Climate change is already costing lives and dollars

[Michaelangelica]

Despite the strong conclusions of the international and Australian scientific communities there are people yet to be convinced that human-induced climate change is likely to or already having adverse impacts.

 

Climate scientists tend to focus on what might happen decades into the future based on scenarios of varying greenhouse gas emissions. However, the starting point should be the pre-industrial climate or at least the reliable climatic data of the 20th century. Observed trends of rising temperatures, more severe droughts, depleted water resources, more heatwaves, shifting storm tracks, rising sea levels and other more extreme events provide a good basis for looking at costs to date.

 

While it is natural to attribute increasingly severe weather-related events to human-induced climate change, science cannot be 100 per cent certain with regard to any particular individual event. Rigorous science deals in changing probabilities and risk. The science community says the chances are high that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations are at least partly to blame for more extreme conditions.

. . .

Reliable estimates of the total cost of the 2009 bushfires are not yet available, but a preliminary estimate from Allianz Insurance put insured losses at about $1 billion. The Melbourne Age on June 28, 2009, reported total losses at about $1.6 billion and insured losses at some $940 million.

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The increasing frequency of so-called “natural disasters”, including coastal storm damage and flooding, has already led to significant coastal erosion, with responses from insurance companies and local and regional governments.

 

Insurance companies are used to the concept of uncertainty and risk. They manage their risk by adjusting insurance premiums or refusing coverage, especially of damage due to sea and storm surge effects. As documented in several recent state and federal reports, local and state governments are also learning to reduce their risk of claims of negligence, lack of due diligence, and compensation, as well as acting out of concern for the welfare of their constituents.

 

The all-party House of Representatives Committee on Climate Change, Water, Environment and the Arts recently released a unanimous extensive report on management of the coastal zone. It identified the threat to property values, the liability of public authorities and private landowners, responses to possible withdrawal of insurance, and the possibility of governments prohibiting continued occupation of land or future building development on properties due to increasing coastal hazards. The report noted that 80 per cent of the Australian population lives in the coastal zone, and some 711,000 addresses are within three kilometres of the coast and less than six metres above sea level.

 

According to this report, quoting from an Insurance Council of Australia submission, “Preliminary estimates of the value of property in Australia exposed to this risk range from $50 billion to $150 billion. The figure depends upon the extent of sea level rise assumed (in the order of 1 metre to 3 metres by 2100) and the effectiveness or otherwise of potential mitigation measures. Even if paid for over 50 years this amounts to a cost to replace these assets of some $1 billion to $3 billion per annum in real terms.”

 

Similar estimates come from the Department of Climate Change, namely “up to $63 billion of existing residential buildings are potentially at risk of inundation from a 1.1 metre sea-level rise with a lower and upper estimate of risk identified for between 157,000 and 274,000 individual buildings”.

Climate change is already costing lives and dollars - On Line Opinion - 22/12/2009

 

A medieval anti-science climate appears to have descended, where Daniel Moynihan's dictum "everyone is entitled to his opinion but not to his facts" is forgotten.

The Case Against the Skeptics Stirring Up the Warming Debate by : Yale Environment 360

 

Four years ago, public relations executive James Hoggan began looking more deeply into the issue of global warming. The more he read, the clearer it became that the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists, representing the globe’s leading scientific institutions and academies, agreed on the basic facts: The world was heating up rapidly, industrial activity was driving much of that warming by pumping heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and continued temperature rises threatened the relatively stable climate under which civilization had flourished for the past 12,000 years.

 

Yet despite this near-unanimity in the scientific community, Hoggan realized that some segments of the mainstream media and an overwhelming majority in the conservative media were telling another story: The world might not be warming, and even if it is, that could be a good thing. Little evidence exists that humanity is influencing climate, the story line went, and spending billions of dollars to tackle a problem that might not exist is folly.

 

Hoggan began looking into what he describes as a well-funded and highly organized PR campaign designed to do one thing: sow doubt among the general public about the reality of global warming, thereby staving off government regulation of greenhouse gases. The more he looked, he says, the more outraged he became, leading to the creation of the well-known Desmogblog * whose stated mission is “Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science” * and a new book, entitled Climate Cover-Up.

The Forum

[BrianG]

Has there ever been a time when climate change didn't cost lives and property?