This summer's weather disasters fit into the pattern forecast by climate scientists in key 2007 report on global warming
NEW YORK — Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-logged Pakistan, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.
The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, British government climatologist Peter Stott said.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel said these trends "have already been observed."
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming global warming for this drought or that flood, because so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt, at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for heat waves, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The World Meteorological Organization noted that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
Russia
• This summer: It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia, with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time. Russia's drought has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing Moscow with smog that finally lifted Thursday after six days. The Russian capital's death rate doubled to 700 people a day at one point. The drought reduced Russia's wheat harvest by more than one-third.
Forecasters said Thursday the heat wave could break next week, though cooler weather and rainfall might come too late to save winter crops.
• The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: The panel predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires in dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
Pakistan
• This summer: The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside, flooding thousands of villages. It has left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500.
A shipload of U.S. Marines and helicopters arrived to boost relief efforts Thursday, but Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said his country needs more international help to cope with one of the worst natural disasters in its history.
• The 2007 report: The climate panel said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over northern Pakistan — a warmer atmosphere can hold and discharge more water — and it predicted greater flooding this century in South Asia's monsoon region.
China
• This summer: China is experiencing its worst floods in decades, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed more than 1,100 people with more than 600 others missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris. More rain was forecast in the coming days — up to 3.5 inches was expected today — and China's National Weather Center said the threat of more landslides was "relatively large."
Flooding in China has killed more than 2,000 people this year.
• The 2007 report: The climate panel said that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the '50s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
Arctic
• This summer: Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile chunk of ice calved off from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.
In the Arctic Ocean, satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
• The 2007 report: Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research reported this spring that the Arctic ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in preparing its 2007 assessments.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," NASA scientist Isabella Velicogna said
