2010 will be one of the top three warmest years on record and the decade 2001-2010 breaks the record as the warmest decade ever since we have records says the UN’s World Meterological Organisation’s secretary-general Michel Jarraud. The assessment is a consense of temperature data from four meteorological institutions. If nothing is done this curve will go on increasing and increasing.
The benchmark for warming is 14C comprising the global combined surface temperatures of the air and sea from 1961 to 1990.
From 2001 to 2010 global temperatures have averaged 0.46C above the benchmark.
2010 ws 0.55C warmer than the benchmark.
Australia bucked the trend because of a powerful La Nina in the Pacific Ocean and heavy rains. Australia is one of the few places in the world to record below average temperatures this year.
Western Australia in parts had the driest year ever but the nation as a whole had the wettest spring on record.
In 2010 the globe had:
[ul]unprecedented heatwave in Russia in which about 11000 people died. Moscow had 33 consecutive days when the thermometer topped 30C and one day it went to 38.2C a record. Peat fires raged outside the city & suffocated it.
Monsoon flooding in Pakistan displacing 20 million and killing 1700 people.
The Rio Negro a major tributory of the Amazon plunged to its lowest level on record
The Arctic sea ice reached its third lowest summer extent ever.
Parts of Greenland where the glaciers are threatened with summer melt had an annual average temperature of 3C above normal.
Searing temperatures were experienced from Canada to Africa and the Indian subcontinent.[/ul]
A UN Environment Program study found that carbon dioxide absorbed by the sea is very gradually turning the water more acidic affecting calcium-based organisms called ptetropods that are the primary food source of crabs fish lobsters and coral. We are seeing an overall negative impact from oceanic acidification directly on organisms and key ecosystems that help provide food for billions. Carol Turley a senior scientist at Britain’s Ocean Acidification Research Program headed the report.