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	New research predicts extremes of weather will hit food production by ReliefWeb, NOAA, Inside Climate News, agencies   Aug. 2019   July 2019 was hottest month on record for the planet. (NOAA)   Much of the planet sweltered in unprecedented heat in July, as temperatures soared to new heights in the hottest month ever recorded. The record warmth also shrank Arctic and Antarctic sea ice to historic lows.   The average global temperature in July was 1.71 degrees F above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, making it the hottest July in the 140-year record, according to scientists at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. The previous hottest month on record was July 2016.   Nine of the 10 hottest Julys have occurred since 2005, with the last five years ranking as the five hottest. Last month was also the 43rd consecutive July and 415th consecutive month with above-average global temperatures.   The period from January through July produced a global temperature that was 1.71 degrees F above the 20th-century average of 56.9 degrees, tying with 2017 as the second-hottest year to date on record.   It was the hottest year to date for parts of North and South America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the southern half of Africa, portions of the western Pacific Ocean, western Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean.   Record-low sea ice: Average Arctic sea ice set a record low for July, running 19.8% below average - surpassing the previous historic low of July 2012.   Average Antarctic sea-ice coverage was 4.3% below the 1981-2010 average, making it the smallest for July in the 41-year record.   http://www.noaa.gov/news/july-2019-was-hottest-month-on-record-for-planet   July 2019   Globally, it was the hottest June on record. (Inside Climate News, agencies)   The extreme heat wave that gripped Europe in late June and sent temperatures soaring to 114 degrees Fahrenheit was made at least five times more likely by global warming, scientists with the World Weather Attribution group said Tuesday.   It was a quick and unambiguous finding, a judgment that in past times would have been harder to declare without heavy hedging.   The week of heat threatened vulnerable older people, damaged roads and railroad tracks and forced a rescheduling of national school exams in France. The Swiss meteorological service called it one of the most intense heat waves in that country's history and said the heat had a clear climate change signal.   "The normally hottest part of the summer is yet to come," World Weather Attribution's Geert Jan van Oldenborgh warned.   The World Weather Attribution scientists zoomed in on France while the heat wave was still being felt to assess the impact of global warming.   Using climate models and historical temperature records, they compared heat waves with and without the effects of human-caused greenhouse gases. They calculated that global warming had made the extreme June heat event at least five times more likely and said the probability was likely even higher.   "Without considering climate model results, the observed temperature record suggests that a heat wave like the one in June is now at least 10 times more likely than in 1901, and possibly 100 times or more, and that maximum heat wave temperatures are about 4 degrees Celsius [about 7F] warmer now than in 1901," said co-author Robert Vautard, a climate researcher at the Laborataire des Sciences du Climat in France.   "Every heat wave occurring in Europe today is made more likely and more intense by human-induced climate change," the scientists wrote in the latest study. "How much more depends very strongly on the event definition: location, season, intensity and duration."   Worryingly, they said, extreme heat waves are happening more frequently than projected by climate models, which could be a deadly trend.   As the heat wave spread across western and central Europe this past week, temperatures spiked to between 10F and 18F above normal in France, Germany, northern Spain, northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. Scores of cities and towns set monthly and all-time highs.   Europe as a whole saw its hottest June on record, a full 1.8F (1C) above its previous high set in 1999. Copernicus, the European climate service, announced that the entire Earth had just experienced its warmest June on record, topping the reading from June 2016 that followed a warming El Nino.   The heat wave lingered in Europe for days, with hot nights that didn't allow buildings or humans a chance to cool down. Heat wave deaths often outnumber deaths from all other natural disasters annually, but they don't get as much public attention because they typically don't appear in the statistics until after the event.   People will have to rethink how they live as heat waves intensify, said Friederike Otto, acting director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and a co-author of the study.   Extreme heat, especially when prolonged over days or weeks, can also stress crops, disrupt pollination and trigger flooding, as was reported along the Inn River in Austria in early June, when record warmth at high elevations quickly melted the winter's accumulated snow.   The attribution study's findings about the heat wave are in line with other recent studies, including major reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Climate Assessment, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.   Of all global warming's dangerous impacts, scientists are most certain that the build-up of greenhouse gases will continue to send temperatures soaring to unprecedented spikes more often.   In a 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Swain and other scientists found human fingerprints on 80 percent of all heat waves in areas with reliable temperature records. In a few decades, every summer will see temperatures hotter than today's, he said.   Researchers studying the causes of the heat waves are eyeing changes in the jet stream and other ocean atmospheric patterns, but "just the temperature rise of global warming is enough to drive unprecedented heat waves," Swain said.   "If you have the same exact weather patterns and you add 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warming on top of that, you're going to increase the likelihood of unprecedented heat waves," he said. "Everything will be unprecedented. Summer is like a whole new season of heat for much of the world.   "That is scary, because you can imagine a whole summer that is hotter than the extremes right now. We are locked into a large amount of additional warming even in an optimistic emissions scenario," he said.   The June heat wave also set the stage for a massive, fast-moving wildfire in Spain, said University of Reading (UK) climate researcher Hannah Cloke, who is working on ways to improve warnings for people about extreme events by combining data from wildfires, including smoke impacts, with heat stress data.   "This is actually really getting quite scary," she said. "It's a human problem, not a scientific problem.. We are deep into the red and there's not really a way back from that." Like last year, heat waves have been occurring across the Northern Hemisphere this summer.   Early in June, a heat wave in Greenland caused widespread melting across the surface of the ice sheet. Alaska is also setting high temperature records, sea ice around its coast is melting faster than normal, and wildfires have burned nearly half a million acres already this year.   Some of those fires are above the Arctic Circle, along with many more in Siberia. There was an "unprecedented" level of wildfire activity in the Arctic during June, said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with Copernicus ECMWF.   India and Pakistan also sweltered in a deadly heat wave in early June that contributed to the depleting of a major municipal water reservoir in Chennai, a city of about 10 million people.   An Indian government think-tank Niti Aayog warned last year Chennai was one of 21 cities that it thought could run out of ground water by 2020. India received 24 percent less rainfall than the 50-year average in the week ending on June 26, data from the India Meteorological Department showed, with scant rains over central and western regions of the country. In 2018 drought destroyed crops, ravaged livestock and exhausted reservoirs, leaving some cities with little water.   Across Asia, 3.4 billion people could be living in "water stressed areas" by 2050, according to a 2016 Asia Development Bank (ADB) report.   And on the U.S. West Coast, San Francisco hit 100F in June for the first time on record.   June 2019   New research predicts extremes of weather will hit food production across Africa, cites The Observer   Global heating could bring many more bouts of severe drought as well as increased flooding to Africa than previously forecast, scientists have warned.   New research says the continent will experience many extreme outbreaks of intense rainfall over the next 80 years. These could trigger devastating floods, storms and disruption of farming. In addition, these events are likely to be interspersed with more crippling droughts during the growing season and these could also damage crop and food production.   'Essentially we have found that both ends of Africa's weather extremes will get more severe', said Elizabeth Kendon of the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter. 'The wet extreme will get worse, but also the appearance of dry spells during the growing season will also get more severe'.   This meteorological double whammy is blamed on the burning of fossil fuels, which is increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and causing it to heat up. Last month levels of carbon dioxide reached 415 parts per million, their highest level since Homo sapiens first appeared on Earth and scientists warn that they are likely to continue on this upward curve for several decades. Global temperatures will be raised dangerously as a result.   The new meteorology study carried out by scientists at the Met Office in collaboration with researchers at the Institute of Climate and Atmospheric Science at Leeds University reports on the likely impact on Africa of these temperature rises and indicates that western and central areas will suffer the worst impacts of weather disruptions. Many countries in these regions - including Niger, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo - are expected to experience substantial growth in population over that time and will be particularly vulnerable to severe floods.   At the other end of the precipitation spectrum, the study revealed there would be an increase in occasions when severe drought would occur for up to 10 days in the midst of the most critical part of a region's growing season. The result could cause severe disruption to crop production.   'We have been able to model in much finer detail than was previously possible the manner in which rainfall patterns will change over Africa', said Kendon. 'In the past it was thought intense rainfalls would occur in a region every 30 years. The new study indicates this is more likely to happen every three or four years'.   An example of such flooding occurred two weeks ago when it was reported that eight people had died south of Kampala in Uganda after torrential rain hit the region. Similarly, at least 15 people were reported to have died during floods in Kenya last year. Thousands lost their homes.   'Africa is one of the parts of the planet that is going to be most vulnerable to climate change', said Kendon. 'Our study of rainfall patterns shows there are going to be some very severe problems to face food security and dealing with droughts'.   http://www.noaa.gov/news/june-2019-was-hottest-on-record-for-globe http://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2019/06/10/drought-africa-2019-45-million-in-need http://reliefweb.int/report/world/overlapping-vulnerabilities-impacts-climate-change-humanitarian-needs http://webtv.un.org/search/panel-on-preparing-for-the-future-in-the-face-of-climate-change-ecosoc-humanitarian-affairs-segment-2019/6052483595001 http://www.fao.org/emergencies/emergency-types/drought/en/ http://www.climatecentre.org/ http://climate.copernicus.eu/record-breaking-temperatures-june http://bit.ly/30hufWH http://tmsnrt.rs/32oe5wK http://bit.ly/2KX3mDf http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/07/one-climate-crisis-disaster-happening-every-week-un-warns http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/19/himalayan-glacier-melting-doubled-since-2000-scientists-reveal http://www.iisd.org/library/g20-coal-subsidies-tracking-government-support-fading-industry http://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/extreme-heating-are-we-hot-enough-act-now-climate
	Under-reporting poverty does not make it go away by Sharan Burrow ITUC, Inter Press Service, agencies   The World Bank claims poverty is decreasing around the world but UN research shows it depends on what you measure. If we are serious about reducing poverty, we need to start by properly identifying it.   The World Bank has repeatedly claimed that extreme poverty is on the decline. In its Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report, it states that 'the world has made tremendous progress in reducing extreme poverty. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty globally fell to a new low of 10 percent in 2015 - the latest number available - down from 11 percent in 2013, reflecting continued but slowing progress. The number of people living on less than $1.90 a day fell during this period by 68 million to 736 million'.   What are we measuring?   The World Bank's extreme poverty line of US$1.90 a day is in fact not based on real estimates of people's cost of living within countries. This explains why it fails to capture the desperation experienced by so many.   As soon as we focus on people's lived experience, the picture becomes more stark. At a most intuitive level, we know that poverty is determined by a person's inability to meet their material needs. Perhaps the most basic of these needs is food. The UN's 2018 figures on hunger show that it is on the rise globally. It estimates that 821 million people are currently going hungry. It is striking then that the World Bank considers millions of those living in hunger as living above its poverty line.   While the World Bank estimates that 400 million people live in extreme poverty in the Asia-Pacific Region, a 2018 report from the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific highlights that 520 million people in the region are undernourished, and 1.2 billion people lack access to basic sanitation.   The World Bank also estimates extreme poverty in Latin America, at 4.1%, to be low, and suggests it has been declining over the last years. Meanwhile, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean's (ECLAC) 2018 figures indicate that both poverty (29.6%) and extreme poverty (10.2%) have been increasing since 2012.   ECLAC defines its poverty and extreme poverty lines based on the costs of food and other essential goods and services. While the World Bank claims that extreme poverty has nearly been eradicated in the region, ECLAC figures show that nearly a third of people in Latin America are unable to cover the costs of basic goods and services, and one in 10 cannot even afford the basic costs of food.   So what is the World Bank's poverty line based on? The US$1 a day indicator was set out in the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report. While the 'dollar a day marker' was easily understandable to the public, it was primarily symbolic and not based on any estimate of the income people would need to live on.   The poverty line has since been updated according to inflation and changes to the consumer price index, and it currently stands at US$1.90 for the poorest countries. The Bank did develop additional poverty lines for lower-middle and upper-middle income countries, at US$3.20 and US$5.50 a day, largely to reflect higher prices in those countries.   The arbitrary nature of the Bank's approach to poverty measurement has numerous critics and many have identified the need to move towards a basic needs approach. This would define the amount of money needed to cover food, housing, and other essential goods and services, including health and education.   It is estimated that if the Bank were to measure poverty on the basis of needs, international poverty rates would be considerably higher. The Bank has resisted such a call, arguing that the US$1.90 poverty line is valid and meaningful as it corresponds to the median of the national poverty lines of the world's poorest countries.   What's really happening is the World Bank validates its poverty line largely on that basis of other World Bank-developed national poverty lines, a flagrant case of partiality and circular logic. Research by Professor Sanjay Reddy showed only 9 of the 87 national poverty lines cited by the Bank have been derived independently.   The Atkinson Commission on Global Poverty, which was set up to advise the Bank on global poverty measurement, set out several recommendations to improve its poverty monitoring and measurement. It recommended that the World Bank partner with other agencies to construct a basic needs estimate of poverty. This is entirely feasible and some regional agencies are already successfully doing it. Nevertheless the Bank argued against it, putting the onus for adopting a more accurate approach on individual countries and preventing the development of internationally comparable estimates.   The Bank's own Acting Director for Research Francisco Ferreira recently conceded, 'there is significant room for arbitrary decision making in setting the World Bank's international poverty estimates'. He went on to argue that correcting against such arbitrary consequences is unfeasible as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) poverty reduction target is based on World Bank poverty measures.   For an international institution to argue that an inaccurate measure should be maintained because the international community is using it, highlights a profound lack of ambition and responsibility taking.   The World Bank, and the greater international community, should not fear changing a measure that is not working. In fact, it is necessary in order to achieve the Bank's stated goal of poverty reduction.   Under-reporting poverty does not make it go away. Rather, inaccurate indicators make it harder to identify the policies that truly address it, such as raising wages, reducing precarious work, extending social protection coverage and enhancing access to essential public services such as health and education.   It is high time the World Bank moves away from an arbitrary indicator towards one that captures the cost of living, based on the real needs of people.   * Sharan Burrow is General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) Visit the related web page
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