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Heat wave fuelled global warming

Tim Radford

Increased atmospheric pollution will trigger hotter summers

LONDON: Europe's great heat wave of 2003, which claimed an estimated 35,000 lives and cost the continent's economies an estimated £7 billion altogether, may also have fuelled further global warming.

A team of more than 30 scientists reports in the journal Nature on Thursday that the scorching temperatures and prolonged drought have stifled Europe's forest growth and released huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to feed still warmer summers in future.

Philippe Ciais, from the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment at Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and colleagues from Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Finland and Portugal, took a snapshot of plant life across Europe using satellite data to measure the sunlight being absorbed by beech woodland and pine and oak forests, as well as grassland and stands of spruce.

In temperate climates, forests act as a carbon ``sink'', with some of the greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels becoming locked away again as wood, leaf litter and buried vegetation.

But the picture in the summer of 2003 was dramatically different. Plant growth in Europe dropped that summer by 30 per cent overall.

Point of no return

This is the third warning in three weeks that global warming could be moving to a point of no return.

A week ago, U.S. scientists calculated that hurricanes categorised as the most violent had almost doubled in frequency over the past 35 years as sea surface temperatures rose. Two weeks ago a Cranfield University (U.K.) team reported in Nature that England's soils were sending back carbon to the atmosphere at the rate of 4million tonnes a year.

The latest news dashes the hope, nursed by climate scientists, that the mix of longer growing seasons and greater levels of carbon dioxide would ``fertilise'' more vigorous plant growth and offset some of the discharges from factory chimneys and car exhausts and other human action. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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