Drought, flood, famine - it's hot and getting hotter

By Gerard Wynn
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

UN study shows the past 10 years have been the hottest decade since records
began

This decade is on track to be the hottest on record, according to the UN's
World Meteorological Organization, and 2009 is the fifth-warmest year on
record.

Speaking on the sidelines of the climate conference, WMO head Michel Jarraud
pointed to extreme hot spots this year - Australia had its third-warmest
year since records began in 1850, "with three exceptional heat waves."

"I could go on. There was the worst drought in five decades which affected
millions of people in China, a poor monsoon season in India causing severe
droughts, massive food shortages associated with a big drought in Kenya," he
said.

Mr. Jarraud also highlighted extreme floods, including one that broke a
90-year record in Burkina Faso. As well, 2009 marked the third-lowest summer
Arctic sea ice on record, after the two previous years.

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at Britain's Met Office Hadley
Centre, which supplied some of the WMO data, agreed that 2009 is likely to
be the fifth-warmest year.

"Essentially what's happened is we've gone into an El Nino," she added,
referring to a natural weather pattern which drives abnormal warming in the
eastern Pacific Ocean and can unleash wider havoc in global weather.

If 2009 ends as the fifth-warmest year, it would replace 2003. According to
the U.S. space agency NASA, the other warmest years since 1850 have been
1998, 2005, 2007 and 2006. NASA says the differences in readings among these
years are so small as to be statistically insignificant.

The hottest year on record, 1998, coincided with a powerful El Nino, and a
new El Nino developed this year.

"It's just a matter of years before we break the record," Mr. Jarraud said.
"It's getting warmer and warmer. The warming trend is increasing."

"It's difficult to say [when the record will be broken] because of the
variability. The first time there will be a strong El Nino the temperature
will be greater than before."

Mr. Jarraud rejected a "climategate" row over leaked e-mails from Britain's
University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit that showed some
scientists' efforts to boost the credibility of climate change at the
expense of skeptics.

The WMO used British - including CRU - and two U.S. data sources for its
temperature analysis. "The three separately show almost identical results,"
Mr. Jarraud said.

The fact that the record for the hottest year has not been broken since 1998
has helped fuel arguments from a small minority of scientists that climate
change may not be as severe as feared.

But Ms. Pope said that temperatures had "climbed slightly" in the past
decade. "There hasn't been a cooling [since the 1998 spike]," she said.

The decade 2000-2009 was 0.44 Celsius above the 1961-1990 average, Ms. Pope
said, while the 1990s decade was 0.23C higher.

*Reuters News Agency with a report from AP*