2000 to 2010 a ‘decade of climate extremes’ report says

2010 was the warmest year on record for Canada in 65 years and the wettest year on record worldwide, according to a report released this week by the World Meteorological Organization.

Quoting Munich Re, WMO stated that winter storms in Canada and the U.S. in 2007 and 2008 “rank among the 10 costliest storms since 1980 in terms of insured losses.”

The report, titled The Global Climate 2001-2010, A Decade of Climate Extremes, was announced Wednesday by Geneva-based WMO. It includes findings from a survey of 139 national meteorological and hydrological services, as well as socio-economic data from some United Nations Agencies and other organizations.

The decade of 2001 to 2010 was the warmest for land and ocean surface temperatures on both hemispheres, WMO stated in a press release.

The WMO report comes seven months after Britain’s Met Office revised its global warming prediction, forecasting that global temperatures over the next five years are expected to be lower than it had predicted in December, 2011. At the time, the Met Office had said 1998 was the warmest year in its 160-year Hadley Centre global temperature record.

But in Canada, “2010 was the warmest year on record for the nation as a whole since records began in 1948,” WMO stated Wednesday in its latest report.

The decade was also “the most active decade since 1855 for tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic Basin,” WMO stated, quoting from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There were an average of 15 named storms per year from 2001 until 2010, compared to an average of 12 a year in 1981 to 2010.

“The most active season ever recorded was 2005, with a total of 27 named storms, of which 15 reached hurricane intensity and seven were classified as major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher),” WMO stated in the report. “Katrina, a Category-5 hurricane, was the most devastating hurricane of the decade, making landfall in the southern USA in August.”

The 10-year period preceding 2011 was also the second wettest since 1901, and 2010 was the “wettest year since the start of instrumental records,” WMO stated.

“Most parts of the globe had above-normal precipitation during the decade,” according to the report. “The eastern USA, northern and eastern Canada, and many parts of Europe and central Asia were particularly wet.”

WMO added “floods were the most frequently experienced extreme event over the course of the decade,” with Eastern Europe affected in 2001 and 2005, while 2,000 people died due to flooding in Pakistan in 2010.