2007 seen as second warmest year as climate shifts

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - This year is on track to be the second warmest since records began in the 1860s and floods in Pakistan or a heatwave in Greece may herald worse disruptions in store from global warming, experts said on Friday.

"2007 is looking as though it will be the second warmest behind 1998," said Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, which provides data to the U.N.'s International Meteorological Organization.

"It isn't far behind ... it could change, but at the moment this looks unlikely," he told Reuters, based on temperature records up to the end of April.

Jones had predicted late last year that 2007 could surpass 1998 as the warmest year on record due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels and an El Nino warming of the Pacific.

Almost all climate experts say that the trend is towards more droughts, floods, heatwaves and more powerful storms. But they say that individual extreme events are not normally a sign of global warming because weather is, by its nature, chaotic.

"Severe events are going to be more frequent," said Salvano Briceno, director of the Geneva-based secretariat of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

The 10 warmest years in the past 150 years have all been since 1990. Last year ranked number six according to the IMO. NASA, which uses slightly different data, places 2005 as warmest ahead of 1998.

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