Hai,
Yahoo News 4 Jan 06
2007 predicted to be world's warmest year
By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON (Reuters) - This year is set to be the hottest on record
worldwide due to global warming and the El Nino weather phenomenon,
Britain's Meteorological Office said on Thursday. The Met Office
said the combination of factors would likely push average
temperatures this year above the record set in 1998. 2006 is set to
be the sixth warmest on record globally.
"This new information represents another warning that climate
change is happening around the world," said Met Office scientist
Katie Hopkins. The world's 10 warmest years have all occurred since
1994 in a temperature record dating back a century and a half,
according to the United Nations' weather agency.
Britain's Met Office makes a global forecast every January with the
University of East Anglia, and said it expected the world's average
temperature to be 0.54 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990
long-term average of 14.0 degrees. There is a 60 percent
probability that 2007 will be as warm or warmer than the current
warmest year, 1998, which itself was 0.52 degrees above the
long-term average it said in a statement.
Most scientists agree that temperatures will rise by between two
and six degrees Celsius this century due mainly to carbon emissions
from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.
They say this will cause melting at the polar ice caps, sea levels
to rise and weather patterns to change bringing floods, famines and
violent storms, putting millions of lives at risk.
Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said in October
that urgent action on global warming was vital and that delay would
multiply the cost by up to 20 times.
The Kyoto Protocol is the only global action plan to curb carbon
emissions, but it expires in 2012, is rejected by the world's
biggest polluter -- the United States -- and does not bind booming
economies like China and India.
The Met Office said the established moderate El Nino, a phenomenon
in the tropical Pacific blamed for disrupting weather patterns,
would continue for the first few months of 2007. It noted that as
there was a time lag between El Nino and its full effect on surface
temperatures, its influence would therefore be felt well into the
year.
It will coincide with what environmentalists say will be a very
busy year for climate diplomacy. Germany, which has an active
climate change agenda, has taken over the six-month rotating
presidency of the European Union and the year-long presidency of
the Group of Eight industrialized nations.
Backed by Britain, which has pushed climate change high up the
world agenda, pressure is building for the G8 summit in Germany in
early June to set out a framework for discussions to take global
action beyond Kyoto.
