What if we could reset the climate?
Rain-soaked autumns, alarming droughts: is this our future? An update on what the weather might hold, ahead of the Paris Climate Conference (COP21). The summer that just ended? Dry, hot, sunny. A blessing for tourists. But a source of growing concern for climate scientists.
Credit: Lucie Campenas
Eric Servat makes no secret of his concerns about the state of the climate and how it is changing. A hydrologist, he is the director of the Research Environmental Research Observatory (Oreme), whose primary goal is to understand Mediterranean ecosystems and study natural hazards.
Climate change is here
“Until now, the IPCC* reports—which are considered the gold standard on the subject—have been very cautious about the impact of climate change. That’s over! Today, everyone knows we’re already there. Climate change is no longer a thing of the future. It’s right here, before our very eyes,” reveals Eric Servat.
Will climate change have a tangible impact on our lives? For Eric Servat, it already has. The hydrologist draws a direct link between increasingly hot summers and the infamous “Cévenol episodes”—the torrential rains that regularly disrupt the Languedoc-Roussillon region. “The Mediterranean Sea is a source of instability, ” he explains. “This nearly enclosed body of water behaves like a pressure cooker when heated, generating significant meteorological instability in the region.”
Major trends
Last fall, for example, the Languedoc-Roussillon region experienced no fewer than nine major weather events. This fall of 2015 is no exception, with extreme rainfall in Montpellier on August 23 that claimed two lives, and floods that devastated the town of Lodève on September 14. These events occurred rather early in the season, which climatologists say is likely yet another sign of climate change…
The culprit? Global warming: the verdict is in. While there are no official figures, everything seems to indicate that the period we have been experiencing for the past three decades is highly unusual:“undoubtedly the warmest the Northern Hemisphere has seen in nearly 1,400 years,”notes Eric Servat. “Since the beginning ofthe 20th century, the average sea level has risen by 19 cm. This rise has most likely been accelerating since the 1950s.”
This is a trend that is unlikely to reverse anytime soon. That’s because the global climate system has enormous inertia. To illustrate this, climate scientists use the following analogy: if you cut the engine of an ocean liner traveling at full speed, it will continue moving forward for a very long time. This is a concept that policymakers have, in fact, taken on board, since the measures being devised today are not aimed at reversing the trend… but at limiting it to a temperature rise of 2 degrees by the end of the century.
Interview with David Mouillot (Marbec)
Interview with Olivier Maury (Marbec)
Floods and droughts
According to the director of OREME, public authorities must recognize the scale of the risks.“In the Mediterranean, this will result in a decrease in annual precipitation of between 5 and 30 percent.” A veritable catastrophe for many regions in the Middle East and on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, which are already below the critical threshold for “water stress”: less than 1,000 m³ of water per year per capita.
“For these communities, this means increasing difficulties in accessing water, as well as problems with agricultural production and a significant impact on the environment,”concludes Eric Servat. The hydrologist goes on to cite two figures: “Floods already account for one-third of natural disasters and more than half of the deaths caused by such disasters.”
2015: A Landmark Year for Climate Action
France will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015.
The challenge: to reach, for the first time, a universal and legally binding agreement that will enable us to effectively combat climate change and drive a genuine transition toward more sustainable and low-carbon societies.
* The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 to assess climate change.