Tiempo Climate Newswatch

It is with a great sense of personal and professional sadness that we report the death of Richard Sandbrook. Richard died of cancer on Sunday December 11th 2005.
We first discussed with Richard the vision that became the Tiempo Programme in 1989 and continued our collaboration with him as co-editors of the bulletin through the 1990s. His vision of a global climate information project that would serve the diverse interests of the developing world and promote global dialogue and understanding has guided the Tiempo Programme's development over the past 15 years.
We will miss Richard's inspiration, his wisdom, his integrity and his mischievous and irreverent sense of humour. Most of all, we will miss a valued friend.

Mick Kelly and Sarah Granich

2005 will be the second warmest year since 1860 according to the provisional global surface air temperature estimate for the year released by the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom. 1998 remains the warmest year on record. Eight of the ten warmest years have occurred within the past ten years. Over the Northern Hemisphere, the year has been the warmest since 1860. "The data also show that the sea surface temperature in the Northern Hemisphere Atlantic is the highest since 1880," said David Viner of the UEA Climatic Research Unit.

Adam Scaife at the Met Office Hadley Centre reckons that "these figures show that global warming is continuing and are consistent with what we expect to occur from our research into greenhouse gas emissions." Fred Singer from the Science & Environmental Policy Project, Washington DC, United States, disagrees. "If indeed 2005 is the warmest Northern Hemisphere year since 1860, all this proves is that 2005 is the warmest Northern Hemisphere year since 1860. It doesn't prove anything else, and certainly cannot be used by itself to prove that the cause of warming is the emission of greenhouse gases. It requires a more subtle examination to know how much of warming is due to man-made causes - there must be some - and how much is down to natural causes."

More information

• BBC
• Washington Post
• TerraDaily

• Press release, WMO/CRU/Met Office
• Latest monthly global surface air temperature

The United Nations has established a US$500 million emergency relief fund aimed at providing rapid assistance following natural disasters. The Central Emergency Response Fund is ten times larger than the existing facility. "The difference is that we will have a larger fund, but also that it will be more flexible," according to United Nations General Assembly President Jan Eliasson. In the past, he continued, "we had to wait for commitments before we could really start massive operations. Now we will be able to do that from the beginning, and not have to wait for individual commitments."

Meanwhile, Dieter Schiessl, World Weather Watch director, has warned that an early warning system for the Indian Ocean nations aimed purely at forecasting tsunamis, rather than a broader range of hazards, would not be financially sustainable in the long run. Speaking at a United Nations conference on a tsunami warming and mitigation system in Hyderabad, India, he said that "if we have to establish a warning infrastructure that will only be tested in very rare occurrences such as tsunamis it is simply inviting operational problems. We need to have a system that is more frequently used and that means the system should address several natural hazards and the most frequent ones such as tropical storms and flooding."

More information

• UN News Centre
• Reuters
• ReliefWeb

• TerraDaily

Land-cover change in the Amazon caused by human activity could generate about the same amount of warming in the region as greenhouse gas increases, according to a recent model simulation. In middle latitudes, the effect of local land-use changes might be to significantly reduce greenhouse warming. The study was the first projection of 21st century climate change to couple interactive ocean and atmosphere models with a land surface model in order to incorporate changes in land cover caused by agriculture, deforestation and other human activities.

"The choices humans make about future land use could have a significant impact on regional and seasonal climates," said project leader Johannes Feddema of the University of Kansas. Deforestation warms the tropics by replacing forests with less productive pasture, whereas midlatitude cropland acts as a cooling influence as the crops reflect more sunlight and release more moisture into the air. "Compared to global warming, land use is a relatively small influence. However, there are regions where it's really important," Feddema concludes.

More information

• Science Daily
• The Why Files
• Guardian

• Link to Science article, SciDev.Net