Catastrophes are reminders of need for firm action on climate change

THE seeming confluence of three powerful hurricanes in the Americas - Harvey which battered Houston, Irma and Jose in Florida and the Caribbbean islands - has not surprisingly raised renewed concern over the pace of global warming.

While the science behind the causal link between climate change and powerful hurricanes may be debatable - in the US, the debate has taken on political overtones - the consensus appears to be that global warming does exacerbate the severity of storms and the subsequent flooding. To be sure, the US and the Caribbean aren't the only areas to be afflicted by extreme weather. Asia is painfully familiar with natural disasters. Recently, two weeks of heavy monsoon rains in South Asia took more than 1,000 lives in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and affected over 41 million people. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan killed 6,000 in the Philippines and affected more than 16 million.

Heavy rainfall and catastrophic flooding can be blamed on several causes, some of which are addressable to a degree. One is climate change. Global atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising over the years. Higher temperatures provide fuel for storms; warmer air holds more moisture which can result in more intense rainfall. Every degree centigrade of warming raises water vapour by an estimated 7 per cent. The Paris agreement on climate change, signed by 195 countries in 2015, is far from a panacea for global warming but it creates a framework for countries to pool their efforts to slow further deterioration. Certainly, the likelihood of extreme weather outcomes makes it imperative and urgent that all countries step up efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.