GLOBAL WARMING and CLIMATE CHANGE

The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfalls in South Africa, the UN weather agency has reported. The World Meteorological Organisation said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1C higher than the average for those months.

There had also been severe monsoon floods across south Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said. "The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Program told journalists in Geneva.

While most scientists believe extreme weather events will be more frequent, Mr Baddour said it was impossible to say with certainty what the second half of 2007 would bring. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN umbrella group of hundreds of experts, has noted an increasing trend in extreme weather events over the past 50 years and said irregular patterns were likely to intensify.

* South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region.

* Heavy rains also doused southern China in June, with nearly 14 million people affected by floods and landslides that killed 120 people, the WMO said.

* England and Wales this year had their wettest May and June since records began in 1766, resulting in extensive flooding, more than $6 billion in damage, and nine deaths.

* Germany swung from its driest April since countrywide observations started in 1901 to its wettest May on record.

* Uruguay had its worst flooding since 1959 in May.

* Huge waves swamped 68 islands in the Maldives in May, and the Arabian Sea had its first documented cyclone in June, touching Oman and Iran.

* Temperature records were broken in southeastern Europe in June and July, and in parts of Russia in May.

A study has yielded the first confirmation that global warming is already affecting the world's rainfall patterns, bringing more precipitation to northern Europe, Canada and northern Russia but less to swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, southern India and Southeast Asia. The changes "may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel,” warns the paper released today by Nature, the British science journal.

Scientists have long said that global warming is bound to interfere with snow and rainfall patterns, because air and sea temperatures and sea-level atmospheric pressure -- the underlying forces behind these patterns -- are already changing. But, until now, evidence that the interference was already happening existed anecdotally or in computer models, rather than from observation.

World climate system stimulated

One problem for researchers has been a lack of accurate, long-term rainfall data from around the world that would enable them to distinguish between regional or cyclical shifts in rainfall. Francis Zwiers, a scientists with Environment Canada, Toronto, found a way around these problems by using two data-sets of global rainfall pattern beginning, conservatively, in 1925 and ending in 1999. They compared these figures with 14 powerful computer models that simulate the world's climate system and found a remarkably close fit.

Tropics drier

Over the 75-year period under study, global warming "contributed significantly'' to increases in precipitation in the northern hemisphere's mid-latitudes, a region between 40 and 70 degrees north, they say. In contrast, the northern hemisphere's tropics and subtropics, a region spanning from the equator to 30 degrees latitude north, became drier. And the southern hemisphere's tropics (equator to 30 degrees latitude south) became wetter.

Drought not studied

The study looked at annual average rainfall on the land, not at sea. In addition, it did not look at extreme weather events -- episodes of drought and flooding -- whose frequency and severity are also seen as likely to increase as a result of global warming. The investigation will be published by Nature on Thursday.

Unless action is taken now to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Australia will be unable to manage future catastrophic bushfires, leading climate scientists have warned. The co-director of the University of New South Wales's climate change research centre, Andy Pitman, says there will be a 100 to 200 per cent increase in bushfire risk by 2100 if Australia continues on its path of high emissions. Professor Pitman said the nation's governments would be at a loss to adapt to such a scenario.

But if Australia was able to meet the low emission guidelines set by the inter-governmental panel on climate change, the increase in bushfire risk would be just 20 to 30 per cent by 2100, he said. Prof Pitman told the Bushfire in a Heating World Conference in Sydney today the low emission regime would allow governments to adapt to the increased risk by introducing new planning regulations, building codes and education programs. "However, if we continue to track a high emissions future I don't believe the increase in bushfire risk would be adaptable to," he said.

Prof Pitman warned it was now "certain" global warming would cause temperatures to rise and it was "very likely" it would result in a drier environment. "You don't need to be a rocket scientist or even a climate scientist to figure out that those two things together would drive increased likelihood of severe bushfires," he said.

Bushfires would also contribute, in a vicious cycle, to global warming by burning trees and releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Prof Pitman said it was a "very open question" as to whether governments understood the scale of the risk, and he was eagerly awaiting the release of the Federal Government's carbon emission targets tonight.

Nobody will escape the effects of climate change but the poor in Africa will suffer the most because of decreasing food production and the heightened prevalence of diseases such as malaria, warn environmentalists, church leaders and researchers.

Another dilemma is that, “for a long time, Africans have regarded owning vehicles like in America and Europe as signs of wealth and good living. Now suddenly they are being told to give up such dreams because of global warming,'' said Zenale Twala, executive director of South African Non-Governmental Organisations Coalition (SANGOCO). She was speaking at a SANGOCO workshop in Johannesburg on the effects of climate change on the poor this week (May 15).

“When I see the price of basic commodities like maize increasing, I see the writing on the wall,'' Bishop Paul Verryn of the Methodist Church told the workshop. He is particularly concerned about a plan to turn some of South Africa's arable agricultural land into producing biofuels. “Turning the land into producing biofuels could exacerbate poverty.''

South Africa's planned production of biofuels from crops such as maize, sunflowers and sugar cane “can play a role in improving energy supply for the poor as long as they are grown by small-scale farmers and rural people,” said SANGOCO.

SANGOCO is opposed to the plan by the government and business to use some of South Africa's arable land for maize for biofuels while more than 1.2 million South Africans suffer from malnutrition and 14 million are vulnerable to food insecurity. Almost half of households in South Africa -- 43 percent -- suffer from food insecurity. Ten percent of children under nine are underweight; whilst 1.5 percent are classified severely underweight, according to official figures.

Emissions of carbon dioxide can largely be attributed to the transport sector. “Yet we are taking away food from poor people's tables and putting it into rich people's cars,'' said Annie Sugrue, southern African co-ordinator of Citizens United for Renewable Energy and Sustainability, a non-governmental organization (NGO). There is also a concern that the manufacturing of biofuels will use a lot of energy and generate greenhouse gases.

Last year the World Food Program (WFP) said 40 million people from 36 African countries required food aid. The reasons ran from perennial drought and floods to unpredictable and reduced rainfalls attributed to climate change. African leaders have placed the issue of poverty on their agenda. This received impetus in 2000 when world leaders met in New York and committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals, including halving poverty by 2015. “Six years later, progress has been made on poverty but we are actually losing ground on hunger,'' the WFP said.

Findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that Africa will suffer the worst effects of global warming. The IPCC is a team of scientists set up by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to examine climate change. According to the IPCC, agricultural yields in Africa are predicted to halve by 2020. At that time, some 250 million Africans “will experience water stress.” Low-lying African coastal areas will be under water as the sea is expected to rise six metres or more. African fisheries will experience decreasing stocks due to the over-exploitation of marine resources. The IPCC predicted that “diseases and pestilence will spread throughout the continent.”

“What we are seeing now are the effects of what happened 30 years ago. What is happening now should have been addressed much earlier,'' said Richard Worthington of Earthlife Africa, an environmental group based in South Africa.

Africa's position is clear on climate change. “Globally, Africa contributes the least to climate change but continues to pay the most for the degradation of the environment. Northern countries remain the greatest polluters and should pay the most. We will insist on the principle of ‘polluter pays',” said Hassen Lorgat, campaigns and communications manager at SANGOCO. He argued that “current measures aimed at entrenching the so-called free market -- which puts profits before the environment --must be changed.”

A SANGOCO briefing paper dated May 2007 pointed out that the US is “the worst offender,” producing “about 25 percent of global carbon emissions, with the European Union (producing) about 15 percent. China is on the US's heels. “It is expected that China will overtake the US with carbon emissions within the year. China has 1.3 billion people and produces 4,732 million tones of carbon dioxide whereas the US has 293 million people and produces 5,799 million tons of carbon dioxide. That means that each person in the Unites States is producing more than four times what a Chinese person is producing,” according to the paper.

Some of the largest cities in the world will be given loans to make their buildings more energy-efficient under a plan by the former US president Bill Clinton.

Mr Clinton got five of the largest global financial institutions -- ABN AMRO, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and UBS -- to pledge $1 billion each in finance for the program.

The money will be used to upgrade buildings to make them more efficient, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This work could include energy-efficient insulation, and lighting, heating and cooling systems, or installing sensors to turn off systems when they are not required.

The Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore (pictured), who is attending the conference at which Mr Clinton made the announcement, invited cities from around the world to join Sydney in making Earth Hour -- a WWF and Fairfax Media event in which everyone is encouraged to turn lights off for one hour -- a global event.

"At the City of Sydney, Earth Hour has now become Earth Always. Sydney is the first global city to blaze with fireworks for the new year, and next March we want to be the first in a chain of cities to turn out the lights in a signal of our united commitment to a sustainable planet," she said. "Earth Hour is about consciousness raising, about capturing people's imaginations and empowering them to make a difference. Sydney's Earth Hour showed that, co-operatively, we can make a difference.”

The City of Sydney already has a similar scheme to that announced by Mr Clinton, encouraging building owners to retrofit existing buildings when leases expire. Councillor Moore said instead of waiting 20 to 50 years for old buildings to be replaced, the "Green CBD" program delivered greenhouse gas reductions through simple measures and tenancy fit-outs.

According to Mr Clinton, building retrofits can reduce energy use by 20 to 50 per cent. He said the total of $5 billion would double the world market for energy saving retrofits within 18 months. The Lord Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said retrofitting of buildings could reduce worldwide emissions by 10 per cent. "This is the biggest single step to tackle climate change by that has been taken by any layer of government anywhere in the world since the debate about climate change started," he said.

Mr Clinton also got the world's four largest energy service companies -- Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens and Trane -- to drop their prices in return for the increase in the size of the market. The companies will provide performance assurances to financially guarantee the energy savings flowing from their retrofits. (Some already give them.) The 16 cities, which include Melbourne, New York, Chicago, London, Seoul, Bangkok, Berlin, Karachi and Tokyo, have agreed to offer their own municipal buildings for the first round of retrofits, to order to create a market.