GLOBAL HEATWAVE PREDICTED

Westcountry scientists are predicting a succession of record-breaking high temperatures after conducting the world's first short-term global warming forecast.Climatologists hailed the study, produced by researchers at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, as a "critical" step in combating climate change.

For the first time, powerful computer simulations have predicted annual global temperatures to 2014.

Within their findings, Westcountry-based scientists say that from 2010 there is at least a 50 per cent chance of temperatures topping the warmest year currently on record.

The findings increase the possibility of hotter summers and more extreme weather events such as the torrential rain that prompted this summer's dramatic flooding across the country.

The average global temperatures peaked in 1998 at 32.2C, although the UK record was set in 2003 at 38.1C.

The new research indicates that natural shifts in the climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity and that temperatures will stall for the next few years. But from then on, temperatures will rise steadily, increasing over the ten-year period by 0.3C.

The forecast is seen as an important development because it will allow Government, local authorities and business to plan more precisely for the future. Previous temperature predictions were based in forecasts in rises by 2100.
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