Freaky Global Weather Sets Off Alarm Bells

July 3, 2003
By Michael McCarthy

London - The world's weather is going haywire in 2003.

This is what the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) signalled on Wednesday night in an astonishing announcement about global warming and extreme weather events occurring right at this moment all around the globe.

In a short but dramatic press release, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in the past few weeks, from the hottest-ever June in Switzerland, to the record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change.

The warning takes its force and significance from the fact that it is not coming from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from a respected UN organisation which is not given to hyperbole - although environmentalists everywhere will seize on it to claim that their direst predictions of climate change are being borne out.

The Geneva-based body, to which the national weather services of 185 countries contribute, clearly takes the view that what has been happening this year - in widely separated locations in Europe, America and Asia - is so remarkable that the world needs to be made aware of it immediately.

The extreme weather events it documented, which include record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms in different parts of the world, are consistent with global-warming predictions.

The WMO's announcement on Wednesday night gave a striking series of examples.

In southern France, record high temperatures were recorded in June, with maximum temperatures exceeding 40°C in parts of south-western France. This resulted in average temperatures of between 5 and 7°C above the long-term average.

In Switzerland, June was the hottest in at least the past 250 years, according to environmental historians. In Geneva, since May 29, maximum daytime temperatures did not drop below 25°C, making June the hottest month on record for the city.

In the United States, there were 562 tornadoes during May, which resulted in 41 deaths. The previous monthly record was 399 tornadoes in June 1992.

In Sri Lanka, heavy rainfalls exacerbated already wet conditions, resulting in flooding and landslides and killing at least 300 people.

The infrastructure and economy of south-western Sri Lanka was heavily damaged. A reduction of 20 to 30 percent is expected for the output of low-grown tea in the next three months.

"These record extreme events (high temperatures, low temperatures and high rainfall amounts and droughts) all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years," the WMO announcement said.

"New record extreme events occur every year somewhere in the globe, but in recent years the number of such extremes have been increasing."

It is quite possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have now all occurred since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001, in that order.
The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now, the WMO is saying, it is a reality.

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