How about a new climate?

Pouring autumns, worrying droughts: is this our future? We take a look at the weather ahead, in the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference (COP21). The summer just ended? Dry, hot and bright. A blessing for tourists. But a growing source of concern for climatologists.

Credit: Lucie Campenas

Eric Servat makes no secret of his concerns about the state of the climate and its evolution. A hydrologist, he is director of the Observatoire de Research Méditerranéen en Environnement(Oreme), whose main objective is to understand Mediterranean environments and study natural hazards.

Climate change is here

"Until now, the authoritative IPCC* reports have been extremely cautious about the impact of climate change. No more! Today, everyone knows we're there. Climate change no longer belongs to the future. It's here, right before our eyes," reveals Eric Servat.

Will climate change have a tangible impact on our lives? For Eric Servat, this is already the case. And the hydrologist makes a direct link between increasingly hot summers and the notorious "Cévennes episodes", the torrential rains that regularly upset the Languedoc-Roussillon region. The Mediterranean Sea is a factor of instability," he explains. This virtually closed environment behaves like a pressure cooker when heated, generating strong meteorological instabilities in the region".

Major trends

Last autumn saw no fewer than 9 major climatic events in Languedoc-Roussillon. This autumn 2015 is no exception, with extreme rainfall in Montpellier on August 23 claiming two lives, and flooding devastating the town of Lodève on September 14. These rather early episodes are no doubt another sign of climate change, according to climatologists...

Responsible? Global warming: the cause is clear. Although there are no official figures, everything seems to point to the fact that the period we've been living through for the last 3 decades is a very special one: " without doubt the warmest the northern hemisphere has seen for almost 1400 years". emphasizes Eric Servat. "Since the beginning of the 20th century, average sea levels have risen by 19 cm. This trend has probably been accelerating since the 1950s.

A trend that is unlikely to be reversed any time soon. For the global climate system is enormously inertial. To describe it, climatologists have this image: cut the engine of an ocean liner launched at full speed, and it will continue to move forward for a very long time. This idea has been taken on board by public authorities, since the measures being considered 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 Oreme's director, public authorities need to be aware of the scale of the risks. " In the Mediterranean, this will mean a drop in annual rainfall of between 5% and 30%". A real catastrophe for many regions in the Middle East and on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, which are already below the critical threshold of "water stress": less than 1,000 m3 of water per capita per year.

"For these populations, this means increasing difficulties in accessing water, as well as problems for agricultural production and a significant impact on the environment", concludes Eric Servat. And the hydrologist recalls two figures: "Floods already account for a third of all natural disasters, and more than half of all deaths caused by such disasters".

2015, a landmark year for the climate

In December 2015, France will chair the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.

The aim is to reach a universal, binding agreement for the first time, to effectively combat climate change and drive a genuine transition to more sustainable, low-carbon societies.

* The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate change.