The world’s climate scientists agree that humanity is poisoning the weather with fossil fuel pollution, making extreme weather more dangerous and deadly. The cavalcade of catastrophe of recent years — epic floods, heat waves, droughts, and storms — is only a foretaste of our planet’s future, because of the unceasing buildup of carbon pollution from the burning of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels. A special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarizes some of the latest scientific findings, which paint a dire picture of increasing disaster for a largely unprepared civilization:

“We need to be worried,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands.

The report calls for mobilization in climate resilience, in particular approaches that reduce the exposure to climate disasters while also improving economic well-being and lowering pollution. Areas that need focus include systems that warn people of impending disasters; changes in land use planning; sustainable land management; ecosystem management; improvements in health surveillance, water supplies, and drainage systems; development and enforcement of building codes; and better education and awareness.

Climate disasters strike the rich and poor very differently. In short, climate disasters harm the economies of developed countries, but kill the people in developing countries. From 1970 to 2008, over 95 percent of natural-disaster-related deaths occurred in developing countries. For some, the only risk management from disasters like sea level rise and drought will be relocation.

Scientists recently found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.

In a new, bi-weekly video report, BBC reporter Martine Croxall reviews the most recent extreme weather from around the globe. In the first episode of this Vestas-sponsored venture, she discusses the freak polar hurricane, flash floods in Italy, Snowtober, and the Thailand floods:

Losses from climate disasters are already high, running at as much as $200 billion a year, said Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, a study author. “Global warming is increasing the risk of disaster and already makes dealing with several types of disaster, like heat waves, more difficult. The risk will become greater as the future gets hotter,” he said. “Governments are not doing a good job now protecting us from disaster in the current climate.”

A USA Today (not IPCC) chart emphasizes the risk of drought in heavily populated areas.

The IPCC Special Report “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX)” is now online.  I had seen the previous draft and the changes to it, so I knew that it was a big missed opportunity, as I explained here.

UPDATE:  Dr. Richard Klein offers a defense of the IPCC process in the comments of my previous post (here).

Even so, since the media hasn’t been spending much time connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, the report has garnered some headlines:

• Report: Climate change worsens extreme weather events (USA Today)
• Extreme weather to worsen with climate change: IPCC (Reuters)
• Extreme weather will strike as climate change takes hold, IPCC warns; Heavier rainfall, storms and droughts could wipe billions off economies and destroy lives, says report by 220 scientists (UK Guardian).

There is definitely some good material in the report (I’ll do a separate post on that).  We should all appreciate the hard work that a great many scientists put into this report.  I’ve been highly supportive of IPCC scientists over the years, pushing back against the attacks by the deniers and confusionists — even as I have been critical of the IPCC process that tends to water down even the most obvious conclusions.

For instance, the report states:

It is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes and decreases in cold extremes will occur in the 21st century on the global scale. It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, or heat waves, will increase over most land areas.

Virtually certain means “99-100% probability” while very likely means “90-100% probability.”  Is there really as much as a 10% chance that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, or heat waves, will NOT increase over most land areas over the next 90 years?

Then we have this line:

It is very likely that mean sea level rise will contribute to upward trends in extreme coastal high water levels in the future.

C’mon guys and gals.  You couldn’t put a “virtually certain” on that?  Note that the sentence is already hedged with “will contribute” and “upward trends” and even the vague “in the future.”  Precisely how could mean sea level rise — even sticking with the lowball estimate from the 2007 report — have as much as a 10% chance of NOT contributing toward an upwards trend in extreme coastal high level waters sometime in the future.

So you can see the effect of the IPCC process that waters down even the most innocuous conclusions.  And by the way, since this is a 2011 report, it ought to base such statements on the recent literature of sea level rise, which is considerably higher than the 2007 estimate (see the discussion in “Scientists withdraw low-ball estimate of sea level rise“).

My biggest problem with the report remains the short shrift it gives to the vast literature on drought that I reviewed in my recent Nature article.  As I wrote, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

You can see from the chart above that USA Today (and Jeff Masters, who helped put it together) figured out that drought may be the biggest extreme weather danger in that it affects 5 heavily populated areas.

Reuters, in its story, states what should be obvious:

Droughts, perhaps the biggest worry for a world with a surging population to feed, were also expected to worsen.

The 29-page report itself has quite little on droughts, and the word “agriculture” appears only once in the main text, but it does have this blockbuster chart:

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UPDATE:  Andy Revkin’s comment (here) may be the single most head-exploding and revisionist thing he has ever written. I reply.  The adaptation expert, Dr. Richard Klein, offers a defense of the IPCC process in the comments (here).

Fortunately, the public already understands that global warming makes extreme weather more severe, as new polling reveals:

September polling by ecoAmerica found that 57% of Americans already understand “If we don’t do something about climate change now, we can end up having our farmland turned to desert.”  Duh:

The Palmer Drought Severity Index on a “moderate” warming path (via NCAR, click to enlarge). “A reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought.” During the 1930s Dust Bowl, the PDSI spiked briefly to -6 but rarely exceeded -3.  We probably can’t stop this, but we can avert far, far worse post-2050 (see below).

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is coming out Friday with its umpteenth watered down report on climate science, in this case on extreme weather.  The thing to remember about IPCC reports is that pretty much everyone involved has to sign off on every word, so it is inevitably a least common denominator document.

The actual scientific literature from 2011 is far more useful than this report — see “Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming” and “NOAA Study Finds Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts.”  I will provide the links to as many recent studies as possible in this post.

Indeed we already know from a major 2011 study that “human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas.”  As predicted, the warming has put more water vapor in the air, making deluges more intense.  Climatologist Kevin Trenberth explains:

There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms,

Obviously, since it’s getting hotter, we’re worsening extreme heat waves — both in intensity and duration and scale (the area the heat wave covers).  For the same reason, we know humans are making droughts worse — in intensity, duration, and scale.  The earlier snow melts also makes summer droughts worse.

Actual observations reveal that since 1950, the global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% of global land area per decade (see here).  Heck, our best scientists are already using global warming to help them predict dangerous extreme weather (see “USGS Expert Explains How Global Warming Likely Contributes to East Africa’s Brutal Drought“).

The reinsurance industry understands all this (see Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”).

Again, much if not most of the public appear to have a better sense of what’s happening right now than you’ll find in the summaries of a typical IPCC report, to go by Yale’s 2011 polling and the September poll from ecoAmerica quoted at the top, which also found:

69% of Americans Know “Weather Conditions (Such as Heat Waves and Droughts) Are Made Worse by Climate Change”

The American public can’t miss the extreme weather because it is everywhere now and increasingly off the charts (see “A New Record: 14 U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters in 2011“) and links below.

Of course, what’s to come is the real issue, since we still have control over that.  We’re facing 5 to 10 times the warming this century that we’ve seen in the past half century.

Unfortunately, the IPCC continues to conflate uncertainty in future emissions of greenhouse gases with uncertainty in the climate’s sensitivity to those emissions.  This means they present a very large range of possible overall impacts — and that allows the deniers to trumpet the low range with their powerful fossil-fuel-funded megaphone and induces the media to provide “balance” in their stories between the mid-range and the low range.

The reality is we are on the highest emissions trends (see “Biggest Jump Ever in Global Warming Pollution in 2010 means “levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago”).  And the latest science and observation points towards the high end of the climate’s sensitivity (see Journal of Climate: New cloud feedback results “provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity”).

Most climate scientists know what is coming if we don’t act quickly– and more and more are shedding their reticence to speak out, even if that is not yet reflected in bland, least-common-denominator IPCC reports (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”).

And as long as the deniers, inactivists and climate ignorati rule the debate, inaction is assured, which means that we are risking extreme weather beyond imagination, extreme events on top of an average warming this century that could hit 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 25°F in the Arctic:

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The Kyoto Protocol is in shambles, greenhouse pollution is at record levels, and climate disasters are growing in frequency and intensity.

To preserve the promise of civilization, we must start anew.

Twenty years ago, the world agreed that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions needs to be reversed as quickly as possible, or dangerous and potentially irreversible degradation of the global climate system would begin in about twenty years.

Those twenty years have passed, and now the world must mobilize to eliminate global warming pollution and defend humanity against the dangerous climate change that is now happening.

The existing global framework to address the threat of global warming — governmental, academic, scientific, economic, societal — is two decades old. The world’s top climate scientists drove the formation, in 1988, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations. Following the first IPCC climate change assessment report in 1990, representatives of the planet’s governments gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to establish a framework convention for addressing climate change — called, naturally enough, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That framework, ratified by all the world’s governments, including the United States, has guided civilization’s collective effort to address the threat of greenhouse emissions to the present day. As expressed in the UNFCCC:

The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

Despite their best efforts, those committed to achieving the objectives of the convention failed. The 1990 First Assessment Report correctly warned that “irreversible change in the climate” could come by 2000. Permafrost melt, sea level rise, species extinction, glacial retreat and disappearance, and other systemic impacts have transformed our planet for the worse. The degraded climate is now causing the decline of ecosystems, degradation of food production, and economic instability around the globe. Left unchecked, global warming is increasingly likely to solve the emissions problem through the collapse of industrial civilization.

So what can be done?

The necessary elements for defending civilization in a more dangerous, rapidly changing world all exist. Insurance companies are reconfiguring their policies as seas rise and disasters increase. Hedge funds are developing new financial instruments to handle the effects of climate instability. City planners are examining the security of transit and utility systems. Military officials are drawing up new war scenarios. Scientists and entrepreneurs are inventing, refining, and deploying technologies to sustainably power civilization. Activists are putting their freedom on the line to challenge the forces of inaction. But these efforts are haphazard and uncoordinated. They are insufficient to ensure that the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are realized on our polluted planet.

The missing piece, often described euphemistically as “political will,” involves a complete rethinking of the threat of global warming. Most Americans see global warming as a real problem, but one that is distant in time and space: that will only affect their children or grandchildren, one that will affect far reaches of the planet first and foremost. That misunderstanding is utterly natural, since that is the presumption of the existing framework, reinforced by the rhetoric and actions of political leaders like President Barack Obama. The greatest culpability, of course, lies in the immoral acts of powerful polluters and their allies to deny the threat entirely.

The new climate framework needs to be built on the following principles:

– Humanity is responsible for climate disasters.

– Climate change is not only a future threat but an active enemy to societal progress.

– All investments must take into account the reality of increasing uncertainty and risk as the climate system becomes more unstable.

– All existing infrastructures — physical, legal, economic, political, cultural — need to be re-examined for resilience in our changing world.

ThinkProgress Green and Climate Progress will be reporting on the efforts of this generation of humanity, and of the great democratic experiment of the United States of America, to build this new framework.