London: Man-made global warming is set to produce exceptionally high average temperatures this year and next, boosted by natural weather phenomena such as El Nino, Britain’s top climate and weather body said in a report yesterday.
“It looks very likely that globally 2014, 2015 and 2016 will all be amongst the very warmest years ever recorded,” Rowan Sutton of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, which contributed to the report, told journalists.
“This is not a fluke,” he said. “We are seeing the effects of energy steadily accumulating in the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, caused by greenhouse gas emissions.” The rate at which global temperatures are increasing is also on track to pick up in the coming years, ending a period of more than a decade in which the pace of warming worldwide had appeared to slow down, the report said.
This “pause” has been seized upon by sceptics as evidence that climate change was driven more by natural cycles than human activity.
Some scientists, however, argue that there was no significant slowdown, pointing instead to flawed calculations. The 20-page report from Britain’s Met Office, entitled “Big changes underway in the climate system?”, highlights current transitions in major weather patterns that affect rainfall and temperatures at a regional level.
An El Nino weather pattern centred in the tropical Pacific Ocean is “well underway”, the report says, and shaping up to be one of the most intense on record. Set to grow stronger in the coming months, the current El Nino is likely to result is dry conditions in parts of Asia and Australia, as well as southern and sub-Saharan North Africa, the Met Office said. AFP
