Global warming continues, regardless of La Niña weather pattern – UN agency

The long-term trend of global warming is continuing, despite the current La Niña weather phenomenon that is bringing relatively cooler temperatures to parts of the Equatorial Pacific region, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said today.

Worldwide temperatures this year are expected to be above the long-term average, even though La Niña is also likely to persist through to the middle of 2008, WMO said in a press statement issued in Geneva.

WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said that while there will always be both cooler and warmer individual years, the overall trend in temperatures is still upwards.

“For detecting climate change you should not look at any particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently long period of time,” he said.

Parts of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean have experienced significantly cooler sea-surface temperatures in recent months, WMO reported, and cooling has also been recorded over China, Central Asia, Turkey and the Middle East.

But Australia, Scandinavia, Russia, the western United States, Mexico, north-eastern Brazil and the southern part of South America have generally experienced higher-than-average temperatures since last December.