Global warming blamed as freak storms batter Britain

By MICHAEL McCARTHY

LONDON - It appeared to arise as a straightforward Atlantic depression. It formed over the ocean, 1600km to the west of the British Isles, and then swung in, bringing its winds and rain, just as dozens of Atlantic lows do every year.

But the storm that yesterday wrecked transport and power supplies on an unprecedented scale across the country was not normal in its intensity: its winds, reaching 156 km/h, were the fiercest to hit Britain for more than 10 years. And it is a sign of things to come, according to a growing body of opinion which sees in such elemental violence the signs of man-made global climate change.

Storm 2000 was not quite as fierce as the Great Storm of October 1987 but it was another extreme weather event. It was the sort of phenomenon that once was expected to hit at very infrequent intervals - 200 years was cited in the case of the 1987 storm.

Now there have been three such remarkable tempests in just 13 years. Ministers, Government officials and scientists are looking at the fact that extreme events are one of the main types of weather phenomena expected to increase with the onset of global warming - and drawing their own conclusions.

"It is a pattern which is beginning to develop," said the Environment Minister, Michael Meacher. "We have to realise that this almost certainly has climate change as a contributory cause."

Surveying the devastation, the Environment Agency's head of operations, Archie Robertson, said there was increasing evidence of the impact of climate change.

Scientists are more cautious - but by no means dismissive - of the possible link between this week's storm and a climate which has begun to become more unstable because of the increasing concentration of industrial gases in the atmosphere, which retain more of the sun's heat.

"You have to choose your words carefully," said Met Office spokesman Andy Yeatman. "We still can't say that the storm was directly due to climate change.

"If you look at the difference between weather and climate, weather is the violent fluctuations from day to day that take place between the upper and lower boundaries which form climate. Most things that are happening are still taking place between these boundaries.

"What we think will happen is that we will start to see more and more events that hit on the boundaries, and more and more that take place outside them.

"But when you get winds of 100 mph [160 km/h], you are getting close to the boundaries. We don't get much higher speeds than that."

The storm has put a violent cap on a miserable year's weather for Britain. It has been the wettest September and October for 25 years, while summer sunshine has been way down.

But it has a political impact as well, with Britain's environmental community seizing on it as one more pressing reason for world Governments to agree on tougher action against global warming when they meet in the Hague next month to strengthen the Kyoto climate-change treaty.

The gales and storms are just a taste of things to come, says Friends of the Earth.

The campaign group says that extreme weather worldwide in the past three months has included storms in Taiwan, Brazil and Canada, floods in Bangladesh, Japan, Vietnam and India, fires in the United States, Italy and the Balkans and droughts in Burundi, Croatia, Kenya and Iran.