Status of Global Climate Change
ECG Bulletin July 2014
2013 tied with 2007 as the sixth-warmest year since records began in 1850, with record warmth in Australia and near-record-high temperatures in Argentina and New Zealand. Typhoon Haiyan and Cyclone Phailin were among the strongest storms ever to make landfall, while droughts hit parts of Africa, China, and Brazil. These and other climate extremes are discussed in the annual statement on the status of the global climate in 2013, published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on 23 March 2014 (1). The report is based on datasets made available to the WMO by its members and partners, and is peer reviewed.
In a separate chapter, Sophie C. Lewis and David Karoly analyse the likely contributions made by natural causes and human-induced climate change to the extreme record-high temperatures in Australia. Based on a suite of climate model simulations involving nine different models, they show that human-induced climate change increases the likelihood of extreme summer temperatures in Australia five-fold (2) and that the record-high temperatures for the whole year of 2013 are almost impossible to reproduce in models without human-induced climate change.
References
In a separate chapter, Sophie C. Lewis and David Karoly analyse the likely contributions made by natural causes and human-induced climate change to the extreme record-high temperatures in Australia. Based on a suite of climate model simulations involving nine different models, they show that human-induced climate change increases the likelihood of extreme summer temperatures in Australia five-fold (2) and that the record-high temperatures for the whole year of 2013 are almost impossible to reproduce in models without human-induced climate change.
References
- See www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/ press_releases/pr_985_en.html. The full report may be accessed at https://docs.google.com/file/ d/0BwdvoC9AeWjUeEV1cnZ6QURVaEE/edit.
- S. C. Lewis, D. Karoly, “Anthropogenic contributions to Australia’s record summer temperatures of 2013”, Geophysical Research Letters 40, 3705–3709 (2013).
