Katrina Fuels
Global Warming Storm
By Alister Doyle
10 September, 2005
Reuters
OSLO - Hurricane
Katrina has spurred debate about global warming worldwide with some
environmentalists sniping at President George W. Bush for pulling out
of the main U.N. plan for braking climate change.
Experts agree it
is impossible to say any one storm is caused by rising temperatures.
Numbers of tropical cyclones like hurricanes worldwide are stable at
about 90 a year although recent U.S. research shows they may be becoming
more intense.
Still, the European
Commission, the World Bank, some environmentalists, Australia's Greens
and even Sweden's king said the disaster, feared to have killed thousands
of people in the United States, could be a portent of worse to come.
"As climate
change is happening, we know that the frequency of these disasters will
increase as well as the scope," European Commission spokeswoman
Barbara Helfferich said.
"If we let
climate change continue like it is continuing, we will have to deal
with disasters like that," she said. She said it was wrong to say
Katrina was caused by global warming widely blamed on emissions from
cars, power plants and factories.
Sweden's King Carl
XVI Gustaf told reporters he was deeply shaken by the damage and suffering
of millions of people.
"It is quite
clear that the world's climate is changing and we should take note,"
he said. "The hurricane catastrophe in the United States should
be a wake-up call for all of us."
Climate change policies
sharply divide Bush from most of his allies which have signed up for
caps on emissions of greenhouse gases under the U.N.'s Kyoto protocol.
Bush pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, saying it was too expensive and wrongly
excluded developing nations from a first round of caps to 2012.
In July this year,
Bush launched a six-nation plan to combat climate change with Australia,
China, India, Japan and South Korea focused on a shift to cleaner energy
technology. Unlike Kyoto, it stops short of setting caps on emissions.
SEA LEVEL RISE
U.N. studies say
a build-up of greenhouse gases is likely to cause more storms, floods
and desertification and could raise sea levels by up to a meter by 2100.
Sea level rise could
expose coasts vulnerable to storms because levees would be swamped more
easily. Some scientists dispute the forecasts and the United States
is investing more heavily than any other nation on climate research.
In Australia, the
opposition Greens party said Katrina was aggravated by global warming
and criticized Bush for pulling out of Kyoto. The United States, the
world's biggest polluter, and Australia are the only rich nations outside
Kyoto.
"It demonstrates
the massive economic, as well as environmental and social penalties,
of George Bush's policies," Greens leader Bob Brown told Reuters.
He did not believe Bush would shift to embrace Kyoto-style caps on emissions.
Concerns were also
voiced in Germany.
"The U.S. must
be more involved," Gerda Hasselfeldt, a leading German candidate
to become environment minister if the conservative opposition wins the
September 18 election, told n-tv television.
In the United States,
the focus has been far more on tackling the human disaster than on links
to climate change.
"People are
still reeling from the tragedy," said Katie Mandes, a director
at the Washington-based Pew Center, a climate change think-tank. "Politically
it's too early to tell what it will mean for Americans' views."
Ian Johnson, the
World Bank's top environmental official, said Katrina could also be
a wake-up call for developing nations, many of which are vulnerable.
An opinion survey
published this week showed that 79 percent of Americans feel global
warming poses an "important" or "very important"
threat to their country in the next 10 years. Worries among Europeans
were even higher.
Taken before Katrina
in June, the Transatlantic Trends survey showed that Americans felt
more threatened than Europeans by terrorism, Islamic extremism, weapons
of mass destruction and economic downturn.
Some individual
climatic disasters in the past have changed perceptions about climate
change. Steve Sawyer, climate change director at Greenpeace, said that
ice storms in Canada in the late 1990s had dramatically raised public
concerns.
Greenpeace called
Katrina a "wake-up call about the dangers of continued global fossil
fuel dependency."
Recent research
by Kerry Emanuel, a leading U.S. hurricane researcher, shows the intensity
of hurricanes -- the wind speeds and the duration -- seems to have risen
by about 70 percent in the past 30 years.
"Globally a
new signal may be emerging in rising intensity," said Tom Knutson,
a research meteorologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Higher water temperatures in future may lead to more
storms. Hurricanes need temperatures of about 26.5 C (80F) to form.
Additional reporting
by Michael Perry in Sydney, Elaine Lies in Tokyo, Jeff Mason and Paul
Taylor in Brussels, Iain Rogers in Berlin, Timothy Gardner in New York
© 2005 Reuters