Emissions of Methane in U.S. Exceed Estimates, Study Finds - Dangerous

NYtimes:

Emissions of the greenhouse gas methane due to human activity were roughly 1.5 times greater in the United States in the middle of the last decade than prevailing estimates, according to a new analysis by 15 climate scientists published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The analysis also said that methane discharges in Texas and Oklahoma, where oil and gas production was concentrated at the time, were 2.7 times greater than conventional estimates. Emissions from oil and gas activity alone could be five times greater than the prevailing estimate, the report said.

The study relies on nearly 12,700 measurements of atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008. Its conclusions are sharply at odds with the two most comprehensive estimates of methane emissions, by the Environmental Protection Agency and an alliance of the Netherlands and the European Commission.

The E.P.A. has stated that all emissions of methane, from both man-made and natural sources, have been slowly but steadily declining since the mid-1990s. In April, the agency reduced its estimate of methane discharges from 1990 through 2010 by 8 to 12 percent, largely citing sharp decreases in discharges from gas production and transmission, landfills and coal mines.

The new analysis calls that reduction into question, saying that two sources of methane emissions in particular — from oil and gas production and from cattle and other livestock — appear to have been markedly larger than the E.P.A. estimated during 2007 and 2008.

One of the study’s principal authors, Scot M. Miller of Harvard University’s department of earth and planetary sciences, said its higher estimates underscore methane’s significant contribution to rising temperatures.

“These are pretty substantial numbers we’re dealing with, and an important part of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said on Monday. “Our study shows that there could be large greenhouse gas emissions in places in the country where we may not necessarily have accounted for them.”

Methane made up only about 9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, the E.P.A. said; carbon dioxide is easily the most prevalent gas. But methane is much more potent. Even though it rapidly breaks down in the atmosphere, its contribution to global warming is 21 times greater than carbon dioxide’s over a 100-year period.

The E.P.A. and Europe’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research largely agree on how much methane is discharged annually in the United States. At the most basic level, both arrive at estimates by assigning an average discharge to each category of methane emission, such as landfills, and multiplying the average by the number of sources in each category.

The latest analysis differs from those estimates because it relies on actual measurement of methane concentrations. Nearly 5,000 air samples were collected from 10 huge communications towers spread across the country — some on mountaintops, others more than 1,000 feet high — and some 7,700 more from an aircraft monitoring program, both programs run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy.

The data did not directly identify the sources of methane discharges. But the researchers were able to infer those sources through a range of techniques. In areas associated with oil and gas production, for example, the amount of airborne methane could be correlated with measurements of propane, another gas that serves as a sort of marker for oil and gas activity.

The study concluded that livestock produced roughly twice as much methane during the reporting period as the European database estimated. Most striking, the analysis reported that oil and gas operations in a north-south swath of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas may have produced five times more methane — and, combining all sources of discharge, the three states may have been responsible for a quarter of all man-made methane discharges in the United States.

Mr. Miller cautioned that both estimates were subject to large margins of uncertainty; the methane from oil and gas activity could be as small as 2.3 times the European estimates, or as great as 7.5 times. The reason, he said, is that the potential for inaccuracy rises as the area being surveyed or the category of emissions grows smaller.

The same caveat applies to the few regions where the study found that methane discharges were smaller than European estimates: the Appalachian coal belt, southern Illinois and western Kentucky, and New York City, for example. Some of those spots were also in areas where monitoring of airborne methane was infrequent or absent.

That said, the study’s overall conclusion that methane emissions were 1.5 times E.P.A.’s latest estimates is statistically accurate to within about 5 percent, Mr. Miller said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Emissions Of Methane Exceed Estimates.

Primeiro ônibus a bateria começa a circular em São Paulo

SÃO PAULO - A nova geração de ônibus da cidade de São Paulo terá seu passo inicial - ou melhor, sua viagem de lançamento - na sexta-feira, 22. É quando o primeiro ônibus movido a baterias da capital começa a circular nas ruas paulistanas. De fabricação chinesa e batizado de e-Bus, o coletivo conta com 504 células de fosfato de ferro para ser alimentado - e não usa nada de combustível fóssil, o que o impede de lançar poluentes no ar, como a maior parte da frota atual, movida a diesel. Ele também não depende de fios para circular por aí, como os trólebus, pois é carregado na garagem, antes de sair.


Inicialmente, a São Paulo Transporte (SPTrans), empresa da Prefeitura que gerencia o sistema de ônibus, fará o e-Bus circular sem passageiros, e utilizará 81 bombas de água de 50 kg cada um para simular o peso das pessoas em carregamento máximo. O coletivo tem autonomia para percorrer até 250 quilômetros. Segundo a Secretaria Municipal dos Transportes, em média, um ônibus da cidade hoje anda 230 quilômetros durante um dia.
Por três meses, o veículo rodará em itinerários de linhas da zona sul e da região central, apenas para ser testado em desafios tipicamente locais: ladeiras íngremes, anda e para constante do trânsito, asfalto nem sempre tão liso. O e-Bus foi cedido para os testes pela BYD, montadora que o produziu, e está sob responsabilidade da viação MobiBrasil, em uma garagem no bairro de Pedreira, na zona su da capital paulista.
A autorização para o elétrico circular foi concedida pelo Departamento Nacional de Trânsito (Denatran) na quarta-feira passada - o veículo chegou ao Brasil em outubro, um mês após uma delegação da SPTrans visitar sua fábrica na China.
"Ele vai 'suar' na nossa mão, vai ter que mostrar a que veio", afirma o diretor de Operações da SPTrans, Almir Chiarato, acrescentando que, por enquanto, não há custo nenhum para a Prefeitura. Contudo, a chinesa BYD já procura um terreno para se instalar no Estado, com vistas a futuros negócios no País. "Daqui, planejamos expandir os negócios para a América Latina", diz Hercílio Becker, gerente de Pós-Vendas da empresa.
A Prefeitura, de fato, avalia adotar ônibus a bateria, mas ainda não estabeleceu uma meta. De acordo com Chiarato, a ideia é usar esse modelo de veículos em linhas mais rápidas e curtas. "Com a restruturação da rede, vamos ter muitas linhas de 30 e 35 minutos, onde este tipo de carro é ideal", diz ele, referindo-se à reorganização das linhas de ônibus que a SPTrans começou a colocar em prática neste ano.
Na semana passada, o Estado participou de uma viagem do ônibus dentro da garagem. O veículo chama a atenção pelo silêncio, na comparação com os movidos por motor a combustão. Há três conjuntos de bateria: um sobre as rodas dianteiras, outro sobre as traseiras e um sobre o teto do veículo. O carregamento é feito por meio de pequenas entradas na lateral, onde são encaixados cabos ligados a um carregador. O processo de carga dura 5 horas, quando as baterias estão completamente descarregadas.
Passageiros. Em meados de março de 2014, mais dois ônibus a bateria chegarão da China já com as especificações feitas pela Prefeitura, o que os tornará aptos a rodar com passageiros. Esses coletivos, explica João Carlos Fagundes, superintendente de Serviços Veiculares da SPTrans, passarão a circular em itinerários de avenidas como a Cupecê, na zona sul. "Vamos colocá-los em linhas cheias, justamente para ver a sua capacidade operacional."
O ônibus que já está em solo paulistano tem a configuração interior original de fábrica, ou seja, em conformidade com a legislação da cidade de Shenzhen, na China, onde foi produzido. Para os próximos dois poderem andar com passageiros em São Paulo, a SPTrans fez uma lista de 25 itens a serem alterados, entre os quais a colocação de vidros basculantes (que podem ser abertos e fechados pelos próprios usuários) em todas as janelas, a reconfiguração dos assentos e a retirada do ar-condicionado.
O e-Bus é testado em outras grandes cidades do mundo. Em Nova York, alguns veículos já estão circulando nas ruas, assim como em Los Angeles, ambas nos Estados Unidos. Em sua cidade natal, Shenzhen, existem mil desses ônibus no sistema de transporte público desde 2010.
Em Bogotá, na Colômbia, o sistema de corredores expresso Transmilenio em breve passará a contar com veículos elétricos a bateria articulados. Becker, representante da BYD no Brasil, não informou quanto custa para se produzir cada ônibus a bateria.
"Eles ainda são mais caros que os ônibus convencionais, mas essa iniciativa é muito positiva", afirma o urbanista e consultor de Engenharia de Tráfego Flamínio Fichmann. Para ele, a tendência é que o preço dos ônibus elétricos caia acentuadamente nos próximos anos, o que deve ajudar a Prefeitura a atualizar a sua frota, deixando-a bem mais limpa.
O especialista destaca ainda que, frente aos trólebus, que também não emitem poluentes, os ônibus a bateria são mais vantajosos, já que a rede aérea dos trólebus é custosa para ser mantida. "Essa é a aposta certa da Prefeitura." A fabricante promete que cada veículo tem vida útil de 30 anos, embora as baterias tenham que começar a ser substituídas após uma década de uso. Um dos pontos fracos é que, em caso de apagão, os ônibus precisam de geradores para serem recarregados.
A cidade tem atualmente cerca de 15 mil ônibus, dos quais 190 são trólebus.

Sul da Flórida enfrenta perspectivas sinistras no aumento do nível do Mar - South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects From Rising Waters

MIAMI BEACH — In the most dire predictions, South Florida’s delicate barrier islands, coastal communities and captivating subtropical beaches will be lost to the rising waters in as few as 100 years.

Further inland, the Everglades, the river of grass that gives the region its fresh water, could one day be useless, some scientists fear, contaminated by the inexorable advance of the salt-filled ocean. The Florida Keys, the pearl-like strand of islands that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico, would be mostly submerged alongside their exotic crown jewel, Key West.

“I don’t think people realize how vulnerable Florida is,” Harold R. Wanless, the chairman of the geological sciences department at the University of Miami, said in an interview last week. “We’re going to get four or five or six feet of water, or more, by the end of the century. You have to wake up to the reality of what’s coming.”

Concern about rising seas is stirring not only in the halls of academia but also in local governments along the state’s southeastern coast.

The four counties there — Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach, with a combined population of 5.6 million — have formed an alliance to figure out solutions.

Long battered by hurricanes and prone to flooding from intense thunderstorms, Florida is the most vulnerable state in the country to the rise in sea levels.

Even predictions more modest than Professor Wanless’s foresee most of low-lying coastal Florida subject to increasingly frequent floods as the polar ice caps melt more quickly and the oceans surge and gain ground.

Much of Florida’s 1,197-mile coastline is only a few feet above the current sea level, and billions of dollars’ worth of buildings, roads and other infrastructure lies on highly porous limestone that leaches water like a sponge.

But while officials here and in other coastal cities, many of whom attended a two-day conference on climate change last week in Fort Lauderdale, have begun to address the problem, the issue has gotten little traction among state legislators in Tallahassee.

The issue appears to be similarly opaque to segments of the community — business, real estate, tourism — that have a vested interest in protecting South Florida’s bustling economy.

“The business community for the most part is not engaged,” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami land-use lawyer and Chamber of Commerce board member who attended the Fort Lauderdale conference. “They’re not affected yet. They really haven’t grasped the possibilities.”

It will take a truly magnificent effort, Mr. Pathman said, to find answers to the critical issues confronting the area. Ultimately, he said, the most salient indicator of the crisis will be the insurance industry’s refusal to handle risk in coastal areas here and around the country that are deemed too exposed to rising seas.

“People tend to underestimate the gravity here, I think, because it sounds far off,” said Ben Strauss, the director of the Program on Sea Level Rise at Climate Central, an independent organization of scientists. “People are starting to tune in, but it’s not front and center. Miami is a boom town now, but in the future that I’m very confident will come, it will be obvious to everyone that the sea is marching inland and it’s not going to stop.”

The effects on real estate value alone could be devastating, Dr. Strauss said. His research shows that there is about $156 billion worth of property, and 300,000 homes, on 2,120 square miles of land that is less than three feet above the high tide line in Florida.

At that same level, Dr. Strauss said, Florida has 2,555 miles of road, 35 public schools, one power plant and 966 sites listed by the Environmental Protection Agency, such as hazardous waste dumps and sewage plants.

The amount of real estate value, and the number of properties potentially affected, rises incrementally with each inch of sea-level rise, he said.

Professor Wanless insists that no amount of engineering proposals will stop the onslaught of the seas. “At two to three feet, we start to lose everything,” he said.

The only answer, he said, is to consider drastic measures like establishing a moratorium on development along coastal areas and to compel residents whose homes are threatened to move inland. 

 Local officials say they are doing what they can. Jason King, a consultant for the Seven50 Southeast Florida Prosperity Plan, an economic blueprint for seven southeastern counties over the next half-century, said it proposed further replenishing of beaches and mangrove forests, raising roads, and building flood-control gates, backflow preventers and higher sea walls. 

Here on Miami Beach, a densely populated 7.5-square-mile barrier island that already becomes flooded in some areas each time there is a new moon or a heavy rain, city officials have approved a $200 million project to retrofit its overwhelmed storm-water system, which now pumps floodwaters onto the island when it should be draining them off, and make other adjustments.

“The sky is not falling, but the water is rising,” said Charles Tear, the Miami Beach emergency management coordinator, who stood at an intersection at the edge of Maurice Gibb Park, just two feet above sea level, that floods regularly.

Mr. Tear said he and other city officials were focused on the more conservative prediction that the seas will rise by five to 15 inches over the next 50 years.

“We can’t look at 100 years,” he said. “We have to look at the realistic side.”

James F. Murley, the executive director of the South Florida Regional Planning Council, was similarly unmoved by the more calamitous predictions.

“We’re not comfortable looking at 2100,” he said, noting that for planning purposes he adhered to a projection that foresaw two feet of sea-level rise by 2060.

Whatever the specifics of the predictions, the Miami Beach city manager, Jimmy L. Morales, said he and his staff had to consider whether “we should adopt more aggressive assumptions” about the effects of climate change.

Officials here are seeking advice from the Netherlands, famous for its highly effective levees and dikes, but the very different topography of Miami Beach and its sister coastal cities does not lend itself to the fixes engineered by the Dutch.

“Ultimately, you can’t beat nature, but you can learn to live with it,” Mr. Morales said. “Human ingenuity is incredible, but do we have the political will? Holland sets aside $1 billion a year for flood mitigation, and we have a lot more coastline than they do.”

Crescer o Clamor Sobre as Desigualdades da crise climática - Growing Clamor About Inequities of Climate Crisis

WARSAW — Following a devastating typhoon that killed thousands in the Philippines, a routine international climate change conference here turned into an emotional forum, with developing countries demanding compensation from the worst polluting countries for damage they say they are already suffering.

Calling the climate crisis “madness,” the Philippines representative vowed to fast for the duration of the talks. Malia Talakai, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a group that includes her tiny South Pacific homeland, Nauru, said that without urgent action to stem rising sea levels, “some of our members won’t be around.”

From the time a scientific consensus emerged that human activity was changing the climate, it has been understood that the nations that contributed least to the problem would be hurt the most. Now, even as the possible consequences of climate change have surged — from the typhoons that have raked the Philippines and India this year to the droughts in Africa, to rising sea levels that threaten to submerge entire island nations — no consensus has emerged over how to rectify what many call “climate injustice.”

Growing demands to address the issue have become an emotionally charged flash point at negotiations here at the 19th conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which continues this week.

At a news briefing here, Farah Kabir, the director in Bangladesh for the anti-poverty organization ActionAid International, described that country as a relatively small piece of land “with a population of 160 million, trying to cope with this extreme weather, trying to cope with the effect of emissions for which we are not responsible.”

With expectations low for progress here on a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, widely seen as having failed to make a dent in worldwide carbon emissions, some nations were losing patience with decades of endless climate talks, particularly those who see rising oceans as a threat to their existence.

“We are at these climate conferences essentially moving chess figures across the board without ever being able to bring these negotiations to a conclusion,” Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said in a telephone interview.

Although the divide between rich and poor nations has bedeviled international climate talks for two decades, the debate over how to address the disproportionate effects has steadily gained momentum. Poor nations here are pressing for a new effort that goes beyond reducing emissions and adapting to a changing climate.

While they have no legal means to seek compensation, they have demanded concrete efforts to address the “loss and damage” that the most vulnerable nations will almost certainly face — the result of fragile environments and structures, and limited resources to respond.

The sheer magnitude and complexity of the issue make such compensation unlikely. The notion of seeking justice for a global catastrophe that affects almost every country — with enormous implications for economic development — is not only immensely complicated but also politically daunting.

It assumes the culpability of the world’s most developed nations, including the United States and those in Europe, and implies a moral responsibility to bear the costs, even as those same nations seek to draft a new treaty over the next two years that would for the first time compel reductions by rapidly emerging nations like China and India. As a group, developing countries will within a decade have accounted for more than half of all historical emissions, making them responsible for a large share of the continuing impact humanity will make, if not the impact already made.

Assigning liability for specific events — like Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with winds of at least 140 miles an hour, making it one of the strongest storms on record — is nearly impossible. It can take scientists years just to determine whether global warming contributed to the severity of a particular weather event, if it can be determined at all. 

 Many negotiators here have pressed to create a new mechanism that effectively accepts the idea that the results of climate change are irreversible and that the countries that are hit hardest first must be compensated. 

“We’ve reached a stage where we cannot adapt anymore,” said Ronald Jumeau, the United Nations representative for the Seychelles, who is his country’s chief negotiator here. He noted the devastating effects not only of extreme storm events, but also of creeping desertification, salinization and erosion that could result in financial losses and even territorial issues that the modern world has never had to face.

“This is new,” he said. “This is like, ‘The Martians are landing!’ What do you do?”

John Kioli, the chairman of the Kenya Climate Change Working Group, a consortium of nongovernmental organizations, called climate change his country’s “biggest enemy.” Kenya, which straddles the Equator, faces some of the biggest challenges from rising temperatures. Arable land is disappearing and diseases like malaria are appearing in highland areas where they had never been seen before.

Developed countries, Mr. Kioli said, have a moral obligation to shoulder the cost, considering the amount of pollution they have emitted since the Industrial Revolution. “If developed countries are reasonable enough, they are able to understand that they have some responsibility,” he said.

How to compensate those nations hardest hit by climate changes remains divisive, even among advocates for such action. Some have argued that wealthy countries need to create a huge pool of money to help poorer countries recover from seemingly inevitable losses of the tangible and intangible, like destroyed traditions.

Mr. Jumeau noted that Congress allocated $60 billion just to rebuild from one storm, Hurricane Sandy, compared with the $100 billion a year that advocates hope to see pledged to a Green Climate Fund by all nations. The fund, intended to help poorer countries reduce emissions and prepare for climate changes, has remained little more than an organizing principle since its creation in 2010, its fund-raising goals unmet.

Others have suggested a sort of insurance program.

The United States and other rich countries have made their opposition to large-scale compensation clear. Todd D. Stern, the State Department’s envoy on climate issues, bluntly told a gathering at Chatham House in London last month that large-scale resources from the world’s richest nations would not be forthcoming.

“The fiscal reality of the United States and other developed countries is not going to allow it,” he said. “This is not just a matter of the recent financial crisis. It is structural, based on the huge obligations we face from aging populations and other pressing needs for infrastructure, education, health care and the like. We must and will strive to keep increasing our climate finance, but it is important that all of us see the world as it is.”

Appeals to rectify the injustice of climate change, he added, will backfire. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” he said.

Juan Pablo Hoffmaister Patiño, a Bolivian who represents the alliance of developing nations known as the Group of 77 and China, said the issue was not so much about assigning culpability for the looming climate disaster as doing something to help those nations hardest hit.

“Trying to assign the blame is something that even scientifically could take us a very long time, and the challenges and problems are actually happening now,” he said in an interview here. “And we need to begin addressing them now rather than identifying who is guilty and to what degree. We can’t make this issue hostage to finding the responsible ones or not.”

Meanwhile, global emissions continue to rise. A report this month by the United Nations Environment Program warned that immediate action must be taken to reduce emissions enough to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That is the maximum warming that many scientists believe can occur without causing potentially catastrophic climate change.

The current global turbulence, consistent with what scientists expect to happen as the climate changes, is already taking a toll.

As the hundreds of diplomats and advocates assembled for talks here, Justus Lavi was waiting for rain in Kenya. The wheat, beans and potatoes he planted on his farm in Makueni County sprouted, but the rainy season brought only two days of showers, threatening to ruin his yield.

In northern Somalia, Nimcaan Farah Abdi’s 10 acres of corn, tomatoes and other vegetables were ruined as violent storms swept the Horn of Africa. A typhoon last weekend in nearby Puntland killed more than 100 people, a disaster overshadowed by the far more destructive one in the Philippines.

“My farm has been washed away,” Mr. Abdi said. It was the second year in a row of unusually heavy storms to have destroyed his livelihood, leaving him uncertain about how he will provide for his six children. “God knows,” he added, “but I don’t have anything to give now.” 

 Steven Lee Myers reported from Warsaw, and Nicholas Kulish from Nairobi, Kenya. Justin Gillis contributed reporting from New York, David Jolly from Paris, and Mohammed Ibrahim from Mogadishu, Somalia.

Speaking to CNN Philippine President

Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Philippine President Benigno Aquino warned that storms like Haiyan were becoming more frequent, and there should be "no debate" that climate change was happening.

He said either the world was committed to action on climate change "or let us be prepared to meet disasters".

 

 

 

 

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Typhoon in Philippines Casts Long Shadow Over U.N. Talks on Climate Treaty

The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet turned the storm into a lethal monster.

Olai Ngedikes, the lead negotiator for an alliance of small island nations, said in a statement that Typhoon Haiyan, which by some estimates killed 10,000 people in one city alone, “serves as a stark reminder of the cost of inaction on climate change and should serve to motivate our work in Warsaw.”

Naderev Saño, the chief representative of the Philippines at the conference, said he would stop eating in solidarity with the storm victims until “a meaningful outcome is in sight.”

“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness; the climate crisis is madness,” Mr. Saño said. “We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw.”

His declaration, coupled with the scope of the disaster, moved many of the delegates to tears. Yet scientists remain cautious about drawing links between extreme storms like Haiyan and climate change. There is not enough data, they say, to draw conclusions about any single storm.

“Whether we’re seeing some result of climate change, we find that impossible to find out,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists largely agree that it appears that storms will become more powerful as the climate changes. Dr. Emanuel helped write a 2010 study, for example, that forecast that the average intensity of hurricanes and typhoons — different names for the same phenomenon — would increase by up to 11 percent by the end of the century.

Haiyan, with winds of at least 150 miles an hour, was considered one of the strongest storms to make landfall on record. “The data suggests that things like this will be more frequent with global warming,” said James P. Kossin, an atmospheric scientist with the National Climatic Data Center.

Dr. Emanuel said that as the planet warms because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the difference between sea and air temperatures increases. It is this difference that fuels these kinds of cyclonic storms.

“As you warm the climate, you basically raise the speed limit on hurricanes,” he said.

As with Hurricane Sandy last year in the United States, powerful storm surges contributed to the deaths and destruction in the Philippines. And Dr. Kossin and others noted that one of the impacts of climate change — an overall rise in sea levels — is sure to worsen storm surges. While factors like wind speed, storm track, geography and the timing of tides affect the height and extent of a surge and the damage it causes, a higher sea level baseline will lead to a higher surge.

“When you strip everything else away, we’re seeing a general rise in sea level,” Dr. Kossin said. “There’s no question that storm surge is going to be compounded.”

The effect of climate change on storms in the Pacific is especially difficult to study, scientists said, because no governments fly research planes into storms to gather data. In the Atlantic the United States government regularly sends reconnaissance flights into hurricanes, but the last regular flights into Pacific typhoons — also by American aircraft — occurred more than a quarter of a century ago. “Since then, we’ve been pretty much blind,” Dr. Emanuel said.

Instead, researchers have to rely on remote sensing data from satellites that essentially detect the degree of cloud cover, and use pattern-recognition software and algorithms to come up with estimates of storm intensity. Dr. Kossin used that data in a 2008 study of the Pacific that found “that the strongest storms are getting stronger,” he said.

In Warsaw, some of the delegates expressed hope that the typhoon and its aftermath would give fresh impetus to the talks.

“The scale of the response in the talks must match with what is clearly an escalating situation,” Dessima Williams, a former chairwoman of the alliance of island states, said in an interview from Warsaw.

The negotiations, which will last about two weeks, are another step in a long effort to replace a weak treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which failed to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, with a new one that would take effect in 2020.

The Philippines disaster is likely to be cited by delegates debating one of the main issues, a longstanding fight about climate justice. As global warming proceeds, some of the poorest people in the world, who have had the least to do with the burning of fossil fuels, stand to be among the primary victims in small island nations and in countries like Bangladesh, India and the Philippines.

Developing countries want the West, historically responsible for emissions, for the most part, to take the lead not only in reducing the use of fossil fuels, but to put up huge amounts of money to help poorer countries adapt to climatic changes that have already become inevitable. Western governments — which in some cases are already starting to consider their own adaptation to climate change — agree in principle that they should help poor countries. But they have committed relatively small sums, and they are wary of letting fast-growing countries like China off the hook on emissions.

Analysts say the likeliest outcome of the Warsaw negotiations is a weak pact that essentially urges countries to do what they can to cut emissions.