Source: Dawn
Date: 10-08-2010
OSLO: Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia’s heat wave match projected trends of ever more extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists said.
This year is on track to be the warmest since reliable temperature records began in the mid-19th century, beating 1998, mainly due to a build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
“We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes,” said Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at WMO head quarters in Geneva.
“It is too early to point to a human fingerprint” behind individual weather events, he said. Recent extremes include mudslides in China or temperature heat records from Finland to Kuwait.
Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs “shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist”.
The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left two million homeless.
“Global warming is one reason” for the rare spate of recent weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
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