A new report by the United Nations says that the first decade of the 21st century has experienced "unprecedented high-impact climate extremes," resulting in the warmest land and ocean temperatures ever recorded in history, UN News Centre reports.
The report, "The Global Climate 2001-2010, A Decade of Extremes," cites 2001 and 2010 as the decade in which more temperature records were broken than any other decade since measurements of land and ocean temperatures began in 1850. A rapid decline in Arctic sea ice and accelerating loss of ice sheets of glaciers accompanied these rapid changes.
Extreme droughts, floods and tropical cyclones were all experienced across the globe, affecting Eastern Europe, India, Africa and Australia in particular, as well as Pakistan where 2,000 people died in the floods of 2010. High-impact droughts struck Australia, East Africa and the Amazon Basin, producing negative environmental impacts to these ecologically diverse and rich environments.
"Rising concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are changing our climate, with far reaching implications for our environment and our oceans, which are absorbing both carbon dioxide and heat," said Michel Jarraud, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which produced the report.
The report includes findings from a survey of 139 national meteorological and hydrological services, including socioeconomic data and analysis from several UN partners and agencies. It charts rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and says that global concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose by 39 percent since the beginning of the industrial era in 1750, while nitrous oxide rose by 20 percent and methane concentrations more than tripled in amount.
The report also includes staggering numbers, blaming 370,000 deaths on the extreme weather in 2001-2010 decade, and 20 million people having been affected in Pakistan by devastating floods. A whopping $380 million of damage is estimated by these storms.
"We are already seeing the effects of climate change and so we need to take action through the use of scientifically-based climate services to cushion the impact on our environment, our economies and our societies," said Jarraud. "Decisions on flood defenses and dams, for instance, are often based on past experience and not on the likely future. But the past climate is no longer a sufficient guide to the future. We need to anticipate the climate we shall have in the next 50 to 100 years. It's a huge challenge but it's not a hopeless challenge if we all work together."
