The year 2010 is almost certain to rank in the top three warmest years since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

A WMO statement said the global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2010 (January–October) is now estimated at 0.55 degrees Celsius plus or minus 0.11 degrees Celsius above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14 degrees Celsius. At present, 2010′s nominal value is the highest on record, just ahead of 1998 and 2005.

The data also indicates that the January-October 2010 temperatures are near record levels. The final ranking of 2010 will not become clear until data are analysed in early 2011. Preliminary operational data from November 1 to 25 indicate that global temperatures from November 2010 are similar to those observed in November 2005, indicating that global temperatures for 2010 are continuing to track near record levels.

From 2001 to 2010, global temperatures have averaged 0.46 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 average, 0.03 degrees Celsius above the 2000-09 average and the highest value ever recorded for a 10-year period. Recent warming has been especially strong in Africa, parts of Asia, and parts of the Arctic, the Saharan/Arabian, East African, Central Asian and Greenland/Arctic. Canada sub-regions have all had 2001-10 temperatures 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, and 0.7 degrees Celsius to 0.9 degrees Celsius warmer than any previous decade. Surface air temperatures over land were above normal across most parts of the world.

Pakistan experienced its worst flooding owing to exceptionally heavy monsoon rain. The event principally responsible for the floods occurred from July 26 to 29, when four-day rainfall totals exceeded 300 mm over a large area of northern Pakistan. There were additional heavy rains further south, from August 2 to 8, which reinforced the flooding.

More than 1500 lives were lost and over 20 million people displaced as large parts of Pakistan’s agricultural land were inundated. In terms of the number of people affected, the United Nations rated the floods as the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history. The total monsoon season rainfall for Pakistan was the fourth-highest on record and the highest since 1994.

Summer rainfall was above normal in western India and China experienced its most significant monsoon flooding since 1998, with south-eastern China and parts of the northeast most severely affected. The latter floods extended to the Korean Peninsula too. These floods, directly as well as through land-slips in China, claimed more than 1400 lives in Gansu Province in China.

However, monsoon season rainfall averaged over India was only 2 per cent above normal, and it was well below normal in north-eastern India and Bangladesh, which had its driest monsoon season since 1994.

Only limited land areas had below-normal temperatures in 2010, the most notable being parts of western and central Siberia in Russia, parts of southern South America, interior Australia, parts of northern and western Europe, eastern China and the southeast United States. It was the coldest year since 1996 for the northern European region, and since 1998 for northern Asia, mainly due to below-normal temperatures during winter.

A number of northern European countries are also likely to have had their coldest year since 1996, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Norway.

Animals like tigers and polar bears are much more vulnerable to environmental change because of their huge appetite, researchers say.

Large predators suffer more than smaller species from habitat change because they have to work harder to find their next meal.Experts found numbers of mammals like lions, tigers and polar bears dropped more, compared to weasels or badgers, when food was scarce, according to the journal Biology Letters.

It suggests that the vulnerability of larger species may be linked with the high energetic costs of being ‘big’, reports the Daily Mail.The robustness and large size of these species, which are well suited for hunting large prey, might become a hindrance when times are tough.

Dr. Philip Stephens, from Durham University’s School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, in U.K., said that when prey was scarce, large predator populations dropped five to six times more than those of their smaller rivals.He said, “It’s hard work being a large predator roaming and hunting across extensive areas to find food.”

“The apparent vulnerability of tigers and polar bears to reductions in the availability of prey may be linked to the energetic costs of being a large carnivore.” he added.

The thinning ozone layer could be leaving the world’s whales scarred from severe sunburn, experts said on Wednesday.

A study of whales in the Gulf of California over the past few years shows that the sea-going mammals carry blisters and other damage typically associated with the skin damage that humans suffer from exposure to the ultraviolet radiation.

That makes it yet another threat for the already endangered animals to worry about.

Whales would be particularly vulnerable to sunburn in part because they need to spend extended periods of time on the ocean’s surface to breathe, socialize, and feed their young. Since they don’t have fur or feathers it effectively means they sunbathe naked.

As Dr. Laura Martinez-Levasseur, the study’s lead author, put it- “Humans can put on clothes or sunglasses, but whales can’t.”

Martinez-Levasseur, who works at Zoological Society of London, spent three years studying whales in the Gulf of California, the teeming body of water which separates Baja California from the Mexican mainland.

Photographs were taken of the whales to chart any visible damage, and small samples – taken with a crossbow-fired dart – were collected to examine the state of their skin cells.

Her study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, seemed to confirm suspicions first raised by one of her whale-watching colleagues. The beasts were showing lesions associated with sun damage, and many of their skin samples revealed patterns of dead cells associated with exposure to UV radiation.

As with humans, the lighter-skinned whales seemed to have the most difficulty dealing with the sun. Blue whales had more severe skin damage than their darker-skinned counterparts, fin whales and sperm whales, even though the latter spend bigger chunks of time at the surface.

So far, there were no indications of skin cancer among the whales studied, although Martinez-Levasseur, who is also a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary, University of London, noted that only tiny samples were taken of the massive animals.

She said one of her next projects will be to examine how well whales’ cells hold up under the increased UV radiation – and whether whales’ pigmentation darkens as a result of their time spent out in the sun.

In other words, she wants “to be able to see if they’re tanning.”

Unless steps are taken to reverse biodiversity loss, scientists warn that the rate of extinction will climb and natural habitats will be degraded or destroyed — contributing to climate change and threatening agricultural production, fish stocks and access to clean water.

An international conference aimed at preserving the planet’s diversity of plants and animals in the face of pollution and habitat loss begins on Monday in Japan, facing some of the same divisions between rich and poor nations that have stalled U.N. climate talks.

Seventeen years after the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity was enacted, it has yet to achieve any major initiative to slow the alarming rate of species extinction and loss of ecosystems despite global goals set in 2002 to make major improvement by this year. Frogs and other amphibians are most at risk of disappearing, coral reefs are the species deteriorating most rapidly and nearly a quarter of all plant species are threatened, according to the convention, which is convening the two-week meeting.

A key task facing delegates will be to hammer out a set of 20 strategic goals for the next decade.Unless steps are taken to reverse the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, scientists warn that the rate of extinction will climb and natural habitats will be degraded or destroyed — contributing to climate change and threatening agricultural production, fish stocks in the oceans and access to clean water.Scientists estimate that the Earth is losing species 100 to 1,000 times the historical average, upsetting the intricately interconnected natural world.

Prominent insect biologist E.O. Wilson at Harvard University argues that a man-made environmental crisis is pushing the Earth toward its sixth big extinction phase, the greatest since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

However, some battle lines have already formed between developed and developing nations over the convention’s strategic mission statement — whether to take action to halt or simply slow the loss of biodiversity by 2020 — and finding a way to equitably share the benefits of genetic resources, such as plants native to poor countries that have been converted into lucrative drug products in the West.

The convention, which will bring together 8,000 delegates from 193 member nations in Nagoya, 270 km west of Tokyo, was born out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

So far, the convention has failed to meet a series of goals set eight years ago to preserve the world’s biodiversity against overfishing, deforestation and pollution. Conservation groups attribute part of that to a lack of political will and funding. They also say that some of the goals until now have been fuzzy, and partly blame their own failure to make a convincing case that action is needed — something they hope to change in Nagoya.

“We haven’t been able to successfully get across a message that our society and economies ultimately depend on this biodiversity,” said Bill Jackson, deputy director-general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “We have to fix the problem within the next 10 years.”

Host country Japan, meanwhile, will be looking to this conference as a chance to portray itself as a protector of biodiversity after helping kill off many of the measures at the CITES, or Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, meeting earlier this year that would have limited the trade in tuna, sharks and other marine species.Divisions between rich and poor nations over how to fairly share in the access and benefits of genetic resources could undermine the gathering, observers say.

For example, the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar, produces two cancer-fighting substances. Drug companies have grown the plants and profited from them, but little of the money has returned to Madagascar.

Developing countries argue they should receive royalties or a share of the benefits of such natural resources. The convention aims to address this problem by setting up a legal framework by which producers and users can negotiate to reach mutually agreeable terms to ensure equitable sharing of resources and their benefits.

“Developing countries are putting pressure on developed countries and saying if we don’t reach an agreement on this issue, we won’t give you what you want on the strategic plan,” said Patricia Yakabe Malentaqui, international media manager at the environmental group Conservation International. “All the parties are at risk of polarising the debate.” Another contentious goal will be setting a percentage of the Earth’s land and oceans that should be protected by 2020.

Currently, 13 per cent of land and less than 1 per cent of open ocean is protected — which can range from a strict nature reserve to an area managed for sustainable use of natural resources. Those percentages need to be raised to 25 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, Conservation International says.

But even if delegates manage to agree to such targets, carrying them out in real life is another matter. Businesses will likely oppose any limits on their activities and population growth means setting aside such protected areas will become increasingly difficult. Furthermore, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity has no mechanism for enforcing compliance.

Environmental groups argue that creating protected areas reap huge economic rewards. For example, there is plenty of evidence, says IUCN’s Mr. Jackson, that providing safe havens for fisheries help their populations recover and flourish.

A new study has revealed that more than 80 percent of the farmlands created in the tropics between 1980 and 2000 came into existence after cutting forests.

As a result it sends carbon into the atmosphere and drives global warming.Stanford researcher have also noted that big agribusiness has largely replaced small farmers in doing most of the tree cutting in Brazil and Indonesia, which may make it easier to rein in the trend.More than half a million square miles of new farmland – an area roughly the size of Alaska – was created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000, of which over 80 percent was carved out of tropical forests, according to Stanford researcher Holly Gibbs.

“This has huge implications for global warming, if we continue to expand our farmland into tropical forests at that rate,” said Gibbs, lead author of the study.

Dr. Gibbs and colleagues at several other universities analyzed Landsat satellite data and images from the United Nations to reach their conclusions.

“Every million acres of forest that is cut releases the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as 40 million cars do in a year,” Dr. Gibbs said.Most of the carbon released comes from burning the forests, but even if the trees are simply cast aside, the bulk of the carbon from the plants makes its way into the atmosphere during decomposition, she said.

Dr. Gibbs and colleagues found that about 55 percent of the tropical forests that had been cut between 1980 and 2000 were intact forests and another 28 percent were forests that had experienced some degradation, such as some small-scale farming, logging or gathering of wood and brush for cooking or heating fuel.

“The tropical forests store more than 340 billion tons of carbon, which is 40 times the total current worldwide annual fossil fuel emissions,” Dr. Gibbs said.

“If we continue cutting down these forests, there is a huge potential to further contribute to climate change.” But Dr. Gibbs and her colleagues also observed some encouraging signs. The patterns of change in the locations they analysed made it clear that during the 1990s, less of the deforestation was done by small family farms than was the case in the 1980s and more was done by large, corporate-run farms.

Big agribusiness tends to be more responsive to global economic signals as well as pressure campaigns from advocacy organizations and consumer groups than individual small farmers.Along with wiser use of land already cleared, Dr. Gibbs said, improvements in technology and advances in yield intensification also could slow the expansion of farming into the forests.

The study was published in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

India’s Pallava Bagla has won the American Geophysical Union (AGU) David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism for his articles on the impact of climate change on Himalayan glaciers.

The Perlman Award of AGU, the largest organisation of earth and space scientists with more than 58,000 members worldwide, recognises work published with deadline pressure of one week or less.

Announcing the award for Bagla, NDTV’s science editor, AGU’s Perlman Award selection committee applauded “Bagla’s articles for addressing “a very serious issue in the earth sciences”.

“His articles serve as a reminder to journalists to question sources, to think harder about the agendas and ideas of those people about whom they are reporting, and to stop the steamroller of opinions or ideas when the facts just don’t back them up.”

“Although Bagla’s articles reveal embarrassing foibles of scientists, ultimately they also illustrate science’s ability to self-correct,” it said.

The first of his two articles “No Sign of Himalayan Melt Down, Indian Report Finds”, published in the journal Science, explores dissent among glaciologists regarding the claim by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that Himalayan glaciers would imminently disappear.

The second article, “Himalayan Glacier Deadline ‘Wrong’, published by BBC News, reports on an apparent typographical error in the IPCC claim which appears to explain the panel’s controversial, 300-year acceleration of when Himalayan glaciers are expected to vanish.

Bagla is also an author. His latest book is “Destination Moon: India’s Quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond”. He also freelances stories to BBC and other media outlets, and contributes photographs to Corbis images.

Climate change is a topic for hot debate across countries right now, but is it possible to predict future climate change?

Researchers at Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen said that climate change probably occurs as a result of different chaotic influences and as a result would be difficult to predict.

The most pronounced climate shifts besides the end of the ice age is a series of climate changes during the ice age where the temperature suddenly rose 10-15 degrees in less than 10 years. The climate change lasted perhaps 1000 years, then — bang — the temperature fell drastically and the climate changed again.

This sudden change is called the tipping point and researchers have not been able to simulate it in their labs.

“We have made a theoretical modelling of two different scenarios that might trigger climate change. We wanted to investigate if it could be determined whether there was an external factor which caused the climate change or whether the shift was due to an accumulation of small, chaotic fluctuations”, explained Peter Ditlevsen, a climate researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute.

According to Ditlevsen, in one scenario the climate is like a seesaw that has tipped to one side. If sufficient weight is placed on the other side the seesaw will tip — the climate will change from one state to another. In the second scenario the climate is like a ball in a trench, which represents one climate state. Turmoil in the climate system such as storms, heat waves, heavy rainfall and the melting of ice sheets may finally push the ball over into the other trench, which represents a different climate state.

Currently, an increase in the atmospheric content of CO2 may be triggering a shift in the climate again.

“The Earth has not had such a high CO2 content in the atmosphere since more than 15 million years ago, when the climate was very warm and alligators lived in England,” he said.

“This could mean that the climate might not just slowly gets warmer over the next 1000 years, but that major climate changes theoretically could happen within a few decades”, Ditlevsen added, but stressed that his research only deals with investigating the climate of the past and not predictions of the future climate. The results have just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2009 fell 1.3 percent to 31.3 billion tonnes in the first year-on-year decline in this decade, German renewable energy institute IWR said on Friday.

The Muenster-based institute, which advises German ministries, cited the global economic crisis and rising investments in renewable energies for the fall in emissions.

Global investment in renewable installations for power, heat and fuels last year rose to 125 billion euros ($161 billion) from 120 billion in 2008, IWR said.

But IWR director Norbert Allnoch said given the force of the crisis, the reductions in CO2 output could have been greater, had stronger output in Asian and Middle Eastern countries not overcompensated the savings obtained from declines in Europe, Russia, Japan and the U.S.

“The energy-induced CO2 output in China in 2009 due to its economic growth has grown to a level now that is as high as that of the U.S. and Russia combined,” he said.

China in 2009 was in top position with 7.43 billion tonnes after 6.81 billion in 2008, followed by the U.S. with 5.95 billion (6.37 billion 2008). Russia was in third position, just before India, and followed by Japan.

Global investments in solar and wind power were helped by lower equipment costs as the crisis led to price cuts, IWR said.

But it reiterated its earlier suggestions that, in order to put brakes on the rising fossil fuels usage and to stabilize global CO2, it recommends that global annual spending on renewables be quadrupled to 500 billion euros ($644.2 billion).

Global CO2 emissions are still 37 percent above those in 1990, the basis year for the Kyoto Climate Protocol.

Less than 20 per cent of plants and animal species in the world’s tropical forests may remain in their current form by the end of the century due to global warming, a new study says.

The study was conducted by Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and published in Conservation Letters, a journal of the Society for Conservation Biology Thursday. According to the new study, by 2100, only 18 to 45 percent of the plants and animals making up ecosystems in global humid tropical forests may remain as we know them today because of global warming.

In Latin America and Africa, about two-thirds of the humid tropical forests’ biodiversity could alter because of climate change, selective logging and ongoing land-use changes.

In Asia and the central and southern Pacific islands, deforestation and logging are also the primary drivers of ecosystem changes.

The scientists came to the conclusion after looking at land use and climate change by integrating global deforestation and logging maps from satellite imagery and high-resolution data.

“This is the first global compilation of projected ecosystem impacts for humid tropical forests affected by these combined forces,” the institution’s Greg Asner said. “For those areas of the globe projected to suffer most from climate change, land managers could focus their efforts on reducing the pressure from deforestation, thereby helping species adjust to climate change, or enhancing their ability to move in time to keep pace with it,” he said.

Tropical forests hold more than half of all the plants and animal species on earth. But the combined effect of climate change, forest clear cutting and logging may force them to adapt, move, even die.