Extreme Overachiever Decade 2001-2010

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

WHAT: The Global Climate Report for the decade 2001-2010

 

WHEN: July 2013

 

WHERE: Online at the WMO website

 

TITLE: The Global Climate 2001-2010 A Decade of Climate Extremes (open access)

 

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) recently released their wrap up of the last decade’s worth of global weather related data. Now, as you will all remember, climate is the long term trend of the weather (generally over a 30 year period) but it’s also important to keep track of the decade to decade trends, if not because 10 is a nice round number to deal with.

 

So what did the last decade’s report card look like? Turns out 2001-2010 was an overachiever when it came to records and extremes, which is bad news for all of us, really. The last decade was the warmest on record for overall temperatures and the speed of warming has amped up as well. The long term warming trend is 0.062oC/decade, but since 1970 it’s sped up to 0.17oC/decade.

 

If you only look at land surface temperatures 2007 held the record for hottest with 0.95oC above average, with 2004 the ‘least warm’ (there’s no long term cold records happening here) at 0.68oC above average.

 

If you look at sea surface temperatures, 2003 wins with 0.40oC above average and 2008 was the least warm at 0.26oC above average. The warmest year in the Northern Hemisphere was 2007 at 1.13oC above average and in the Southern Hemisphere 2005 wins with 0.67oC.

 

When it comes to rain, it’s a mixed bag. There were places that got more rain, there were places with drought, there were more extremes. South America was wetter than normal, Africa was drier than normal. Overall, 2002 was the driest year of the decade and 2010 was the wettest. The problem with rain patterns changing with climate change is that the location and the time frame changes. Instead of slow soaking rains, it’s extremes of dry spells followed by flash flooding.

 

The patterns of El Niño and La Niña switched back quite a lot during the decade, with El Niño generally creating warmer trends and La Niña creating cooler trends.

 

To qualify as an extreme event, an event needs to result in 10 or more people dying, 100 or more people being affected, a declaration of a state of emergency and the need for international assistance, which I think is a pretty high bar. But of course, since the last decade was overachieving, there were 400 disasters of this scale that killed more than 1million people.

 

Weather disasters represented 88% of these extreme events and the damage from these events have increased significantly as well as seeing a 20% increase in casualties from the previous decade. The extra casualties have been from some extreme increases in certain categories like heatwaves. In 1991-2000 6,000 people died from heatwaves. In 2001-2010 that jumped to 136,000 people.

 

The price of extreme weather events has also gone up with 7,100 hydrometeorological events carrying a price tag of $US1trillion and resulting in 440,000 deaths over the decade. It’s also estimated that 20million people worldwide were displaced, so this was probably our first decade of a sizable number of climate refugees. Internal displacement will be one of the biggest factors as people move away from the more extreme parts of their country to the places where it still rains (eg. from Arizona to Oregon).

 

Tropical storms were a big issue, with the report noting ‘a steady increase in the exposure of OECD countries [to tropical cyclones] is also clear’. It’s nice to see them point out that issues around extreme weather are not a developing world problem because they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with them, shown through the flooding in Germany and Australia last decade.

 

There was also a special shout-out to my homeland of Australia, for the epic heatwave of 2009 where I experienced 46oC in Melbourne and can attest to it not being fun. Of course, that epic heatwave was beaten by 2013’s new extreme map colour. However I noted Australia was getting pretty much all of the extreme weather effects over the decade. Ouch.

 

Even for the category of ‘coldwaves’ where the Northern Hemisphere saw an increase in freak snowstorms, the average temperature for the winter was still +0.52oC warmer than average.

 

Last decade was also setting lots of records in the cryosphere (frozen part of the planet). 2005-2010 had the five lowest Arctic sea ice records which have been declining in extent and volume at a disturbingly rapid rate in what is commonly known as the Arctic Death Spiral. There’s been an acceleration of loss of mass from Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets and a decrease in all global glaciers.

 

The World Glacier Monitoring Service describes the glacier melt rate and cumulative loss as ‘extraordinary’ and noted that glaciers are currently so far away from their equilibrium state that even without further warming they’re still going to keep melting. Oh, and last decade won the record for loss of snow cover too.

 

Sea level has started rising faster at a rate of 3mm/yr last decade, which is double the historical average of 1.6mm/yr. Interestingly, sea level rise is not even across the globe due to ocean circulation and mass. In a La Niña year, the Western Pacific Ocean can be 10-20cm higher than the average for the decade, but there’s only one way sea levels are going as the water warms and expands and the ice sheets melt – up.

 

Finally, if all of that wasn’t enough bad news for you – the report looked at the gas concentrations in the atmosphere and found (surprise, surprise) that CO2 is up and accounts for 64% of the increase in radiative forcing (making our planet warmer) over the past decade and 81% of the increase in the last five years. Methane is responsible for 18% of the increase and Nitrous Oxides chip in 6%.

 

Does it make anyone feel better if I tell you the hole in the ozone layer isn’t getting bigger anymore?

 

Basically the world we live in is getting more extreme as it heats up at an ever increasing rate. Given that these are the changes we’re seeing with a 0.8oC increase in global average temperatures and that’s from carbon we burnt over a decade ago, how about we stop burning carbon with a little more urgency now?