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.
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