2005 was the hottest, stormiest and driest year ever: Studies Climate at record extremes
MONTREAL— This is shaping up as the year the battered earth hit back, wreaking havoc with record weather extremes that almost certainly spring from global climate change.
Scientists at the U. N. conference on climate change here will make public today this unprecedented litany for 2005:
The hottest year, with the global average temperature already slightly warmer than 1998, the current record year.
The most Arctic melting, with satellite photos showing the smallest area ever remaining covered by perennial sea ice at the end of summer.
The worst Atlantic hurricane season, with the most named tropical storms ( 26), most hurricanes ( 14), most top- category hurricanes ( 5) and most expensive hurricane damage.
The warmest Caribbean waters, with weeks- long high temperatures causing extensive bleaching of coral reefs.
The driest year for many decades in the Amazon, where a continuing drought may surpass anything in the past century. The western United States is also suffering from prolonged drought. As well, climate researchers from a dozen countries will soon report that it’s been getting warmer at night over two- thirds of the earth’s land mass since 1950.
“ We are seeing the fingerprints of climate change on the physical world,” said Lara Hansen, chief climate change scientist for the international arm of WWF, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund. Hansen said the five record extremes were even more striking because they happened in widely separated parts of the world and involved different physical forces.
“This isn’t a domino effect,
with the warm Caribbean causing Arctic ice to melt. We have a lot of these things going on simultaneously and they’ve all been predicted as consequences of climate change,” she said in an interview. Hansen and colleagues compiled the list of extreme weather records from official sources, including U. S. government agencies and the World Meteorological Organization.
Their sombre interpretation is widely shared among climate researchers and even by the global insurance industry.
“ This doesn’t prove in a mathematical sense that these were caused by climate change triggered by human activities. But it’s exceedingly unlikely that all these things are happening by chance,” said Gordon McBean, organizer of a Canadian climate science session here last week.
“ All this is what climate scientists have been warning would happen,” said McBean, a former head of the Meteorological Service of Canada and chair of the federal agency that funds university climate research. Most climate scientists say the rising global temperatures of the past 50 years are directly linked to increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases generated by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels. This global warming is triggering widespread climate change. The global mean temperature so far this year is six- one- hundredths of a degree Celsius higher than the 1998 level, the current record. To make the calculation in October, climatologists with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies combined readings from 7,200 weather stations around the world. The global average temperatures are ranked relative to the long- term average temperature between 1950 and 1980 so there are no absolute numbers. The record could still elude 2005 but only if a major volcanic eruption blanketed the globe with sun-blocking ash before the end of the month, causing world temperatures to plunge.
Unlike the whisker- thin temperature margin, the intense Atlantic hurricane season demolished previous records. The 26 tropical storms exhausted all the names from the regular alphabet. Officials switched to the Greek alphabet and are now tracking Hurricane Epsilon, about 800 kilometres southwest of the Azores.
Epsilon continued to defy forecasters’ expectations yesterday, refusing to die as it moved over increasingly colder water in the North Atlantic.
In the Arctic, perennial sea ice, the thicker slabs that normally don’t disappear in the summer, covered 1.3 million square kilometres less in September than the 20- year historical average — leaving a Peru- sized area as additional open water.
In addition to the WWF list, a team of two dozen international climate researchers have produced the first global picture of changes over the past 50 years in minimum and maximum daily temperatures, called temperature extremes. The Canadian member of the team, federal research scientist Xuebin Zhang, said temperature extremes “ are what cause the problems in our daily lives. “When we see increases in maximum temperatures we automatically think that heat waves are more likely,” Zhang said in an interview from Downsview, headquarters for federal climate research. The exhaustive study gathered historical records from more than 2,200 temperature stations and nearly 6,000 precipitation stations around the world for the period 1951 to 2003. The research paper will appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research ( Atmospheres). The insurance industry is also taking a keen interest in extreme weather and climate change. Weather- related insurance losses around the world so far this year total $200 billion ( U. S.), according to an industry report issued on the weekend. The amount is three times higher than any previous year, said Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re, a company based in Germany that backs up the policies of other insurers. Some of the increase is due to higher populations and wealth, but “ if you look at the number of weather events, independent of increasing wealth, they go up — a signal to us of being caused by climate change,” Hoeppe said.
Also at the climate conference yesterday, the American National Wildlife Federation warned the U.S. government must get serious about climate change, citing disasters like Hurricane Katrina in August.
President George W. Bush is increasingly out of step with Americans who are experiencing impacts on their jobs, homes and recreation, they said.