Climate research: Canadian winters warmer now than 50 years ago

Daily temperature extremes have risen by up to 4 C over the last 50 years, climate experts from the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) say in research published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research.The article explores how extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures across different world regions have changed since 1950.Minimum temperatures have seen the biggest increases, most notably over Canada and Russia, where the coldest days are now up to 4 C warmer than they were in the middle of the 20th Century, the journal article says.The largest changes in maximum temperature were found across Canada and Eurasia. Maximum temperatures in Canada have typically warmed by 1-3 C, the research notes, whereas warming across the U.K. was found to be between 0.5 and 2 C.Simon Brown, a scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “This latest research shows that some extreme events are already increasing. The trend is set to continue with our changing climate having a significant impact, with warmer nights and hotter days in the future.”The Met Office is working with many different sectors to explore the impacts of climate change. Warmer nights and hotter days will have wide-ranging impacts, the office notes, including heat waves such as the one blamed for killing between 20,000 and 30,000 people in Europe in 2003 to changes in crop growing seasons.