A climate change specialist says climate change is happening faster than many scientists predicted and it is more than 90 per cent likely to be caused by human activity.
Victoria University’s director of climate change in its School of Government, Martin Manning, spoke to about 80 people at a recent seminar on “Carbon – the science and the sense” at Massey University.
They were academics, bankers, people from the Ministry of Agriculture, Niwa, AgResearch and a handful of farmers.
Dr Manning represented New Zealand on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is now responsible for establishing an interdisciplinary New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute hosted by Victoria.
Dr Manning said climate change was a serious issue and was growing, with recognition by the G20 nations which have just met in Paris and have a new risk management programme for extreme weather and food prices.
“And the insurance industry has been concerned about the increase of extreme events.”
He said Lloyds insurers say the world cannot insure its way out of climate change, and showed a slide from Deutsche Bank on the United States.
“They’re asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry.
“You just throw your hands up and say … we’re going to take our money elsewhere,” said Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Asset Management, talking of Washington’s inability to seal a climate-change programme and put other alternative energy incentives into place.
Mr Parker manages $700 billion in funds with about $7b now going into climate change products.
Dr Manning said investors, insurers and politicians were rejecting the view of climate change sceptics and they were now thinking longer term.
He said graphs of world temperatures showed an increase even relative to the 1950s.
Recorded findings of science all point to a consistent pattern of climate change: Surface temperatures increasing; Lower troposphere temperatures increasing; Atmospheric water vapour content increasing; Ocean heat content increasing and being directly linked to sea level rise; Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets losing mass; Glaciers and snow cover declining; Arctic sea ice extent decreasing; The area of seasonally frozen ground decreasing; Mid-latitude wind patterns and storm tracks shifting poleward; More intense and longer droughts; More frequent heavy precipitation events over land; and, Extreme temperatures increasing faster than the average.
He said there were many effects and they all were unequivocally pointing to global warming. And IPCC data showed that was directly in line with an increase in carbon dioxide.
Dr Manning said even with the mid-range scenario, global warming meant that by the 2090s, the Arctic would be 6.5 degrees Celsius warmer, Northern Hemisphere land, by 4.1 to 4.6 deg and the average global temperature would be warmer by 3.4 deg..
And more extreme rainfall is coming quicker than scientists thought.
He said the loss of glaciers and ice would play a bigger role than first thought in the rise in sea level, with melting glaciers adding 60 per cent of the rise in the year 2100.
“Climate change does mean some extreme cold in some places, such as Siberia. We have seen wild fires in Russia, floods in China and Pakistan and scientists attribute all those changes to anthropogenic climate change.”
Dr Manning gave examples of more extreme weather events, such as Sri Lanka, which had the heaviest rains for 100 years, Philippines and Brazil, which had flooding, a record level of drought in the Amazon, and closer to home, the Australian floods earlier this year, as well.
“Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than scientists had originally thought. It is now 36 per cent higher than any time in the past 800,000 years. Atmospheric methane is 150 per cent higher than its previous highest values.”
He said governments were now talking about climate stabilisation.
Dr Manning said a new review found that even if greenhouse gas emissions did not start to decrease until 2030 they might still be able to keep global warming to 2 deg.
But this depends on developing new techniques for bio-energy and carbon capture and storage. With total carbon dioxide levels peaking before 2030 and agricultural methane reducing a bit, and non-agricultural methane reducing by around half, it was hoped to limit global warming.
He said that while science had developed a detailed understanding of many aspects of climate change, the rates of change were increasing, and science was having trouble keeping up.
“We have to decrease agricultural and fossil fuel emissions quickly. Some agricultural emissions can remain, whereas fossil fuel ones can’t.”
