Philippines warned anew of climate impact; more powerful typhoons looming due to climate change, says wind dynamics expert

Floodwaters surround a residential area from to Typhoon Noru in San Miguel town, Bulacan province, Philippine. Typhoon Noru blew out of the northern Philippines earlier this week, leaving some people dead, causing floods and power outages and forcing officials to suspend classes and government work in the capital and outlying provinces. - AP

MANILA, Oct 1 (Philippines Daily Inquirer/ANN): Extreme sea level rise as the oceans further heat up and more intense cyclones are threatening coastal communities around the world, including those in the Philippines, said a United Nations report on the impact of climate change on the ocean and the cryosphere.

Released last week, the special report by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of even more drastic consequences that the world will face due to the unabated warming of the ocean and the rapid thawing of the cryosphere, or the frozen parts of Earth.

While these impacts will be felt globally, the Philippines – an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean with far less adaptive capacity than developed nations – will surely bear the brunt of these extreme events, said Lourdes Tibig, the lone Filipino contributor to the report.

“Whatever permafrost thawing that had happened, it will affect us even if we are far away because it results (in) what we call as major contributions to sea level rise,” she said in an interview with the Inquirer during the report’s Philippine launching on Thursday.

“There could be areas that will be permanently inundated, especially the low-lying ones. Productive agricultural areas near the coast could also be saline because of the intrusion of sea water.”

Without proper preparedness and access to resources, more human lives could also be put at risk due to more severe tropical cyclones, similar to Super Typhoon Yolanda, internationally knowns as Haiyan, which battered Eastern Visayas in 2013.

“More intense storms may become the new normal,” Tibig said.The report also projected that more extreme El Nino and La Nina would also likely intensify existing impacts, with drier and wetter events in several regions worldwide.

“With the ordinary (El Nino), we already find difficulty in adapting to it. What more if it becomes extreme?” Tibig said.

With these projections, coastal communities may suffer from a “triple whammy” or compounded hazards that can happen simultaneously, with the threats of extreme sea level rise, El Nino and stronger storms ahead, she noted.

The report was the third to be released by the IPCC, a UN-backed body that assesses the science related to the changing climate.

More than 100 scientists from 36 countries worked on this report on the ocean, citing nearly 7,000 scientific papers and eliciting over 31,000 comments during the reviews.

The report observed that the global ocean, which is considered a major carbon sink, has already taken up over 90% of the world’s excess heat since the 1970s. Scientists noted that its rate of warming has doubled since 1993.

Marine heat waves, or periods of extremely high ocean temperatures, have already adversely impacted marine organisms and ecosystems, as well as “critical foundation species”, including corals, seagrasses and kelp. — Philippines Daily Inquirer/ANN