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Leading Article

Massive floods have impacted many parts of the world in 2010, including Australia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the Philippines. While the Australian floods received more media attention, over a million people lost their homes in Sri Lanka. The immediate cause of these floods was likely the La Niña weather pattern, but 2010 saw many extreme weather events globally such as heatwaves, snowstorms, and floods. Two leading weather monitors reported that 2010 was the hottest and wettest year on record, continuing the trend of rising global temperatures over the past several decades. The vast majority of scientists agree that this warming is due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, though some skeptics argue the causal link has not been definitively proven.

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14 views

Leading Article

Massive floods have impacted many parts of the world in 2010, including Australia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the Philippines. While the Australian floods received more media attention, over a million people lost their homes in Sri Lanka. The immediate cause of these floods was likely the La Niña weather pattern, but 2010 saw many extreme weather events globally such as heatwaves, snowstorms, and floods. Two leading weather monitors reported that 2010 was the hottest and wettest year on record, continuing the trend of rising global temperatures over the past several decades. The vast majority of scientists agree that this warming is due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, though some skeptics argue the causal link has not been definitively proven.

Uploaded by

Nik Oneill
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Leading article: What the weather is telling us

The massive floods in Australia have tended to overshadow similar disasters in Sri
Lanka, where a million people have seen their homes engulfed, and in Brazil, where
350 people have been killed and thousands affected by torrential downpours which
are the worst in 25 years. The discrepancy might tell us something about the biases
of western news media. But the phenomenon reveals more than that.
The wind and water movement known as La Niña is probably the immediate cause
of the floods from Queensland through the Philippines to Sri Lanka as cold water
from the coast of South America surges across the Pacific interacting with the
normal north-east monsoon. Yet that may not be the only common factor. 2010
was a particularly extreme year, with record-breaking snowstorms in Europe and
the United States, an unprecedented heatwave in Russia and floods across the
globe from Pakistan to Tennessee. This week in Sri Lanka the temperature dropped
to it lowest for 61 years.
Our perceptions of the weather are notoriously skewed by personal experience.
December, despite the prodigious snowfall in the UK, was one of the driest on
record; so much so that a hosepipe ban looms for next year already. Weather is not
the same as climate. But two leading US monitors of global weather have revealed
that 2010 was the hottest and wettest yet recorded. And it was the 34th year
running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average. We
have not had a below-average year since 1976. Nine of the 10 warmest years on
record have occurred since 2001. The warmer it gets, the more unpredictable the
weather will be.
It is beyond dispute that the Earth has been warming for decades. The vast
majority of climatologists believe that is because we are releasing gases which trap
heat inside our atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide we produce has almost
doubled since the Industrial Revolution. The link between that and climate change
has not been definitively proved to be causal, sceptics constantly repeat. The
problem is that by the time the proof is definitive, it will be too late to do much
about it.

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