Global warming effects faster than feared

Recent storms, droughts and heat waves are probably being caused by global warming, which means the effects of climate change are coming faster than anyone had feared, climate experts said yesterday.

The four hurricanes that bashed Florida and the Caribbean within a five-week period over the summer, intense storms over the western Pacific, heat waves that killed tens of thousands of Europeans last year and a continued drought across the US southwest are only the beginning, the experts said.

Ice is melting faster than anyone predicted in the Antarctic and Greenland, ocean currents are changing and the seas are warming, the experts said.

"This year, the unusually intense period of destructive activity, with four hurricanes hitting in a five-week period, could be a harbinger of things to come," said Dr Paul Epstein, associate director of the Centre for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

Epstein and colleagues called a telephone news conference to raise their concerns, which they have also laid out before Congress in recent weeks.

"The weather patterns are changing. The character of the system is changing," Dr Epstein said. "It is becoming a signal of how the system is behaving and it is not stable."

Experts have long said that people are affecting the world's climate, and this is no longer in any real dispute. Fossil fuels such as oil, in particular, release carbon dioxide that forms a blanket that holds in heat from the sun's rays.

But several experts have disputed the idea that this year's hurricane season was unique.

"Recent history tells us that hurricanes are not becoming more frequent," James O'Brien, a professor of meteorology and oceanography at Florida State University and colleague said in a recent statement.

"According to meteorological measurements, extreme weather is not increasing."

James McCarthy, a professor of biological oceanography at Harvard University and former co-chair of the impacts group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed said it is impossible to say any one storm or drought is caused by climate change.

But, he added, "We know that the Earth's temperature pattern is changing... On every continent it is now evident that there are impacts from these changes in temperature and precipitation."

Not even the most anxious scientists had predicted that some of the changes that have occurred would come so soon, he said. For example, several high-profile reports have described the unexpected rapid loss of ice in the Antarctic and Greenland.

"They are really important components of the interactive climate system," Prof. McCarthy said. "They really should serve as a wake-up call."