Natural disasters will increase - UN meteorologists
19 Mar 2007 18:21:12 GMT Source: Reuters
MADRID, March 19 (Reuters) - Global warming is likely to bring more tidal waves, floods and hurricanes, leading meteorologists said on Monday. "What we know is that global warming is very likely to lead in the future to more frequent tidal waves," the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) told a news conference ahead of a meeting in Madrid on Monday. "Heavy precipitation events are very likely to become more frequent ... and it's likely that hurricanes and cyclones will become more intense," Michel Jarraud said. He was speaking at the start of a four day conference of the WMO, a United Nations specialised agency for weather, climate and water. The WMO's President Alexander Bedritsky said flooding in mid and higher latitudes in Western Europe had already become more common. In Russia the number of damaging weather incidents logged in a year now averages more than one a day, said Bedritsky, who is also head of the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, Roshydromet. "There's a constant increase of around 6 percent a year," he said. A draft survey by top U.N. climate scientists is due for release in Brussels on April 6. It says climate change, widely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels, is already underway with impacts ranging from melting glaciers to earlier than normal plant growth in spring. Meteorologists must increasingly consider climate change projections in their forecasting, former WMO president John Zillman told the Madrid conference, which is due to publish the conclusions of its four day meeting on Thursday.
