Extreme weather warnings pre-empted floods
Pastor Dale Morgan
Extreme weather warnings pre-empted floods*
By staff and agencies
Last Updated: 12:01pm BST 08/08/2007
Warnings about extreme weather have been borne out by the occurence of
recent natural disasters such as the flooding that hit England, the UN
Weather Agency has said.
A climate change report released in May predicted that global warming
would lead to an increase in extreme weather events.
“The start of the year 2007 was a very active year in terms of extreme
climatic and meteorological events,” said Omar Baddour, a climatologist
with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
England and Wales endured the wettest July since records began in 1766
when 139.9mm (5.45in) of rain fell, flooding towns, destroying crops and
even hastening the onset of autumn.
The previous record was 135.4mm (5.28in) in 1936.
There have also been floods in Asia, a cyclone in the Middle East and
heatwaves across the world.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth report warned
that climate change would cause more natural disasters, which will hit
the poor hardest.
Global surface temperatures in January - when Europe experienced an
unusually mild winter - were the highest since records began.
According to data compiled by WMO, measurements were 1.89 degrees
Celsius (3.4 Fahrenheit) above the 127-year average.
The Geneva-based agency said April temperatures around the world rose
1.37 degrees Celsius (2.46 Fahrenheit) above the historical average
since 1880.
Record storms, floods and heat waves have since occurred in Africa,
Asia, Europe and South America.
Hundreds have died and thousands have lost their livelihoods in floods
since the start of the year in China, South Asia, Mozambique, Sudan and
Uruguay.
It said two heat waves in southeastern Europe in June and July broke
previous records, with temperatures in Bulgaria hitting 45 degrees
Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) on July 23.
Other extreme events this year include rare snowfall in South Africa and
Argentina, and the first cyclone ever documented in the Arabian Sea,
according to WMO.
“When we observe such extremes in individual years, it means that this
fits well with current knowledge from the IPCC report on global trends,”
Baddour told The Associated Press.
Baddour said it was too soon to say whether global temperatures for the
whole of 2007 would remain at such high levels.
But he added that climate scientists had reached a consensus that
weather extremes have increased over the past 50 years and that this
trend would likely continue.
“There is no other consensus model than this one,” he said.