TEMPERATURES:PROVISIONAL FIGURES for 2011 show that it ranks as the 10th warmest year on record, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), which also confirmed that 13 of the warmest years have occurred since 1997.
“Global temperatures in 2011 are currently the 10th highest on record and are higher than any previous year with a La Niña event, which has a relative cooling influence,” the WMO said in a statement released at the Durban climate summit.
The cyclical La Niña, which continued until last May, was “one of the strongest of the last 60 years and was closely associated with the drought in east Africa, islands in the central equatorial Pacific and the southern United States,” it said.
The latest La Niña – opposite of the periodic El Niña, which has a warming effect – was also implicated in flooding in southern Africa, eastern Australia and southern Asia, where Thailand and Pakistan were particularly badly affected.
The report noted that while neither La Niña nor El Niña climatic phenomena, which occurs every three to seven years, are not caused by climate change, rising ocean temperatures due to global warming may affect their intensity and frequency.
“Temperatures continue to rise,” the organisation’s deputy general secretary Jerry Lengoasa told a press briefing in Durban. “The science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities,” he said.
Mr Lengoasa said that “not a single country” had reported the last decade as cooler than the 1961-1990 average. Even northern Russia was four degrees warmer while summer sea ice in the Arctic was at the second lowest level on record.
He also noted recent reports showing that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had reached new highs and “are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a two to 2.4 Celsius rise in average global temperatures”.
Scientists believe that any rise above the two degree threshold could trigger irreversible climate change, and one of the main objectives of the UN negotiations – first flagged at the Copenhagen summit in 2009 – is to limit the rise to that level.
A report released yesterday by Germanwatch, which is affiliated with the Climate Action Network, showed that Pakistan, Guatemala and Colombia topped its “climate risk index” last year for countries worst hit by extreme weather events. The index takes into account the cost of disasters in terms of human lives and absolute losses in dollar terms, but also the relative cost according to the country’s wealth.
Over a 20-year span, the most vulnerable countries were identified as Bangladesh, Burma and Honduras. No developed country featured in the “top 10”, although Russia made the “top 20” because of the heatwave of 2010.
Throughout the world, more than 710,000 people died since 1991 in 14,000 “extreme weather events”, which caused economic losses of $2.3 trillion, Germanwatch said.
In 2010, Pakistan was severely affected by the worst floods in its history while Guatemala was repeatedly hit by hurricanes and flooding struck Colombia. Russia ranked fourth for the heatwave that caused massive forest fires and led to 55,000 deaths.