Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 16/03/2015
Event: Tim Palmer on Cyclone Pam: "wind gusts that have never been measured before"
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
John Humphrys: The President of Vanuatu, Baldwin Lonsdale, has said climate change is a key factor in the devastation caused by Cyclone Pam, which slammed into his Pacific nation on Friday. He said it was a "monster", and his country would have to start afresh.
Baldwin Lonsdale: Climate change is contributing to the disaster in Vanuatu. We see the level of sea rise, change in weather patterns - all things is happening, every way. The cyclone season that is coming, the warm, the rain, all this is affected.
John Humphrys: Well, that was the President of Vanuatu. What do the scientists make of it? Professor Tim Palmer is Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate, at Oxford University - good morning to you.
Tim Palmer: Hello, hi.
John Humphrys: Is he right?
Tim Palmer: Well, I think it's entirely consistent to say that these incredibly intense tropical cyclones that we've seen - not just Pam, which hit Vanuatu, but also the one Haiyan, which hit the Philippines last winter - you know, these are producing record-breaking winds and it's exactly this type of extreme cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming. So I think he's - it's entirely consistent to say that climate change has played a role.
John Humphrys: But haven't we had extreme cyclones, well, certainly since I was a boy? I mean, haven't we always had them?
Tim Palmer: Well, we have cyclones, I mean, cyclones, tropical cyclones, are extreme forms of weather, no doubt, and for us living in the UK, we rarely experience that degree of violence.
John Humphrys: Indeed.
Tim Palmer: However, within the class of all tropical cyclones, we're now seeing cyclones with wind strengths, with wind gusts that have never been measured before -
John Humphrys: Literally never, not "the worst since X"? But literally, we have never had such high winds?
Tim Palmer: That's right - 200-plus mile an hour winds, so these sort of things have not been seen. Now, it's not, that's not the only point - the point is that we know that this is coupled to an exceptionally warm tropical Pacific sea temperature, sea temperatures in the western Pacific again are at their warmest since records began, and this is almost certainly coupled to these very extreme temperatures that Australia has seen as well. So it's a kind of a pattern, which is all consistent with the general trend which the models predict to be occurring under climate change.
John Humphrys: But don't the models - aren't the models - haven't some of the models been shown to be flawed? I mean, partly because the temperatures have not been rising in the way they were expected to rise, given the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and so on, over the last 10 years, 15 years.
Tim Palmer: Um... I mean, you know, models are approximations to reality, and we're limited by the computers that we have, so, you know, we would always like to be able to increase the accuracy of these models with bigger computers. But they give a broad picture which I think is being borne out by observations, which is more of these very extreme types of weather. I should say, I mean, it's important to say that the climate models - I mean, it's a kind of complex picture. The climate models say that the tropical cyclones in totality actually will decrease, it's not that all types of tropical cyclone will increase under climate change. But what they do say is the very extreme types, such as Pam and such as Haiyan, these are likely to increase, and this is what we're seeing.
John Humphrys: Tim Palmer, thank you very much.