Flooding: a taste of worse to come

28 July 2007 - Eastern Region Green Party is warning that the severe flooding experienced by counties across large swathes of England this summer is just the start of impacts expected from dangerous climate change. And while the UK suffers tropical intensity downpours, a series of extreme heatwaves in southern and eastern Europe has seen hundreds of deaths, widespread crop damage and soaring power demand as people use ever more air conditioning to try and cool down.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is continuing to rise rapidly. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a series of ever more clear and authoratitive reports in recent years pointing to a most likely scenario of mean global temperature rises of between 2 to 4 degrees C by the end of the century. The IPCC also concludes that the warming seen to date is "very likely" to have been caused primarily by human society. For comparsion, the rise in global temperatures since the nineteenth century has been around 1 degree C (Climatic Research Unit UEA Norwich).

And a study has yielded the first confirmation that global warming is already affecting the world's rainfall patterns.

According to a paper published in the journal Nature anthropogenic climate change is bringing more precipitation to northern Europe, Canada and northern Russia but less to swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, southern India and southeast Asia. This is because air and sea temperatures, and sea-level atmospheric pressure - the underlying forces behind these patterns - are already changing.

Over the 75 year period under study, global overheating "contributed significantly" to increases in precipitation in the northern hemisphere's mid-latitudes, a region between 40 and 70° north. The UK is entirely within this band.

In contrast, the northern hemisphere's tropics and subtropics, a region spanning from the equator to 30° latitude north became drier and the southern hemisphere's tropics (equator to 30° latitude south) became wetter.

Councillor Rupert Read, Green Party Lead candidate in Eastern Region for the 2009 European Elections said: "We should not let the sceptics get away with denying the realities of manmade climate change for a minute longer. The trend towards more extreme weather patterns is now very clear. Climate chaos is exactly what the climate models for rising temperatures predict. We are told that the severe flooding events suffered in recent years in many parts of the UK, including here in Eastern Region, are unusual ie "one in 100 year" events. Yet they keep happening with increasing and alarming regularity, causing misery for untold thousands of people."

Councillor James Abbott, Eastern Region and National Green Party Climate Change Spokesperson added: "Gordon Brown tells us that "lessons will be learnt" from these latest devastating floods. The Green Party asks what lessons? Carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of climate change, have risen under the Labour Government since 1997, not fallen. The Government still intends to bulldoze through plans for more airport expansion, more road building, development on flood plains, waste incinerators and many other schemes that will add to emissions and add to the amount of land covered in tarmac and buildings which increases flooding. Labour is even legislating to make the planning system more friendly to these unsustainable patterns of development, overuling local community concerns."