KNMI: No reason for panic over climate change

The Netherlands is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world, but the Dutch meteorological institute sees no reason to adapt its scenarios for the future.

There is no reason to panic. Despite last year's finding that the Netherlands and Western Europe are warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world, there is no need revise the climate change scenarios that the Dutchmeteorological institute ( KNMI) drew up three years ago to help the Netherlands deal with climate change. In other words: there is no need to make the dikes twice as high.

That is the reassuring message of a new KNMI report published on Wednesday.

Amersfoort beach

In 2006, the KNMI envisioned four possible scenarios for the Netherlands in 2050, based on different degrees of global warming. All four scenarios started from the premise that the Netherlands will continue to warm up, its winters will get wetter and the sea level will continue to rise.

Since then a lot has been said about climate change: from theories that it is just a lot of scaremongering to the prediction that the central Dutch town of Amersfoort will soon have a beach, as in Al Gore's climate change movie. As a result, the KNMI was being asked more and more often by local authorities, water boards and architects if its 2006 predictions were still up to date. Wasn't it time to raise thedikes, widen the sewers, start building heat-resistant buildings?

"There was a need to make an intermediary assessment, to look at the recent research and to judge it as part of one vision for the Netherlands," says KNMI researcher Albert Klein Tank. "That's what we're there for."

The KNMI's conclusion is that the existing scenarios are still a good foundation to base policy on.

Yes, the Netherlands and Western Europe are warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world; storms are more intense than was predicted three years ago, and international research shows that the polar caps of Western Antarctica and Greenland are melting faster, which may have an impact on the Netherlands.

But, the KNMI says, our scenarios still stand. "The changes are still within the margins of the scenarios."

'Manageable'

The relatively rapid rise of the temperature in the Netherlands is still within the margins of the prediction that the average temperature in 2050 will be two degrees Celsius higher than in 1990. Any rise in temperature under two degrees is seen as "manageable". Moreover, the KNMI says the warming trend can be partially explained by a predominance of western winds during winter, less cloud cover during summer and fewer dust particles in the air because of lower pollution.

Nor are the dramatic reports about melting ice caps reason to discard the 2006 scenarios. The "small-scale dynamic processes" that are causing the ice caps to shrink are "not yet fully understood" and have "hardly been modelled", the KNMI says.

But what about the Delta commission, which a year ago called the situation "urgent", in part because the rising of the sea levels is "possibly higher than expected"? That was a "plausible upper margin", meant to give politicians and public officials a worst-case scenario of what they can expect in a hundred or two hundred years. The KNMI, for its part, doesn't look at the maximum rise of the sea level but at the "most probable" one, which is not 55 to 120 centimetres but a 'mere' 35 to 85 centimetres by the year 2100.

Meanwhile, summer storms are gaining in intensity. The hourly rainfall could turn out to be much higher than was predicted three years ago. New insights have been gained about the situation along the North Sea coast, which should expect not just "long periods of drought" but also "extreme precipitation".

That's still not enough to discard the existing scenarios, says Albert Klein Tank, but enough to inform local authorities "so that they can take these changes into account, for instance when they are planning sewage works."

In four years time the UN panel on climate change is expected to come out with a new report. At that time, the KNMI will take another look at its own scenarios.