ChemRegs Newsletter – July 2021
Climate Change
This month (July) has witnessed some phenomenal weather events.
The intensity and scale of the floods in Germany have shocked not only climate scientists (who did not expect records to be broken by this amount), but also politicians, whose usual contribution is to visit the devastation, look glum, and supply some platitudes for the 24-hour news reporters.
In China, almost a million people have been displaced because of unprecedented floods.
For a second day in a row, and third time in a week, Northern Ireland recorded its highest ever temperature (31.4°C) on 22 July 2021.
It is apparent that what was merely conjecture a decade ago (about the effects of climate change), is evidently now climate change in action.
As we enter the new climate epoch, climate change will stop being a global issue affecting other people and become a local issue. For example, in Northern Ireland, some of the restaurants had to close, not just due to the exceptional heat records, but due to the fridges, ice machines, and inefficient beer bottle chillers that were pumping their heat back into the room, making it unbearably hot.
ChemRegs previously wrote in our March 2014 Newsletter that we would be living with a changed climate and we think this is worth reading again, so we have updated it and publish it below.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) published a report in 2014 that concluded that climate change is happening now.
This was titled a “Summary for Policymakers” and was a summary of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report “AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”.
This has since been updated as the IPCC is currently in its Sixth Assessment cycle, during which the IPCC will produce the Assessment reports of its three Working Groups, due for release in 2022.
One of the salient conclusions still seems to be that it will become wetter, hotter, colder, windier and dryer with more extremes of each.
It is the more extremes that should concern us the most, as this is the area that is making news headlines now.
The IPCC recommended in 2014 that we should start to adapt (i.e. begin to prepare) for these new weather extremes, as they are going to happen whether we like it or not!
But what exactly is an ‘extreme’?
Let us take a simple example of extremes of height: most adults in the world are between 5-6 feet in height, but there are also quite a few adults who are less than 5 feet or over 6 feet tall. It is quite rare to find an adult less than 3 feet tall or over 8 feet tall, but they do exist.
If we had to design a garden shed that could be used by all adults (ranging from less than 3 to over 8 feet tall) we would have to design it with a very tall door that had handles that were low down but also could be operated in tandem with a handle further up to accommodate the variability in size of the operator.
Insurance, civil disaster or environmental planners use the same principles and will plan their appetite for risk or investing of funds using the known extremes.
For example, when building a sea wall they will take into account the highest known recorded tide; when planning a new substation they will determine for how long has the area been flood free; or when putting in environmental mitigation schemes, the question will be what was the wettest, hottest, coldest or windiest it has been “since records began”?
However, what the IPCC stated in 2014 (and this is more relevant today) is these are no longer suitable benchmarks from which to plan. The ‘old’ extreme events are becoming the ‘new’ normal.
This means we have to plan for an even wetter, hotter, colder and windier future. Or, to use the height analogy, a 10’6” tall giant has just walked down your street.
What does this mean for us as individuals and businesses?
It means that even though climate change is a global phenomenon, the effects are going to be felt most keenly at a local level.
This in turn means that all plans to adapt to climate change will have to be radically different on a country-by-country basis and also on a region-by-region basis; meaning that plans in Norfolk will be of little importance to plans on Anglesey.
These local plans will have to be further reduced to micro plans, taking into account weather events affecting a village or small area only. For example, the 23-24 December 2013 rainfall falling on Gatwick airport was unprecedented, whilst only a few villages away normal rainfall was recorded.
Further, the micro plans may well have to be reduced again to cover individual homes and businesses, which face differing challenges and thus cannot be forecast just on a general basis.
The devastating floods in recent years has raised the question of planting more trees upstream of the levels to absorb the water and help to stop the run-off from fields.
However, if a business owner or householder plants more trees on his premises thinking he is doing the right thing, what happens if a drought occurs and the trees are still absorbing the water causing subsidence? These are the type of micro decisions that will need to be faced in the future.
The huge subject of climate change will become too big for any government or country to deal with. It will have to be adapted onto a local and micro-local basis by individuals and individual businesses.
We wrote back in 2014 “Will this change our lives tomorrow?” and answered “No. We cannot start to change everything at once as we are all plugged into a ‘system’, which would collapse if we did.”
However, as the effects of climate change seem to be happening more often and the system is already beginning to collapse, the answer in 2021 would seem to be “Yes”. This is happening now and we need to keep the concept of the 10’6” giant in our minds when planning for the future.
Luckily, there are a few publicly available websites that can help to inform our future planning decisions:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate-change/what-is-climate-change
The Met Office has historical facts and figures concerning past weather events and data. It also has the UK Climate Projections (UKCP), which provides the most up-to-date assessment of how the UK climate may change in the future. You can find information that will help your climate change risk assessments and adaptation plans.
This is an interactive map showing the effect of rising sea levels. NOTE – it is a private extrapolation and takes no account of future mitigation measures. It does, however, give a sobering visual representation of the effects of sea level rise in your area.
https://www.gov.uk/topic/environmental-management/flooding-coastal-change
This has detailed information on flood maps and flood risk in the UK.
The IPCC reports can be found here: https://www.ipcc.ch
For more information on anything in this Newsletter, please contact us at info@chemregs.co.uk