Planet marks new highs for heat, pollutants, sea level in 2016: report



By Jean-Louis SANTINI, with Kerry Sheridan in Miami



Washington (AFP) Aug 10, 2017



"We are thus able to identify connections that previously were purely speculative."

"The timing of the floods throughout Europe over many years gives us a very sensitive tool for deciphering the causes of floods," said Bloeschl.

And as the Mediterranean coast warms, coastal flood events in some regions occur later in the season.

Storms hit later in the winter than before, a trend that is likely "associated with a modified air pressure gradient between the equator and the pole, which may also reflect climate warming," said the report.

Meanwhile, floods in parts of northern Britain, western Ireland, coastal Scandinavia and northern Germany now tend to occur about two weeks later than they did two decades ago.

Winter floods along the Atlantic coast of western Europe tend to occur earlier, almost in the autumn, because maximum soil moisture levels are now reached earlier in the year.

"At that time, they typically occurred in April, today in March. This is because the snow melts earlier in the year than before, as a result of a warming climate."

"In the north-east of Europe, Sweden, Finland and the Baltic States, floods now tend to occur one month earlier than in the 1960s and 1970s," said lead author Guenter Bloeschl, a professor at the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).

The report in the US journal Science is the largest European study of its kind, and spans 50 years and a vast trove of data from over 4,000 hydrometric stations from 38 countries.

Washington (AFP) Aug 10, 2017 - Global warming is altering the timing of floods in Europe, making some rivers swell early and others later than usual, a phenomenon that impacts farming and daily life across the region, researchers said Thursday.

The Earth set a series of dire records in 2016, including hottest year in modern times, highest sea level and most heat-trapping gases ever emitted, a global climate report said Thursday.

A range of key climate and weather indicators show the planet is growing increasingly warm, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, said the annual State of the Climate Report.

"Last year's record heat resulted from the combined influence of long-term global warming and a strong El Nino early in the year," said the report.

"The major indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet," it added, noting that several markers -- such as land and ocean temperatures, sea level and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere -- broke records set just one year earlier.

The ominous news comes two months after President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the 2015 Paris accord on global warming, a decision that sparked widespread international criticism.

In the past billionaire Trump has called climate change "a hoax" invented by the Chinese, dismissing scientific evidence of human contributions to rising temperatures.

But as humanity continues to rely on fossil fuels for energy unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases are polluting the atmosphere, acting like a blanket to capture heat around the Earth, the report emphasized.

All the major greenhouse gases that drive warming, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide, rose to new heights, it said.

Atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 402.9 parts per million (ppm), surpassing 400 ppm for the first time in the modern record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years.

"Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and life on Earth," said the peer-reviewed publication, put together by nearly 500 scientists around the globe and released each year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the American Meteorological Society.

The entire 280-page report is available online.

- Hottest year -

The report confirmed prior announcements that 2016 was the hottest year since contemporary records began, marking the third year in a row that global records were broken planet-wide. Both land and sea surface temperatures set new highs.

Melting glaciers and polar ice caps swelled the world's oceans, and global average sea level rose to a new record high in 2016 -- about 3.25 inches (82 millimeters) higher than the 1993 average.

Global sea level has risen for six straight years, with the highest rates of increase seen in the western Pacific and Indian Oceans.

In the sensitive polar regions, sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic hit record lows.

Land temperatures warmed too -- average Arctic land surface temperature was 3.6 Fahrenheit (2.0 Celsius) above the 1981-2010 average.

This represents a 6.3 F (3.5 C) increase since records began in 1900.

- Heat, floods drought worldwide -

Some extreme weather events increased, such as unusually high tropical cyclone activity. A total of 93 named tropical cyclones were observed worldwide in 2016, well above the 1981-2010 average of 82 storms.

Record high annual temperatures swept Mexico and India.

Over the northern and eastern Indian peninsula, a week-long heat wave at the end of April saw temperatures exceed 111 F (44 C), contributed to a water crisis for 330 million people and to 300 fatalities, the report said.

Meanwhile, drought was unusually widespread. At least 12 percent of land surfaces experienced severe drought conditions or worse each month of the year.

"Drought in 2016 was among the most extensive in the post-1950 record," said the report.

Northeastern Brazil marked its fifth consecutive year of drought, the longest dry spell on record in this region.

Meanwhile, the weather phenomenon known as El Nino, which warms waters around the equator in parts of the Pacific, was strong in the first half of 2016, leading to increasingly wet conditions in some places.

Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay saw repeated heavy flooding, while parts of eastern Europe and central Asia were also wetter than usual.

The US state of California had its first wetter-than-average year since 2012, breaking a drought that lasted several years.

Tenerife, Spain (AFP) Aug 8, 2017





Authorities in Spain's Canary Islands kept beaches open to the public Tuesday but warned holidaymakers against touching potentially irritating microalgae blooms that have infested the waters. The spreading algae, which contain a toxin that can irritate the skin, have produced a greenish brown hue in the waters off some beaches of the hugely popular archipelago near the coast of Africa that a ... read more

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