On the UNFCCC newsroom homepage today I found the video at the bottom of this blog post. The first four minutes of the video show a news anchor man going through the current weather across the US with a hurricane off the coast of Florida, a heat wave in Chicago and a server drought in the south-west US. The video ends with Ban Ki-Moon addressing the viewers and asking for us to take action on climate change with him. On one hand the video seems overly dramatic. But, is this what it takes to get people to take up Ban Ki-Moon’s call for action?
After investigating the WMO’s website, I was able to find a link to a series of videos that the organization is running in preparation for the Climate Summit at the end of the month in New York City. A list of those videos can be found here.
It is very interesting to me that they are running this campaign on weather related events. We know that there is not a clear connection between any given daily weather event and climate, yet, this video series suggests that weather when examined in different locations globally is an indication of a warming climate. These videos are consistent with the predictions of climate modelers, according to the WMO website. So, maybe this is an effective way of convincing people of the real dangers of climate change. What do you think?
This is a very provocative video. Thanks for adding this to the Blog.
While links between human-caused climate change and individual extreme whether events are complex and difficult to establish, climate change does change the system in ways that can amplify or increase the frequencies of some types of extreme events. The probability of severe, long-lasting heat waves is rising as we add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The amount of rainfall that falls in heavy rainfall events has increased in a number of parts of the world, including the NE US, and it is projected that this trend will continue with global climate change. This can increase the likelihood of flood events. James Hansen, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy make an analogy with loaded dice. Adding GHGs to the atmosphere is loading the climate dice, increasing the likelihood of extreme summer heat events. See http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_17/.
Thanks for adding the “loaded dice” analogy Neil. That definitely should have been said.
This video is really interesting… I agree that it seems a bit dramatic but I do think that sometimes drama is necessary in order to get people to care. I think serve weather, although like you said is hard to correlate perfectly with climate change, is something that touches peoples live. It is events that they can see and feel. And that is why it might encourage them to take more action.