The World Meteorological Organization has
published a detailed analysis of the global climate 2011-2015 – the hottest
five-year period on record – and the increasingly visible human footprint on
extreme weather and climate events with dangerous and costly impacts.
The record temperatures were accompanied by
rising sea levels and declines in Arctic sea-ice extent, continental glaciers
and northern hemisphere snow cover.
All these climate change indicators
confirmed the long-term warming trend caused by greenhouse gases. Carbon
dioxide reached the significant milestone of 400 parts per million in the
atmosphere for the first time in 2015, according to the WMO report which was
submitted to U.N. climate change conference.
The
Global Climate 2011-2015 also examines whether human-induced
climate change was directly linked to individual extreme events. Of 79 studies
published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society between 2011
and 2014, more than half found that human-induced climate change contributed to
the extreme event in question. Some studies found that the probability of
extreme heat increased by 10 times or more.
“The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the
global temperature increase to well below 2 ° Celsius and pursuing efforts
towards 1.5 ° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This report confirms that
the average temperature in 2015 had already reached the 1°C mark. We just had
the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest
individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” said WMO
Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
“The effects of climate change have been
consistently visible on the global scale since the 1980s: rising global
temperature, both over land and in the ocean; sea-level rise; and the
widespread melting of ice. It has increased the risks of extreme events such as
heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods,” said Mr Taalas.
The report highlighted some of the
high-impact events. These included the East African drought in 2010-2012 which
caused an estimated 258,000 excess deaths and the 2013-2015 southern African
drought; flooding in South-East Asia in 2011 which killed 800 people and caused
more than US$40 billion in economic losses, 2015 heatwaves in India and
Pakistan in 2015, which claimed more than 4,100 lives; Hurricane Sandy in 2012
which caused US$67 billion in economic losses in the United States of America,
and Typhoon Haiyan which killed 7,800 people in the Philippines in 2013.
The report was submitted to the Conference
of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The five-year timescale allows a better understanding of multi-year warming
trends and extreme events such as prolonged droughts and recurrent heatwaves
than an annual report.
WMO will release its provisional assessment
of the state of the climate in 2016 on 14 November to inform the climate
change negotiations in Marrakech, Morrocco.
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