linked to global heating. Spring rainfall in the region had neither become more nor less intense alongside climate change.
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Other storms, however, have been found to have a tighter link to climate change - for instance, Storm Daniel, which burst two dams and killed thousands in Libya earlier this year. A World Weather Attribution study found that global heating made that torrential rainfall up to 50 times more likely.
The picture, in other words, is complicated. A study recently published in Nature, looking at whether anthropogenic climate change had altered the probability of extreme river flood events between 1951 and 2020, found that it had some impact on 20 out of 52 of the events.
Fourteen of these 20 flood events, which occurred mainly in Asia and South America, were likely to have been enhanced by climate change, but two in North/South America, two in Asia, and two in Europe were suppressed, “perhaps as a result of lower snowfall”. Not every flood is a climate-change flood.
What we do know, however, is that Scotland, in winter, is likely to get wetter – and already is. According to the UK Climate Change Committee’s 2022 report, Is Scotland Climate Ready, “Over the last 30 years, average temperature in Scotland has risen by 0.5⁰C, Scottish winters have become 5% wetter, and sea level around the Scottish coast has increased by up to 3cm each decade. Further climate change in Scotland is now inevitable, no matter how rapidly global greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. Further changes in the climate will bring impacts to every corner of Scotland.”
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These warnings have been out there, and Scotland has an adaptation strategy. There are bright ideas - like rain gardens and planting trees above the Rest and Be Thankful. But as with Net Zero, and climate change mitigation, it still appears we're not taking adaptation and climate resilience quite seriously enough.
Meanwhile, the costs of the damage of this storm are likely to be substantial - and on multiple levels. NFU Scotland President Martin Kennedy has already responded to what he described as "exceptional" flooding, by asking Scottish Government for support for farmers.
“What this event clearly demonstrates," he said, "is that, when it comes to risk, it is the farming industry that is left carrying the can. While some losses may be insurable, many will not, and it is likely that farmers will be left with a bill for millions."
Research into the cost of the damage caused globally by the climate crisis through extreme weather events is growing. A newly published study found that such damage has cost $16 million an hour, globally, for the past 20 years.
A London School of Economics study, published last year, stated that “Under current policies, the total cost of climate change damages to the UK is projected to increase from 1.1% of GDP at present to 3.3% by 2050 and 7.4% by 2100. Strong mitigation policies, it noted, could slash that. But what struck me most about the study was that it said that the greatest risk of climate change damages to the UK economy was from "catastrophic disruption of the global economic system".
Another study, published in 2021, showed that by 2100, global GDP could be 37% lower than it would be without the impacts of warming. Its author Paul Waidelich said: “The findings confirm that it is cheaper to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than it is to deal with climate change impacts”
Research like this reminds us that however we adapt to the storms and drought affecting Scotland, what happens in the world will impact us; and that we can impact it. It reminds us that we still need to drive as hard as we can on mitigation and Net Zero.
To all of us in Scotland, this storm is a reminder, after a wash-out summer, of the power of the weather - not just here, but all around the world.
We can have all our ideas about how the world and politics works, but the weather is bigger. And the climate bigger still.
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