DESPITE THE recent severe cold spell in northern Europe, 2010 will rank as one of the hottest years on record alongside 1998 and 2005, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
The Geneva-based UN agency also said yesterday that the first decade of this millennium was the hottest since meteorological records began, confirming a long-term warming trend.
“Data received by the WMO show no statistically significant difference between global temperatures in 2010, 2005 and 1998,” the organisation said, citing data provided by British and US agencies.
These were the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit.
The four agencies hold the largest databases on meteorological trends, gathered from worldwide networks of land-based weather stations as well as ships, buoys and satellites.
Allegations by climate change sceptics in late 2009 that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit had manipulated data to bolster the case for man-made global warming have since been disproved.
The WMO said yesterday there was a “statistical tie” between 2010, 2005 and 1998, with temperature differences less than the margin of uncertainty of plus or minus 0.09 degrees.
Over the 10 years from 2001 to 2010, it said global average surface temperatures were 0.45 degrees higher than the average of 14 degrees for the period from 1961 to 1990.
“The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,” said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud. “The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.”
Last year was “exceptionally warm” in much of Africa, southern and western Asia, Greenland and Arctic Canada, “with many parts of these regions having their hottest years on record”.
Arctic sea-ice cover last month was the lowest on record, with an average monthly extent of 12 million square kilometres – 1.35 million square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average for December.
Reuters reported yesterday that Thailand is closing dozens of dive sites to tourists after unusually warm seas caused severe damage to coral reefs in the Andaman Sea, one of the world’s top diving areas.
More than half of southern Thailand’s 15,000 hectares of coral reefs are suffering from bleaching, a phenomenon caused largely by higher sea temperatures over an extended period of time.
Sunan Arunnopparat, director of the national parks department, was quoted as saying that the reefs will be closed to divers in seven areas.
“This is part of an effort to restore the reefs,” he said.
The coral bleaching – whitening due to heat driving out the algae living within the coral tissues – was first reported last May after a surge in temperatures in the Andaman Sea from Sumatra to Burma.
Between last April and late May, sea surface temperatures in the Andaman Sea rose to 34 degrees, or about 4 degrees above the long-term average, according to NOAA’s Coral Hotspots website.
Other parts of southeast Asia have also suffered. An international team of scientists studying bleaching off Indonesia’s Aceh province found that 80 per cent of some coral species had died since then.