Global warming: normal weather is a 'thing of the past', claims scientist

Oxford University's Professor Myles Allen said we have 'changed the odds' on weather conditions, with wetter and warmer winters now more likely

2K
0
88
2K
Email
Seaham lighthouse takes a battering as stormy seas lead to huge waves engulfing the iconic landmark in County Durham
Seaham lighthouse takes a battering as stormy seas lead to huge waves engulfing the iconic landmark in County Durham Photo: Paul Kingston/North News
10:40AM GMT 05 Jan 2016
Comments4584 Comments
Normal weather is now a “thing of the past”, a leading climate change scientist has said, after storms and heavy rain caused devastating floodsin parts of Britain.
December was record-breaking in both warmth and rainfall, according to the Met Office, with temperatures closer to those expected in April and May. For some parts of the UK, it was also the wettest December since records began in 1910.
Floods caused chaos in northern communitiesaf Storm Frank hit Britain  Photo: Getty
Professor Myles Allen, leader of the Climate Research Programme at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute said: “Normal weather is actually a bit of a thing of the past.
“Here in Oxford we maintain the world’s longest daily weather record, we just beat the previous record by a whopping two and a half degrees and that record was set back in 1852.
“You’re not meant to beat weather records by that kind of margin and just like in athletics if you start doing so, it’s a sign that something’s actually changed.”
Provisional statistics released by the Met Office at the end of December showed that the average temperature in the UK last month was 8C, 4.1 degrees above the average and beating the previous record of 6.9C set in 1934. Last month was also the wettest calendar month ever in Met Office records since 1910.
Speaking on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Prof Allen said compared the change in weather patterns to an athlete doping: “What we’re doing is loading the dice if you like, or like an athlete popping pills, we’re changing the odds. And we’re seeing the odds on these extreme warm, extreme wet winters increasing. And we’re going to need to plan for it.
'We've long known this was likely to be one of the earliest symptoms of climate change'
Professor Myles Allen
“You asked is this the new normal, well as I stressed, normal weather, unchanged over generations, is now a thing of the past. And if we’re building buildings and building infrastructure, we’re going to have to use climate simulations to work out what the weather will be like that that infrastructure will have to tolerate in 50 years’ time.”
Prof Allen said wetter and warmer winters had been predicted more than 25 years ago.
North Yorkshire Police warned on Monday night that Whitby was only accessible through one route by 4x4 vehicles The seaside town of Whitby was virtually cut off by heavy rain  Photo: Glenn Kilpatrick/Dobson Agency
“The intergovernmental panel in 1990, predicted that we would see a greater prevalence of these intense, short duration precipitation events that have caused all this flooding misery in northern England, so we have for a very long known that this was likely to be one of the earliest symptoms of climate change. Now we’re seeing it, it’s not actually all that surprising.”
We should expect the weather of the 2040s to be as different from today as today’s weather is from conditions in the 1970s, the professor added.
Whitby became the latest town to suffer flash flooding on Monday with the seaside town virtually cut off by heavy rainfall.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Climate Change Skeptics Lash Out At New Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Study That Questions Ocean Temperature Measurements

Image
Share on facebook 227 Share on twitter 22 Share on linkedin Share on google_plusone_share More Sharing Services 128 An estimated 35,000 walruses are pictured crowding on a beach near Point Lay, Alaska, because of a lack of sea ice in this September 2014 photo. A study published June 4, 2015, refuting the notion that the Earth’s temperature rise has been interrupted since 1998 was lambasted by the usual skeptics and their supporters.  Corey Accardo/NOAA/NMFS/AFSC/NMML/Via Reuters A new climate study was released Thursday that refutes the claim that there’s been a slowdown, or “hiatus” in the rate the Earth is warming, but some conservative-leaning media sites skipped covering the study itself and chose instead to promote the views of the minority of climate change deniers, such as  Christopher Monckton . For example, the Drudge Report, an immensely popular headline aggregator operated by conservative Matthew Drudge, promi...
Read more

Global warming could drive world temperatures up 7 degrees by 2100

Another piece of the  global warming  puzzle has been revealed. According to new research published on Jan. 1 in the journal  Nature , increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the number of clouds that form. This, in turn, will cause temperatures to rise much higher than previous climate-change models have predicted. According to this new research, global temperatures could rise 4 degrees Celsius or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100, and twice that by 2200. Lead researcher Steven Sherwood at the Climate Change Research Center at Australia's University of New South Wales, told  The Guardian  that this level of climate change would be "catastrophic rather than simply dangerous. For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet."   In a  news release , Sherwood said this new...
Read more

Why Is Critical Technology to Stop Global Warming Stalled?

Image
Pumping CO2 underground can help fight climate change but remains untested for the most part March 12, 2015  | By  Howard J. Herzog  and  The Conversation US Injection of CO2 and other gases into geological formations has been practiced for many years.  Credit:  SaskPower There are many uncertainties with respect to global climate change, but there is one thing about which I have no doubts: we will not solve climate change by running out of fossil fuels. Understanding this leads to three posible pathways we can follow to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, and explains why I’ve chosen to focus  my research  on carbon capture and storage. We can: continue to burn fossil fuels with little or no restrictions. We will blow by atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 450 parts per million (ppm), the level many scientists think is dangerous to exceed, and we will keep on going. We have enough fossil fuels to easily go above 1,000 ppm. The impac...
Read more