Weather extremes point to global warming

Things are heating up...

A year of extremes provides evidence of global warming
By Michael McCarthy
03 December 2003

Since January, many of the predicted consequences of a steadily warming atmosphere have started to come true. In June the World Meteorological Organisation drew attention to extreme weather events across the world and in a highly unusual move, linked them to global warming explicitly.

India, Sri Lanka and the United States have registered record high temperatures, rainfall and tornadoes this year. There has been an increasing number of scientific reports of rapidly melting ice in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, and rapidly melting mountain glaciers. Continental Europe has seen forest fires like never before, and great rivers like Italy's Po have been reduced to a trickle.

Britain had its own extreme: on 10 August we registered the first three-figure Fahrenheit air temperature - 101.3F (38.5C) - in a reliable record that goes back to 1659.

The 10 hottest years in the global temperature record, which goes back to 1860, have all now occurred since 1990, with the hottest being 1998, which, according to the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was probably the hottest year in the northern hemisphere for 1,000 years.

It is followed in the table by 2002 and then 2001, and it is already clear that 2003 will also be in contention as one of the hottest years ever.

In Britain, four of the five hottest years in the Central England Temperature Record,

which goes back almost 350 years, have also occurred since 1990.