Meteorologists have chronicled strange weather years for more than a decade, but nothing like 2007.
Get used to it, scientists said. As man-made climate change continues, the world will experience more extreme weather, bursts of heat, torrential rain and prolonged drought, they said.
Soaring temperatures, shrivelling lakes and prolonged drought could be the new norm thanks to climate change.
(CBC)
"We're having an increasing trend of odd years," said Michael MacCracken, a former top U.S. federal climate scientist, now chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington.
"Pretty soon, odd years are going to become the norm."
According to the World Meteorological Organization, a Geneva-based United Nations agency, the decade of 1998-2007 has been the warmest on record.
With temperatures 0.85 degrees Celsius above normal, January of this year was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe's average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.
As the year progressed, American weather stations broke or tied 263 all-time high temperature records, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. weather data.
England had the warmest April in 348 years of record-keeping, shattering the record set in 1865 by more than 0.6 C.
"Here in Canada, we can see the effects of climate change," Environment Minister John Baird told a Toronto audience in early December.
"Winters don't come as they used to; they're much warmer ... up in the Arctic in a place called Inuvik, we've had a school which has actually come off its foundation because the permafrost is
melting."
Another eye-opening event was reported this year in the Far North.
"For the first time in recorded history, the disappearance of ice across parts of the Arctic opened the Canadian Northwest Passage for about five weeks starting 11 August," the organization said.
Climate scientists say that the Arctic, which serves as the world's refrigerator, dramatically warmed in 2007, shattering records for the amount of melting ice. Sea ice melted not just to record levels, but far beyond the previous melt record.
The impacts have not been limited to temperature.
"Across North America, severe to extreme drought was present across large parts of the western U.S. and Upper Midwest, including southern Ontario, Canada, for much of 2007," the World Meteorological Organization said.
The UN agency mentioned "devastating floods, drought and storms in many places around the world."
And there were other oddball weather events.
A tornado struck New York City in August, inspiring the tabloid headline: "This Ain't Kansas!"
In the Middle East, an equally rare cyclone spun up in June, hitting Oman and Iran.
Major U.S. lakes shrank; Atlanta had to worry about its drinking water supply. South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years. And on Reunion Island, 640 kilometres east of Africa, nearly 394 centimetres of rain fell in three days — a world record for the most rain in 72 hours.
Individual weather extremes can't be attributed to global warming, scientists always say.
However, "it's the run of them and the different locations" that have the mark of man-made climate change, said top European climate expert Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in England.
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