Warming up

The Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Michel Jarraud, disclosed the findings at the launch of a report by the United Nations agency on the sidelines of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen on Tuesday.

The report by the Geneva-based organization, which provides further evidence that the world is heating up, also said the current decade was already warmer than the 1990s, which were in turn warmer than the 1980s.

The hottest year recorded, 1998, coincided with a powerful El Nino. Meaning "little boy" in Spanish, an El Nino is driven by an abnormal warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean and can create havoc in weather patterns.

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

He pointed to extreme hotspots 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 told reporters.

Jarraud also highlighted extreme floods, including one which broke a 90-year record in Burkina Faso in West Africa. The current year marked the third lowest summer Arctic sea ice on record, after the two previous years, he added.

"Large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have the warmest year on record," the WMO report said.

"Warming is not uniform - there will still be cold winters and summers, but what we are talking about is a trend," Jarraud said, adding: “Cold waves will become less frequent, and heat waves more frequent."

And while there a few weeks to go before 2009 draws to a close, data collected by the WMO between January and October suggest that average global temperatures were already 0.44 degrees centigrade above the annual average for the 1961-1990 reference period.

The preliminary WMO information for 2009 is based on data from land-based weather and climate stations, ships and buoys, as well as satellites.

The agency said a full report was due in March.

rb/AFP/Reuters
Editor: Susan Houlton