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The climate forecast
OPINION
The climate forecast When extreme weather strikes, somebody, somewhere always asks about a link to climate change. It’s time we gave straight answers, says Peter A. Stott IN THE aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005, a vigorous debate raged as to whether it was a “normal” natural disaster or a consequence of global warming. Al Gore depicted the devastation of New Orleans in his movie An Inconvenient Truth and linked it to climate change. I became involved during a case before the High Court in London challenging a UK government decision to distribute the movie to schools. I was asked to provide expert written evidence on the extent to which the film correctly represented scientific understanding at the time. I liked the film and thought that Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change was broadly accurate. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in its most recent assessment report: “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level”. And as data continues to pile up, the evidence gets ever stronger that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause of the observed warming over the past century. But hurricanes are difficult. Climate models predict that they will become more intense. At the same time, considerable uncertainty remains. We only have about 40 years of reliable observational records, which precludes a clear determination of their variability. Given that 30 | NewScientist | 12 November 2011
different aspects of climate misinterpreted to imply that change could act to increase or every extreme flood or drought is decrease hurricane activity, due to climate change when this is whether or not Katrina can be manifestly not the case. And when ascribed to global warming is a events occur that climate change challenge beset by difficulty. might make less likely, such as the It is not surprising, then, that in record-breaking cold snap in the the aftermath of Katrina many UK last December, it doesn’t scientists were reluctant to make follow that climate predictions definitive statements about its are inconsistent or wrong. links with climate change. The A clearer way of thinking about same has happened after many weather and climate is to consider other extreme weather events the odds. After the European heat such as floods and droughts. wave of 2003, I worked with Myles When pressed, scientists often Allen and Dáithí Stone of the say that instances of extreme “Science now makes it weather are consistent with the possible to attribute some expected effects of climate types of weather event to change. But such statements are climate change” problematic. They can be
University of Oxford to show that human influence had very likely more than doubled the probability of such extreme temperatures. Since then, the concept that human influence could have “loaded the dice” in favour, or against, the occurrence of a particular heatwave, flood or drought has become widely accepted by scientists and seems a relatively straightforward message to communicate to the public. But this doesn’t mean that we are yet able to reliably quantify the changed odds of all extreme weather events. What we need is an attribution system, operated regularly like the weather forecast and made available to the public. Its purpose would be to deliver rapid and authoritative assessments of the links, if any, between recent extreme weather events and human-induced climate change. In the event of, say, a severe flood, the system would provide estimates of the extent to which the event was made more or less likely by human-induced climate change. It would also take into account alternative natural explanations such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a large-scale climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that affects weather worldwide. We expect such a service would be of great interest to anyone who wants to know whether a given event could be attributed to climate change, from politicians and journalists to homeowners and insurance companies. Are we capable of delivering? Attribution is difficult and it will
Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinion
be important not to undermine the credibility of a system by prematurely attributing events. However, climate science has advanced to the point where it is possible to assess some types of weather event. For example, the European heatwave of 2003 was consistent with an increased risk of extreme weather caused by climate change, whereas the cold US temperatures of 2008 were not – instead being linked to the La Niña phase of the El Niño. For other events, such as hurricane Katrina and last year’s devastating Pakistan floods and Moscow heatwave, the cause remains uncertain. But the development of an attribution system should help drive further improvements in the forecasting models by continually confronting real world examples of extreme weather. We at the Met Office – the UK’s national weather service – are keen to take this idea forward, and have begun to put together an international collaboration of scientists called the Attribution of Climate-related Events Initiative, or ACE for short. Our aim is to understand when we can reliably estimate the odds of particular types of extreme weather event and for which types of events further improvements are required. We hope to have a prototype attribution system up and running in two years. Should another category five hurricane make landfall on the US mainland its attribution will be tough. But scientific understanding is developing all the time. Were an attribution system established and its strengths and limitations well understood, a future judge, journalist or local resident, interested in who – or indeed what – to blame, would know where to go. n Peter A. Stott leads the climate monitoring and attribution team at the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, UK
One minute with...
Marc Koska Unsafe injections kill 1.3 million people a year, says the former beach bum who has a solution: the self-destructing syringe You are on a mission to stop the reuse of syringes. How big is the problem? The World Health Organization (WHO) says 1.3 million people die every year because of the reuse of syringes. The burden of disease cost is over $100 billion a year from syringe reuse, which is just mind-blowingly horrific. Twenty-two million cases of hepatitis B are spread every year because of the reuse of syringes. The WHO says one in two injections given is unsafe. You invented a simple non-reusable syringe, the K1. Where did it all begin? I read a newspaper article in May 1984 which predicted that syringes would one day be a major cause of the transmission of HIV. It was what I had been waiting for, a project that had a lot of the things that I liked: problem-solving, product design, campaigning, and being a bit of a big mouth pain-in-the-bum. I grew up in England, went to a nice public school, then didn’t want to go to university so I thought I would wander around. I did a season skiing, a bit of sailing, typical spoilt brat stuff. I ended up in the Caribbean. I was having a blast. I was really waiting for this bit of inspiration if you like, and it came in the form of syringes. How did you go about designing a selfdestructing syringe? Syringes are made in their billions every month around the world, and I realised that until I could go to a manufacturer and say “this is going to add nothing to your manufacturing costs” then I didn’t have a hope. That dictated the design. There is a part of the existing moulding process that is easy to change. I designed a mechanical valve into the plunger. After one use the plunger passes a ring inside the barrel. If you try to retract the plunger past that ring it locks. If you use excessive force, the plunger snaps and it can’t be used. Tanzania has just agreed to use only K1 syringes. Tell me about that. The Tanzanian government recognised there is a problem: that they don’t have enough sterile
Profile Marc Koska has worked for 27 years to stop the reuse of syringes. He designed the selfdestructing K1 syringe, set up Star Syringe to manufacture it and runs the charity SafePoint, which campaigns against unsafe injections
syringes, that they are being reused probably four or five times each, and that this reuse is a massive contributor to their burden of healthcare. How did you persuade the Tanzanian officials to switch to non-reusable syringes? I was anonymously sent a video of a healthcare worker reusing a syringe on three people: a 4-year-old, an adult with HIV and then a 1-yearold baby. I edited that into a short version and was able to show it to the minister, who was appalled. What’s next for your safe syringe campaign? In 2012 I want to concentrate on east Africa. I want to see Tanzania through, then I want to move on to Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi. A country like Tanzania is going to go from using 40 million syringes to 200 million. That’s going to require them spending about $7 million extra, but is likely to save them $70 million in healthcare costs. But where do they get the $7 million in the first place? My role is also trying to help them find the money. Interview by Jon White
12 November 2011 | NewScientist | 31
The climate forecast When extreme weather strikes, somebody, somewhere always asks about a link to climate change. It’s time we gave straight answers, says Peter A. Stott IN THE aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005, a vigorous debate raged as to whether it was a “normal” natural disaster or a consequence of global warming. Al Gore depicted the devastation of New Orleans in his movie An Inconvenient Truth and linked it to climate change. I became involved during a case before the High Court in London challenging a UK government decision to distribute the movie to schools. I was asked to provide expert written evidence on the extent to which the film correctly represented scientific understanding at the time. I liked the film and thought that Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change was broadly accurate. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in its most recent assessment report: “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level”. And as data continues to pile up, the evidence gets ever stronger that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause of the observed warming over the past century. But hurricanes are difficult. Climate models predict that they will become more intense. At the same time, considerable uncertainty remains. We only have about 40 years of reliable observational records, which precludes a clear determination of their variability. Given that 30 | NewScientist | 12 November 2011
different aspects of climate misinterpreted to imply that change could act to increase or every extreme flood or drought is decrease hurricane activity, due to climate change when this is whether or not Katrina can be manifestly not the case. And when ascribed to global warming is a events occur that climate change challenge beset by difficulty. might make less likely, such as the It is not surprising, then, that in record-breaking cold snap in the the aftermath of Katrina many UK last December, it doesn’t scientists were reluctant to make follow that climate predictions definitive statements about its are inconsistent or wrong. links with climate change. The A clearer way of thinking about same has happened after many weather and climate is to consider other extreme weather events the odds. After the European heat such as floods and droughts. wave of 2003, I worked with Myles When pressed, scientists often Allen and Dáithí Stone of the say that instances of extreme “Science now makes it weather are consistent with the possible to attribute some expected effects of climate types of weather event to change. But such statements are climate change” problematic. They can be
University of Oxford to show that human influence had very likely more than doubled the probability of such extreme temperatures. Since then, the concept that human influence could have “loaded the dice” in favour, or against, the occurrence of a particular heatwave, flood or drought has become widely accepted by scientists and seems a relatively straightforward message to communicate to the public. But this doesn’t mean that we are yet able to reliably quantify the changed odds of all extreme weather events. What we need is an attribution system, operated regularly like the weather forecast and made available to the public. Its purpose would be to deliver rapid and authoritative assessments of the links, if any, between recent extreme weather events and human-induced climate change. In the event of, say, a severe flood, the system would provide estimates of the extent to which the event was made more or less likely by human-induced climate change. It would also take into account alternative natural explanations such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a large-scale climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that affects weather worldwide. We expect such a service would be of great interest to anyone who wants to know whether a given event could be attributed to climate change, from politicians and journalists to homeowners and insurance companies. Are we capable of delivering? Attribution is difficult and it will
Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinion
be important not to undermine the credibility of a system by prematurely attributing events. However, climate science has advanced to the point where it is possible to assess some types of weather event. For example, the European heatwave of 2003 was consistent with an increased risk of extreme weather caused by climate change, whereas the cold US temperatures of 2008 were not – instead being linked to the La Niña phase of the El Niño. For other events, such as hurricane Katrina and last year’s devastating Pakistan floods and Moscow heatwave, the cause remains uncertain. But the development of an attribution system should help drive further improvements in the forecasting models by continually confronting real world examples of extreme weather. We at the Met Office – the UK’s national weather service – are keen to take this idea forward, and have begun to put together an international collaboration of scientists called the Attribution of Climate-related Events Initiative, or ACE for short. Our aim is to understand when we can reliably estimate the odds of particular types of extreme weather event and for which types of events further improvements are required. We hope to have a prototype attribution system up and running in two years. Should another category five hurricane make landfall on the US mainland its attribution will be tough. But scientific understanding is developing all the time. Were an attribution system established and its strengths and limitations well understood, a future judge, journalist or local resident, interested in who – or indeed what – to blame, would know where to go. n Peter A. Stott leads the climate monitoring and attribution team at the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, UK
One minute with...
Marc Koska Unsafe injections kill 1.3 million people a year, says the former beach bum who has a solution: the self-destructing syringe You are on a mission to stop the reuse of syringes. How big is the problem? The World Health Organization (WHO) says 1.3 million people die every year because of the reuse of syringes. The burden of disease cost is over $100 billion a year from syringe reuse, which is just mind-blowingly horrific. Twenty-two million cases of hepatitis B are spread every year because of the reuse of syringes. The WHO says one in two injections given is unsafe. You invented a simple non-reusable syringe, the K1. Where did it all begin? I read a newspaper article in May 1984 which predicted that syringes would one day be a major cause of the transmission of HIV. It was what I had been waiting for, a project that had a lot of the things that I liked: problem-solving, product design, campaigning, and being a bit of a big mouth pain-in-the-bum. I grew up in England, went to a nice public school, then didn’t want to go to university so I thought I would wander around. I did a season skiing, a bit of sailing, typical spoilt brat stuff. I ended up in the Caribbean. I was having a blast. I was really waiting for this bit of inspiration if you like, and it came in the form of syringes. How did you go about designing a selfdestructing syringe? Syringes are made in their billions every month around the world, and I realised that until I could go to a manufacturer and say “this is going to add nothing to your manufacturing costs” then I didn’t have a hope. That dictated the design. There is a part of the existing moulding process that is easy to change. I designed a mechanical valve into the plunger. After one use the plunger passes a ring inside the barrel. If you try to retract the plunger past that ring it locks. If you use excessive force, the plunger snaps and it can’t be used. Tanzania has just agreed to use only K1 syringes. Tell me about that. The Tanzanian government recognised there is a problem: that they don’t have enough sterile
Profile Marc Koska has worked for 27 years to stop the reuse of syringes. He designed the selfdestructing K1 syringe, set up Star Syringe to manufacture it and runs the charity SafePoint, which campaigns against unsafe injections
syringes, that they are being reused probably four or five times each, and that this reuse is a massive contributor to their burden of healthcare. How did you persuade the Tanzanian officials to switch to non-reusable syringes? I was anonymously sent a video of a healthcare worker reusing a syringe on three people: a 4-year-old, an adult with HIV and then a 1-yearold baby. I edited that into a short version and was able to show it to the minister, who was appalled. What’s next for your safe syringe campaign? In 2012 I want to concentrate on east Africa. I want to see Tanzania through, then I want to move on to Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi. A country like Tanzania is going to go from using 40 million syringes to 200 million. That’s going to require them spending about $7 million extra, but is likely to save them $70 million in healthcare costs. But where do they get the $7 million in the first place? My role is also trying to help them find the money. Interview by Jon White
12 November 2011 | NewScientist | 31