(Newswire.net — December 17, 2015) — Paris talks were finished last week with a promise to keep the global temperature rise under 2C, with a tendency to down it to 1.5C.
Just after a few days of a historic deal in Paris, the forecast for 2016 does not look promising. According to the forecast that The UK Met Office issued on Thursday, 2016 will probably be the warmest year ever. This forecast is based on the “key drivers” of global climate change and random events are not taken into account. It seems that it is no surprise, since the last two years’ temperatures were also above average.
El Nino together with the climate change will set a new record of global average temperature. The Met Office is worried because the forecast shows that there is only five percent chance for 1.5C goal to be met.
“The vast majority of the warming is global warming, but the icing on the cake is the big El Nino event”, said professor Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office. El Nino is a natural phenomenon of warming in the Pacific Ocean and it is expected to reach its peak in 2016.
Temperature rise caused by global warming in combination with natural variability are an excellent base for extreme weather events like heatwaves and fllods. “When variability adds to the underlying warming, it can give impacts that have never been seen before”, Scaife said.
Countries like Australia, Russia and China, some parts of Latin America anbd the Middle East were struck by heatwaves in the past two years. England has recently experienced floods and the estimation shows that it is 40 percent more likely that they have been caused by climate change.
Although it seemed that the air temeperatures warmed slowly, it turned out, according to the Met Office that the pace of global warming will gain speed in years to come, unless carbon emissions are reduced.
“The current sirtuation shows how global warming can combine with smaller natural fluctuations to push our climate to levels of warmth which are unprecedented in the data records”, said a Met Office statement.
Simon Bullock at Friends of the Earth said: “This is yet more evidence that the world is warming up fast. We’ll see far more savage storms and fllods in places like Cumbria and Chennai if governments do not act to cut carbon pollution”.
Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute of Climate Change at the London School of Economics said: “Global surface temperatures continue to rise. This means governments must act strongly and urgently to cut emissions of greenhouse gasses if there is to be any chance of keeping future warming to well below 2C, as laid out in the Paris agreement”.
Britain, for example, is experiencing the warmest December since the 1940s, with temperatures 10 degrees warmer than the average December temperatures. A good indicator of this mild winter are daffodils that have started flowering again. Many more examples of unusual weather conditions can be found in almost every country in the world.