London: Some of the most extreme predictions of global warming are unlikely to materialise, new scientific research has suggested, but the world is still likely to be in for a temperature rise of double that regarded as safe.
Researchers said that warming was most likely to reach about 4 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels going by the past decade’s readings.
That would still lead to catastrophe across large swaths of the Earth, causing droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves. Some climate change sceptics have suggested that because the highest global average temperature yet recorded was in 1998, climate change has stalled. The new study, which is published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shows a much longer “pause” would be needed to suggest that the world was not warming rapidly.
Alexander Otto, at the University of Oxford, lead author of the research, said that most of the recent warming had been absorbed by the oceans, but this would change as the seas heat up. The thermal expansion of the oceans is a factor behind current and projected sea level rises.
The highest global average temperature ever recorded was in 1998, under the effects of a strong El Nino, a southern Pacific weather system associated with warmer and stormy weather.Since then, the trend of average global surface temperatures has shown a clear rise above the long-term averages — the 10 warmest years on record have been since 1998 — but sceptics have claimed that this represents a pause.
Guardian News
