A weather agency affiliated with the United Nations said in a report on Monday that humans are mostly to blame for the wild forecasts that rocked around the world in 2013.
“Many of the extreme events of 2013 were consistent with what we would expect as a result of human-induced climate change,” said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, about his agency’s annual findings, Raw Story reported.
He went on: “We saw heavier precipitation, more intense heat and more damage from storm surges and coastal flooding as a result of sea level rise — as Typhoon Haiyan so tragically demonstrated in the Philippines.”
The WMO also pointed to other weather events that could be rooted in human activity, including the extreme cold temperatures in Europe and the United States, the floods in Nepal and northern China, and the snowfall in the Middle East, Raw Story said.
“There is no standstill in global warming,” Mr. Jarraud said, of the WMO report. “The warming of our oceans has accelerated and at lower depths. More than 90 percent of the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans.”
These sky-high greenhouse gas stores have hit “record levels,” he said, and that means “our atmosphere and oceans will continue to warm for centuries” into the future, Raw Story reported.
“The laws of physics are non-negotiable,” Mr. Jarraud said.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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