LAST DECADE WARMEST ON RECORD
AFP/Reuters
December 8, 2009

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The first decade of the 21st century is set to be the warmest on record, the head of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said at UN climate talks.

"The decade 2000-2009 is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, which were in turn warmer than the 1980s," WMO secretary general Michel Jarraud said.

Mr Jarraud also said that the year 2009 would probably rank as the fifth warmest since 1850, the beginning of accurate instrumental climate records.

The year 2009 is expected to be Australia's third hottest year on record.

The December 7-18 climate summit in Copenhagen has brought together 193 countries to hammer out a climate deal to curb global warming and help poor countries cope with its consequences.

"We are in a warming trend, we have no doubt about that, but I would not make predictions for next year," he said when asked whether temperatures would continue to rise in the near term.

He said unexpected events such as a major volcano spewing tonnes of heat-filtering debris could lower temperatures.

Climate extremes, including devastating floods, severe droughts, snowstorms, heatwaves and cold snaps, were registered in many parts of the world, the UN weather organisation found.

Above-normal temperatures were recorded in all continents except North America, which experiences conditions slightly cooler than the 1961-1990 benchmark average.

Otherwise, there were marked regional variations, the WMO reported.

Extreme warm events were more frequent and intense in the southern part of Australia, southern Asia and South America.

The Arctic sea ice extent during the melt season was the third lowest ever, after the record year of 2007 and the runner-up year 2008.

China will have had the third-warmest year since 1951, and for some regions 2009 was the warmest ever.

The country suffered its worst drought in five decades, with water levels in parts of the Gan and Xiangjiang Rivers the lowest in 50 years.

In India, less-than-average rainfall during the monsoon season caused severe droughts in 40 per cent of districts, the WHO reported.

Most of these trends are consistent with long-term forecasts by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts that average global temperatures will rise by up to 6.4 degrees Celsius unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced.

The WMO's global temperature analysis is based on three data sets, one of them coming from the Climate Research Unit of University of East Anglia in Britain.

East Anglia's climate science has been the focus of intense scrutiny in recent weeks after email exchanges among its scientists, stolen and posted on the internet, led to allegations that data was manipulated to exaggerate the threat of global warming.

Poor demand more

Meanwhile, developing nations have demanded deeper emissions cuts from rich nations, particularly the United States, at UN climate talks in Denmark.

Negotiators are struggling to reach agreement on the depth of emissions cuts needed to slow the pace of climate change and are worried about the cost to their economies of switching from polluting fossil fuels to cleaner energy.

"We're off to a good start," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said of the December 7-18 talks.

He urged delegates to sort out technical details of an accord but said that the big issues such as emissions targets for rich nations and funds for the poor would have to wait for a December 18 summit that will be attended by over 100 world leaders.

Emission cuts offers from rich nations were far below what was needed, Dessima Williams of Grenada, chair of the 43-nation Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) said.

AOSIS wants emissions cut 45 per cent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

"Our 45 per cent remains on the table. Germany is at 40, the EU as a whole and some other countries are at 30. This is the time to escalate, to be ambitious," she said.

Washington, whose provisional offer to cut emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels works out at just 3 per cent below 1990 levels, said on Monday it had legal authority to curb planet-warming emissions, a step delegates cautiously welcomed.

The US Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse gases endanger human health, allowing it to regulate them without legislation from the Senate, where a bill to cut US emissions by 2020 is stalled.

India was equally cautious.

"It's for the US to indicate how that will be reflected here in the negotiations, in terms of targets, and how those targets are going to be enforced," said Shyam Saran, India's special envoy for climate change.

Mr De Boer said the ruling was "like having a stick behind the door... something to fall back on" for President Barack Obama.

"I think that will boost peoples' confidence in the US coming forward with a number, and that number making it through," either as cap-and-trade or as regulation, he said.

The United States, as the world's number two emitter after China, is key to a deal in Copenhagen to break deadlock between rich and poor nations about sharing out the burden of curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.

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