This column by Simon Gear first appeared in a Green Office Week newsletter in February of 2011

It has been snowing for 6 weeks in the US.  The North American media, with typical restraint, have dubbed the season Snowpocalypse. Australia’s second most expensive hurricane, Tropical Cyclone Yasi is pummelling Queensland, dumping yet more water into a state that was already boasting a flooded area the size of Belgium, from an extremely wet December.  Last year saw record-breaking droughts in Russia and floods in Pakistan.

The glaciers on top of Kilimanjaro are retreating fast enough that photographs taken 6 months apart tell the story of the melt. Postcards from Glacier National Park in Montana show unrecognisable empty valleys, bereft of the ice that gave the park its name. In the Himalayas, the drier, warmer climate is putting a billion people at risk as the rivers that flow out over the Indian sub-continent dry up.

For years, climatologists have been interviewed by eager reporters desperate for a slam-dunk global warming quote and for years, climatologists have avoided such comparisons like the plague.  A scientist’s reputation rests wholly on their unwillingness to jump to conclusions.  So no self respecting researcher is going to allow his name to emblazon the front page under the headline, “Global warming kills two in lightning shock”.  

But things are changing.  For one, we’ve been watching this problem for long enough that we now have 30-odd years’ worth of pretty good extreme weather data. We have watched three decades of Atlantic hurricanes and can conclude that warmer years mean more and bigger storms.  Satellite data shows us that warm years mean more floods in the Pacific than cooler years.  In fact, the warm year rains exceed model predictions, showing that contrary to accusations of exaggeration, the scientists’ forecasts of increased floods and drought may be too conservative.

For the first time ordinary forecasters are speaking of climate change effects, not as something possible or futuristic, but as a reality of the systems with which we are now faced. There is probably a while before climate changes will become so severe that they will significantly affect middle class urban dwellers in temperate climates like Johannesburg, but for people still immediately reliant on, or exposed to the natural world, the effects are already here.

Forecasters all over the world are agreeing that we are now seeing a volume and persistence of extreme weather events unmatched in the past. This is compounded by ever-increasing population pressure pushing people to live in areas, which expose them to the worst that nature can throw. There is a sense that for once, changes that the species most affected by the environmental we have wrought will be us. After years of the oil lobby dismissing climate change scientists as scaremongers, they might finally be getting the proof they so scoffingly demanded.  This is one argument that I wish science had lost.