UN Claims Extreme 2013 Weather Caused By Human-Induced Climate Change and Global Warming
The U.N.'s weather agency announced Monday that the majority of the extreme weather experience in 2013 in the Asia, Europe and Pacific regions were caused by human-induced climate change, Fox News reported.
According to the World Meteorological Organization's annual assessment, last year is marked as the sixth-warmest year on record while 13 out of the 14 warmest years on record have occurred during the 21st century.
U.N. Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said storm surges and coastal flooding are a result of rising sea levels. He used Typhoon Haiyan, which killed at least 6,100 people in November and caused about $13 billion in damage to the Philippines and Vietnam, as an example.
Jarraud also said the characteristics of last year's extreme weather are what is expected in human-induced climate change.
"Many of the extreme events in 2013 were consistent with what we would expect as a result of human-induced climate change," he said.
Jarraud brought up other examples including over-flooding in central Europe last June that caused $22 billion in damages, $10 billion in damage from Typhoon Fitow that struck China and Japan, and China's drought problems.
The central U.S. and only a few other places experienced cooler than normal weather in 2013 but oddly there was no El Nino, which is supposed to occur every few years to change rain and temperature patterns around the world.
The world's top climate scientists and representatives from about 100 governments met in Japan as part of a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to complete their latest report on how global warming is impacting hunger, disease, drought, flooding, refugees and war, Fox reported.
While speaking in Geneva, Jarraud cited Australia's recent heat wave, as 2013 was its hottest year on record, as a source of evidence to climate change.
He said the cause of the island's heat waves is not natural but human-induced. Jarraud argued that it's impossible in to have reached these levels of climate change without heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas.
"It is not possible to reproduce these heat waves in the models if you don't take into account human influence," he said.