Posted on 07/05/2003 4:17:45 PM PDT by chance33_98
Alarm over freak weather worldwide
July 4, 2003
The world's weather is going haywire in 2003, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) warned this week in an astonishing announcement about global warming and extreme weather occurring around the globe.
In a short but dramatic press release, the organisation, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in the past few weeks, from the hottest-ever June in Switzerland to the record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change.
The unprecedented warning takes its force and significance from the fact that it is not coming from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from an impeccably respected UN organisation which is not given to hyperbole - although environmentalists everywhere will seize on it to claim that their direst predictions of climate change are being borne out.
The Geneva-based body, to which the national weather services of 185 countries contribute, clearly takes the view that what has been happening this year - in widely separated locations in Europe, America and Asia - is so remarkable that the world as a whole needs to be made aware of it immediately.
The extreme weather it documented, which includes record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms in different parts of the world, are consistent with global warming predictions.
Supercomputer models of the global climate show that as the atmosphere warms, the climate will not only become hotter, but much more unstable.
"Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase," the WMO said in its release.
Its announcement this week presented a series of examples:
In southern France, record high temperatures were recorded in June, with maximum temperatures exceeding 40C in parts of south-west France. This resulted in June average temperatures of 5C to 7C above the long-term average.
In the United States, there were 562 tornadoes during May, which resulted in 41 deaths. This was a record for the number of tornadoes in any month. The previous record was 399 tornadoes in June 1992.
In India, this year's pre-monsoon heatwave brought peak temperatures of more than 45C. At least 1 400 people died because of the hot weather.
In Sri Lanka, heavy rainfalls from Tropical Cyclone 01B exacerbated already wet conditions, resulting in flooding and landslides that left at least 300 people dead.
"These record extreme events all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years," the WMO said.
"New record extreme events occur every year somewhere in the globe, but in recent years the number of such extremes have been increasing ... the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1 000 years."
It is quite possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have all occurred since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001, in that order.
The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now, the WMO is saying, it is a reality. - Independent Foreign Service
Is their funding under review?
Just look out the friggin window and this claim will be shown to be false. Patterns appear quite normal.
You've got something there.
Most of these events occurred AFTER the Iraq war.
10-4. THIS is the most significant comment made IMO. Trust nothing the UN says or does!
Crazy, huh?
100 years ago, the world's population was about a third of what it is today... fewer people concentrated mainly in larger cities. Large tracts of minimally inhabited terrain. We probably don't know about the tornadoes that ravaged the plains 100 years ago because there was nobody to witness them and our satelites weren't yet orbiting. But we know the cities give off an excessive amount of heat compared to ehr countryside.
It only stands to reason that as our reporting and observing technologies improve, our records will become more complete. As we miss fewer events, we observe more of them. That doesn't mean there are more of them, just that we observe more of them.
BTW, I didn't see the debunker to whom you refer, but it might have been Patrick Michaels. He's an actual atmospheric scientist and quite good at rebutting the systerical crowd.
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