Climate change effects are more than evident today but researchers have found that clear signs of global warming first appeared much, much earlier and that extreme rainfall events are likely to occur in the near future.
In a study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, researchers give insight on the effects of climate change that have been felt all over the world and where these effects are likely to grow stronger in the coming years. After examining extreme and average temperatures (as they are the most sensitive to global warming), they found that signs of global warming were observed in the tropics in the 1960s but Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia have been experiencing these signs as early as the 1940s.
One of the reasons the researchers used to explain why the tropics was one of the first areas to experience changes in temperature was because it had regions that traditionally saw narrower ranges of temperatures. What this meant was that even if a shift in temperature is small, it would be more easily observed and recorded.
Changes in climate temperature were recorded later in areas closer to the poles but by 1980 to 2000, temperature records in most parts of the world were already showing the effects of global warming. One of the exceptions to this is large portions of continental United States, especially East cost and central states, where warming signals have yet to be experienced, although models project that these states should be expected to feel the heat within the next 10 years.
Climate change effects have been felt in terms of pronounced warming periods but heavy rainfall events have yet to be experienced. Climate models have recorded a general increase in the amount of extreme rainfall around the world but figures are not dramatically beyond expected variations so the increase in precipitation has not been tagged as a sign of global warming.
According to Ed Hawkins, one of the study's authors, the first of the heavy rainfall events clearly associated with global warming is expected to show up in northern Europe, Russia and Canada during winters over the next three decades, on top of the existing trend of wetter winters.
The results of the study correspond closely to data used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report where temperature increases are outlined as being caused by global warming.
Photo: Tim J. Keegan | Flickr
