Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The first ever United Nations General Assembly meeting devoted to climate change, Climate Change as a Global Challenge, ran an extra day as delegates needed more time to express their concerns about the likely impact of the climate problem and to demand urgent action. Mohamed Latheef, United Nations ambassador for The Maldives, said that his country "is threatened not by invading armies but by rising sea levels." A projected temperature increase of two degrees Celsius "is more than we can bear," he continued. According to Britain's ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, "never has the challenge we face from climate change been so well understood, or so evident. We face a shared dilemma, developed and developing countries alike. Collective international action by us all... is imperative. It is not a choice."

The Group of 77 called on the next climate treaty negotiating session, to be held in Bali in December 2007, to take "fully into account the needs and concerns of all developing countries." Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, environment minister for Pakistan, said that the Bali conference should agree "a comprehensive and clear timeframe" to achieve a post-Kyoto accord. "With the clock continuing to click, we need to move fast and act before climate change turns into a climate crisis," he said. Opening the meeting, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he is "convinced that this challenge, and what we do about it, will define us, our era, and ultimately, our global legacy. It is time for new thinking. We all need to shoulder this responsibility, not just for ourselves, but for our children and their children." He is convening a high-level meeting on climate change on September 24th, a day before the General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting, "to build on existing momentum" and "galvanize political will."

Parts of Europe are experiencing the warmest summer for many decades as heatwave conditions persist. Hungary reported that the weather may have been responsible for as many as 500 "early" deaths. Wild fires are causing serious problems in southern Europe. On the Canary Islands, twelve thousand people had to evacuate their homes as fire swept over 12,000 hectares of land. The Portuguese government has asked Nato to provide water-carrying helicopters and equipment to assist in fire control. Croatia is suffering the worst drought for 50 years; its main river, the Sava, is at its lowest level for 160 years. In France, over half the country's departments have requested state assistance for farmers affected by drought.

Elsewhere in Europe, the United Kingdom is counting the cost of the recent flooding. A series of disasters in June and July has resulted in insurance claims totalling around £4 billion. A spokeswoman for Aviva reported, on behalf of insurance company Norwich Union, that "there will be an increase in premiums as the flooding is one of the elements causing claim inflation. The increase will on average be ten per cent." The British government will "put together the strongest case possible," according to floods recovery minister, John Healey, in seeking up to £125 million support from the European Commission's European Union Solidarity Fund. England suffered its wettest July on record.

Global warming may already be affecting rainfall patterns across the world, according to a recent assessment. More rain- and snowfall is occurring over northern Europe, Canada and northern Russia but less rainfall over much of sub-Saharan Africa, southern India and Southeast Asia. These trends "may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel," report Francis Zwiers, at Environment Canada, and his collaborators.

The analysts compared hindcasts for the past century from fourteen different climate models with observed rainfall data for bands of latitude. "Over the 20th century, we now detect the signal [in rainfall changes] that is predicted by climate models," Zwiers said. "If you're able to reproduce the past, you also have greater confidence for predictions of the future." The observed changes, though, were greater than the models suggested should have occurred. For all regions, the model predictions indicated an increase in extremes - floods and droughts. "As humans, our activities are much more constrained by limits of water than by temperature," Zwiers warns. "In places where agriculture is marginal, it will become more marginal in the future."