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Dubai: Global warming is condemning the planet to go with the floe, a US government report has warned.
The Earth has just experienced its warmest December-February since records began 128 years ago, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, adding fire to global warming concerns.
"A single season is not definitive proof but it’s an indication of the extent of warming," the administration's climate
monitoring chief, Jay Lawrimore, told Gulf News. "We may not see the consequences for decades but there’s already evidence of animal life seeking higher altitudes."
The El Nino phenomenon, an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters in the eastern Pacific, contributed to the chart-busting combined global land and ocean surface temperature, the NOAA said. In the northern hemisphere, the combined temperature increase was the warmest at 0.91C, while the southern hemisphere recorded a temperature 0.49C above average. During the past century, global temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.06C per decade.
Experts say that if the trend continues, up to a third of the world’s highest glaciers could melt away by 2050 and half will disappear by 2090. The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said global warming had probably been caused by humans.
"We do not prescribe policies but a serious impact is taking place," Carola Traverso Saibante of the IPCC Secretariat told Gulf News from Geneva.
— With additional inputs from agencies
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