The world experienced its share of weird weather last year.
Toronto had a snow-free November for the first time in recorded history.
South of the border, there were record floods on the Red River in the northern plains region and the wettest October since records began 115 years ago.
Mexicans experienced severe to exceptional drought conditions, and torrential downpours caused flooding from Peru to Colombia to Argentina.
Those are just the tip of the climate anomalies and events catalogued in State of the Climate in 2009.
Compiled by more than 300 scientists from more than 160 research groups in 48 countries, the 20th annual report documents weather and climate events from around the world and puts them into accurate historical perspective.
Its conclusion? Global warming is undeniable.
Global average surface and lower-atmospheric temperatures during each of the past three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, and the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest in the instrumental record, the report states.
Analysis of 10 key indicators suggests the next decade will be even warmer.
Air temperature, humidity, ocean heat, sea levels, ocean temperatures, sea air temperatures and land air temperatures? Rising steadily. Snow cover, sea ice and glaciers? Receding at an alarming rate.
Who is to blame for the warmest decade since records began?
The report avoids specifying a cause. It simply notes atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to rise, with carbon dioxide increasing at a rate above the 1978 to 2008 average.
Scientists can be so polite when they’re jabbing a finger into your chest, screaming, “Wake up, people! Your fossil fuel addiction is to blame.”
Climate change skeptics — and there are more than a few of them in this province — will scoff at the report’s conclusions and attempt to challenge the scientists’ expertise and credibility.
While that ploy is unlikely to be successful in this case, given the weight and consistency of the evidence compiled by so many different independent groups, it’s happened before.
Last year, emails suggesting researchers at one of the world’s leading climate institutes fudged their numbers were leaked to the media. Three investigations have cleared the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit of any wrong doing since then, but the damage to public opinion was done.
Failing that, the skeptics will prey on the public’s fear of an economic meltdown to justify inaction.
But three decades of political rhetoric fueled by public skepticism produced nothing but a lot of hot air and the warmest decade in the instrumental decade.
Case in point is the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. After two weeks of negotiations beset by controversy, the best the world’s leaders could do was “take note of’ the Copenhagen Accord: a weak recognition that climate change is a threat and that some type of action should be taken to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C.
No legally-binding document was signed, no legally-binding commitments were made to slash carbon dioxide emissions.
Canada trumpeted the Copenhagen Accord as a “major turning point,” the very thing that it had been advocating for three years.
Really? That’s the best we could do in three years?
In that case, we would have been better off implementing the much-maligned Kyoto Protocol.
State of the Climate in 2009 is not a major turning point in the debate about global warming. It’s simply the latest summation of what researchers have been telling us for three decades: the Earth is getting warmer, which will result in climate change, which will radically alter our relationship with the environment.
Confronting that challenge will require our leaders to make difficult decisions, one of which will be slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Unless they take substantive action now, 2009’s climate anomalies will be merely average in the decades to come.
Cameron Kennedy is an Advocate editor.