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Freakish climate events 'likely to intensify'
Topic Started: Feb 8 2009, 12:24 PM (66 Views)
Warren
Administrator
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Freakish climate events 'likely to intensify'

By Laura Macinnis

August 09, 2007 12:20am
Article from: The Courier-Mail

THE world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfalls in South Africa, the UN weather agency has reported.

The World Meteorological Organisation said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1C higher than the average for those months.

There had also been severe monsoon floods across south Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.

"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Program told journalists in Geneva.

While most scientists believe extreme weather events will be more frequent, Mr Baddour said it was impossible to say with certainty what the second half of 2007 would bring.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN umbrella group of hundreds of experts, has noted an increasing trend in extreme weather events over the past 50 years and said irregular patterns were likely to intensify.

South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region.

Heavy rains also doused southern China in June, with nearly 14 million people affected by floods and landslides that killed 120 people, the WMO said.

England and Wales this year had their wettest May and June since records began in 1766, resulting in extensive flooding, more than $6 billion in damage, and nine deaths.

Germany swung from its driest April since countrywide observations started in 1901 to its wettest May on record.

Uruguay had its worst flooding since 1959 in May.

Huge waves swamped 68 islands in the Maldives in May, and the Arabian Sea had its first documented cyclone in June, touching Oman and Iran.

Temperature records were broken in southeastern Europe in June and July, and in parts of Russia in May.

In many European countries, April was the warmest ever recorded.
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