2010: Global climate hotter, wettest

The new figures confirm that 2010 will go down as one of the more exceptional years in the annals of climatology. Last year saw prodigious snowstorms that broke seasonal records in the United States and Europe; a record-shattering summer heat wave that scorched Russia; strong floods that drove people from their homes in places like Pakistan, Australia, California and Tennessee; a severe die-off of coral reefs; and a continuation in the global trend of a warming climate.

Two US agencies—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—reported on Wednesday that the global average surface temperature for 2010 had tied the record set in 2005.

The analyses differ slightly: In the NOAA version, the 2010 temperature was 0.62 degree Celsius (1.12 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the 20th century, which is 14 degrees Celsius (57 Fahrenheit).

Climate experts have become increasingly concerned about rising global temperatures over the last century. A large majority of climatologists attribute global warming to industrial processes and gasoline-burning engines that release heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“The warmth this year reinforces the notion that we are seeing climate change,” said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

Warmest years

It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th century average; the last below-average year was 1976. More remarkable, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

Easterling said the temperature readings collected at land stations and from ships and buoys at sea “unequivocally” disproved claims that climate warming ended in 2005.

“If the warming trend continues, as is expected, if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the 2010 record will not stand for long,” said James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Bob Ward at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science said the US data showed “that the Earth is warming and its temperature is at record levels.”

Last year’s data “also showed that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 390 parts per million, its highest level for at least 800,000 years and almost 40 percent higher than the level before the start of the Industrial Revolution when humans started to burn fossil fuels in increasing amounts,” Ward said.

“The evidence is overwhelming that human activities are driving climate change,” he added.

Wettest year

Last year was also the wettest on record, according to NOAA which cited a report of the Global Historical Climatology Network that made the calculation based on global average precipitation.

A warmer atmosphere holds more water, which in general can result in more floods, Easterling explained.

The NOAA analysis tracked weather changes that contributed to massive floods in Pakistan and a heat wave in Russia, saying an “unusually strong jet stream” from June to August was to blame.

“The jet stream remained locked in place for weeks, bringing an unprecedented two-month heat wave to Russia and contributing to devastating floods in Pakistan at the end of July,” the agency said.

As various crops were scorched and countless farms were inundated, global food prices rose to record levels and threatened to lead to food riots like those seen in 2008.

When it came to hurricanes and storms, the Pacific Ocean saw the fewest number of hurricanes and named storms, three and seven respectively, since the 1960s.

Shrinking sea ice

But the Atlantic Ocean told a different story, with 12 hurricanes and 19 named storms, marking the second highest number of hurricanes on record and third highest for storms.

NASA analysts said the shrinking sea ice in the Arctic may have made winters in Europe and Canada warmer than usual.

“Winter weather patterns are notoriously chaotic, and the analysis finds seven of the last 10 European winters warmer than the average from 1951 to 1980,” NASA said in a statement.

“The unusual cold in the past two winters has caused scientists to begin to speculate about a potential connection to sea ice changes,” it said.

“Arctic sea ice acts like a blanket, insulating the atmosphere from the ocean’s heat. Take away that blanket, and the heat can escape into the atmosphere, increasing local surface temperatures. Regions in northeast Canada were several degrees warmer than normal in December.”

The United States was wetter and hotter last year than the average values for the 20th century, but overall the year was not as exceptional in this country as for the world as a whole.

Still, some remarkable events occurred at a regional scale, including snowstorms last February that shattered seasonal records in cities like Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. In the summer, a heat wave broke records in the South and along much of the East Coast.

Future weather

The NASA and NOAA reports did not predict weather in the future.

But the UN climate science panel said the weather was likely to be more extreme this century because of a buildup of gases released by burning fossil fuels and forest destruction.

Jay Gulledge, the senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said farmers and others may be able to adjust to expected warmer temperatures, but preparing for extreme weather would be harder.

“We’ve got really immense potential right now to have even bigger impacts from the direct effects of extreme events,” he said.

As the weather warmed, the world did not do enough to prevent future climate change, scientists said.

At the UN climate talks in Cancun late last year, nearly 200 countries agreed to set a target of limiting a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over preindustrial times.

But promised emissions curbs by big polluters such as China and the United States are not enough to achieve that goal and tougher actions are needed, climate scientists said.

Paradox

Frigid winters in parts of Europe and the United States in 2010 may be a paradoxical side effect of climate change, some scientists said.

Rising temperatures mean a shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic, heating the region and pushing cold air southward during the winter, according to a study last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Warming of the air over the Barents and Kara seas, for instance, seems to bring cold winter winds to Europe.

“This is not what one would expect,” said Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and climate scientist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far away sea-ice won’t bother him could be wrong.”

The release of the NOAA report itself was delayed one day by an unusually hard snowstorm in North Carolina.

“These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia,” Petoukhov said. “Recent severe winters like last year’s ... do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.” Reports from The New York Times, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer Online at http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20110114-314309/Global-climate-hotter-wettest