“Hello Warsaw, this is Haiyan calling”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8015
At Google News as of 14 November, the search combination “Haiyan Warsaw” yielded nearly 23 000 hits. Shortly after news of the monster typhoon Haiyan’s Philippine devastation began circulating, journalists worldwide began wondering how it might affect United Nations-sponsored climate deliberations under way in Warsaw, Poland—and they continued wondering whether science can confirm anthropogenic heightening of a destructive storm’s intensity.
An unscientific sampling of news articles and commentaries suggests widespread belief that Haiyan is influencing deliberations at the climate meeting, in part because the widely reported speech by Philippine representative Naderev Saño moved fellow delegates deeply. (A four-minute collage of excerpts from that speech can be seen and heard online.)
A report at the Times of India carried the headline “Typhoon Haiyan sets the tone of UN climate change talks in Warsaw.” A New York Times article began, “The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion on Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet had turned the storm into a lethal monster.” At Asia Times Online, a headline read “Hello Warsaw, this is Haiyan calling .” In the UK, the Guardian published “Philippines urges action to resolve climate talks deadlock after Typhoon Haiyan; UN negotiations in Warsaw must deliver emergency climate pathway as new storm brews in the Pacific, says government.”
Concerning anthropogenic storm intensification, the sampling suggests that with many exceptions, journalists accept this brief answer by Reuters: “Scientists have cautioned against blaming individual storms such as Haiyan on climate change. But they agree that storms are likely to become more intense.” In Pakistan, Dawn‘s answer sounded like Reuters’s. In Canada, so did the Toronto Star‘s, though that answer added a bit more spin by adding that climate scientists “mostly agree we will witness more such ferocious weather in coming years.”
Online articles at the New Yorker , the South China Morning Post , and China Central Television , which calls itself “the national TV station of the People’s Republic of China,” presumed an anthropogenic link for Haiyan.
The Guardian asked the anthropogenic question in a headline : “Is climate change to blame for Typhoon Haiyan?” The article reported that Saño’s speech “has reopened the growing debate about whether the extreme weather events seen around the world over the past few years … can be attributed to manmade climate change.” It proposed what many other articles proposed as well: “Logic, at least, suggests a clear link between Haiyan and a warming world. Storms receive their energy from the ocean and the warming oceans that we can expect from global warming should therefore make superstorms such as Haiyan more likely…. If the extra heat stored in the oceans is released into the atmosphere, then the severity of storms will inevitably increase.”
The Guardian also stipulated, however, that “the best science says there is some evidence that storm intensity has already increased, at least in the North Atlantic, but there’s not enough data to say categorically that any particular weather event can be linked to climate change.” Other publications emphasized that cautiousness. In London, the Financial Times reported :
With the next round of international climate change negotiations beginning in Warsaw, environmental group Greenpeace called typhoon Haiyan the “writing on the wall for climate talk politicians”.
But when discussing individual events, scientists are always careful to say it is hard to distinguish the effects of man-made climate change from the extremes of natural variation.
More heat in the oceans is expected to generate more ferocious storms, everything else being equal, but the temperature difference between the surface and upper atmosphere is important, too. The effect of climate change on this is less clear, though most projections by climate scientists do show an increase in the intensity of tropical storms over the next few decades.
The Wall Street Journal similarly advocated caution about the anthropogenic link. Forbes.com expressed outright hostility to the idea of “limitations, even strict ones, on anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases” and declared that such restrictions can “have no detectable (at least based on our current scientific understanding) impact on the characteristics of future tropical cyclones, such as Haiyan, or Sandy, or Katrina, or any other infamous storm.”
Investor’s Business Daily took that hostility even further in an editorial headlined “Climate con artists exploit Typhoon Haiyan":
[A]ttempts to “do something” about devastating storms that have occurred throughout human history and predate the Industrial Revolution will only produce a recipe for global poverty and be as successful as King Canute who, so the legend goes, stood on the seashore and commanded the tides to recede.
Canute at least knew he had no such power and was trying to demonstrate to his courtiers the limits of a king’s control over the elements. Warm-mongers like Al Gore and the U.N. climate-change scammers recognize no such limits and misdiagnose the cause of such storms and overestimate man’s power to affect them.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.