That wonderful weather – every wondered why? Prof says hydrological resilience in dramatic decline. Huh!

By Staff and much thanks to CATCH

BURLINGTON, ON April 29, 2011 – As record-setting tornados rake the continent and floods hit the Canadian west and the US Midwest, a McMaster researcher is warning that poor local decisions will make global climate change much worse for Hamiltonians. In particular, Dr Mike Waddington says expansions to the urban area will exacerbate flooding problems that are already plaguing the city and leave Hamilton less able to respond to other climatic extremes.

Massive cloud formation that pulled itself into a funnel to wreck havoc on a community.  Awesome power.

Massive cloud formation that pulled itself into a funnel to wreck havoc on a community. Awesome power.

“Our hydrological resilience is in dramatic decline,” the associate director of the McMaster Centre for Climate Change told Tuesday’s annual general meeting of Environment Hamilton. “And what should the city of Hamilton do to mitigate that? You certainly wouldn’t be wanting to expand the urban boundary, in that we have ecosystems in this region which are providing very valuable ecosystem services.”

Waddington highlighted a string of catastrophic atmospheric trends that he contends suggest this is “the first time in the history of the world, thanks to science, that we can actually predict our demise”. He says a doubling of extreme heat days, intensifying precipitation, and more droughts will likely be among the local effects of climate change.

“The distribution of that precipitation is going to become a lot more extreme,” he predicted. “We’re going to go through periods of large drought, and then very large rainfall events. So we’re going to get a lot more of what we’ve seen in the last couple of years.”

Hamilton endured two 100-year storms in the summer of 2009 and over a dozen other extreme rain events since 2005 that have flooded homes and triggered compassionate grants from the city. Council decided earlier this month to battle the province over a 3000 acre future boundary addition in Elfrida, and last fall approved a 4500 acre expansion around the airport that remains under appeal.

The professor of geography and earth sciences is one of two dozen McMaster researchers studying climate change. His current work focuses on the increased risks of wildfires and their relationship to soil moisture. He pointed to the disastrous drought and resulting peat fires that killed an estimated 56,000 people in and around Moscow last summer as an example of what happens when bad local decisions are magnified by weather events. Prior to last summer’s record heat wave, forests around the city had been drained to improve their productivity.

“These were very poor forests in very wet environments, and they drained these ecosystems to make the trees grow better, and once they got very dry, they caught on fire and they wouldn’t stop.”

A similar “triple whammy” of land use change, climatic changes, and the El Nino weather system imposed an air quality disaster on Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia for months in 1997 in what came to be known as the Southeast Asian haze.

“It resulted from the draining of very large ecosystems for palm oil plantations and also for mega-rice projects under Suharto,” Waddington explained. “Emission from the fires in this region alone was equal to almost 40 percent of the annual fossil fuel emissions”.

It remains difficult for science to connect specific weather events to climate change, but it is simple physics that warmer temperatures increase the moisture holding capacity of the atmosphere and provide greater energy to storms. For example, the huge number of tornados devastating the US this month – and especially over the last two days – are being linked to an unusually warm Gulf of Mexico.

Storm chasers take huge risks to capture these images and give us a sense of all the energy that is swirling around.  Changes in our climate bring about  cloud formations like this.

Storm chasers take huge risks to capture these images and give us a sense of all the energy that is swirling around. Changes in our climate bring about cloud formations like this.

Last year set a global record for precipitation, and tied 2005 as the hottest since modern records began. Extreme flooding in Australia and Brazil earlier this year has been followed by current inundations in western Canada and along the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

It is all tied together isn’t it? What we do effects them and what they do effects us. Guess we all need to think about what we do.

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