Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The United States House of Representatives has voted to cut off funding to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the remainder of the current year. "My constituents should not have to continue to foot the bill for an organization to keep producing corrupt findings that can be used as justification to impose a massive new energy tax on every American," said the sponsor of the measure, Republican Blaine Luetkemeyer.

The House doesn't "like the message so they are killing the messenger," commented Mike MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington DC. Chris Field, IPCC contributor from Stanford University in California, said that about half the funding, around US$3 million in 2009, went to the IPCC Trust Fund, which supports the international coordinating team, with the other half covering American scientists' travel to meetings and a small team of staff. Without the federal support, Field said that there would be no ability to organize meetings and no ability to coordinate chapters. The meetings allow scientists, who volunteer their time, to combine their knowledge with the work of colleagues around the world. "A small amount of funding goes a long way," he said. A measure was also passed eliminating the salaries of the president's international climate change envoy and other top officials.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is warning that climate change will result in mass migrations of people. National governments and the international community must urgently address this issue in a proactive manner, the forthcoming report, Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific, concludes.

Bart Édes, who directs ADB's Poverty Reduction, Gender, and Social Development Division, predicted that climate-induced migration will affect poor and vulnerable people more than others. "In many places, those least capable of coping with severe weather and environmental degradation will be compelled to move with few assets to an uncertain future," he said. "Those who stay in their communities will struggle to maintain livelihoods in risk-prone settings at the mercy of nature's whims."

Researchers from Environment Canada and other institutions worldwide have shown that 24-hour rainfall events became more intense over the second half of the 20th century throughout North America, most of Europe and parts of Asia. "What we're seeing is not consistent with things like El Niño, it's more consistent with something that's acting globally, and the thing that's acting globally is the effects of global warming," said co-author Francis Zwiers, now of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

The link with global warming rests on the fact that a warmer atmosphere is able to hold more water vapour. "If these events of this particular size become more frequent, then we're going to have to pay for damage more often," Zwiers said. "Once every ten years rather than once every 20 years, for example." The study was based on statistical analysis and climate model data. The real-world trend was found to be greater than predicted by the models.