Climate Change triggers extreme weather - study

US: Severe droughts, floods and heat waves rocked the world last year as greenhouse gas levels climbed, boosting the odds of some extreme weather events, international scientists said Tuesday. The details are contained in the annual State of the Climate report, compiled by nearly 400 scientists from 48 countries and published in the peer-reviewed Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The report itself remains “consciously conservative” when it comes to attributing the causes of certain weather events to climate change, and instead refers only to widely understood phenomena such as La Nina.

However, it is accompanied for the first time by a separate analysis that explains how climate change may have influenced certain key events, from droughts in the US and Africa to extreme cold and warm spells in Britain.

“2011 was notable for many extreme weather and climate events. La Nina played a key role in many, but certainly not all of them,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s National Climatic Center. Last year was among the 15 warmest since records began in the late 1800s, and the Arctic warmed at about twice the rate of lower latitudes with sea ice at below average levels, according to the report.

Greenhouse gases from human pollution sources like coal and gas reached a new high, with carbon dioxide emissions exceeding 390 parts per million -- up 2.10 parts per million from 2010 -- for the first time since modern records began.

Despite the natural cooling trend brought by back-to-back La Nina effects, which chill waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, 2011 was among the 12 highest years on record for global sea surface temperatures. The double La Nina punch influenced many of the world's significant weather events, like historic droughts in East Africa, the southern US and northern Mexico, said the report.

AFP