Originally published February 15 2006
Global warming led to a record-breaking year of heat in 2005
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
NASA's Goddard Institute projects that 2005 will surpass 1998 as the hottest year globally in the 125 years that records have been kept, and world health officials are taking note, as the trend of warming bears important consequences for human health.
In the high Arctic, deep in the Atlantic, on Africa's sunbaked plains, climate scientists are seeing change unfold before their eyes.
In Geneva last week, the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2005 thus far is the second warmest year on record, extending a trend climatologists attribute at least partly to heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" accumulating in the atmosphere.
It said warming has accelerated and is now boosting the mercury every decade by more than 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
"The observed rapid warming thus gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions," the NASA researchers said.
The Montreal delegates did adopt technical rules for that 1997 agreement, leading Canadian conference president Stephane Dion to declare, "The Kyoto Protocol has been switched on."
Carbon dioxide, most important of six greenhouse gases covered by Kyoto, is a byproduct of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning industries.
The atmosphere now holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide than it did before the Industrial Revolution.
In fact, European scientists reported last month that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today's level is 27 percent higher than any previous peak looking back 650,000 years.
A U.N.-organized network of scientists warns of shifting climate zones, ocean levels rising via heat expansion and glacial melting, and more extreme weather events if emissions are not reined in and average temperatures continue to rise.
"In a sense, the burden of proof has shifted from the people who are saying there's a risk, to the skeptics now," Michel Jarraud, World Meteorological Association secretary-general, said in an interview.
Those who ratified Kyoto, meanwhile, decided a working group should develop proposals for emissions reductions by 35 industrialized nations after the current pact expires in 2012.
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