News Point﹕Climate change

【明報專訊】The weather has recently been quite disappointing. There seemed little chance of admiring the full moon on the Mid-Autumn Festival. In the two days before it, more than 1800 strokes of lightning were detected over Hong Kong. In the evening of September 8, Hong Kong had heavy rain and a thunderstorm. In the six hours from 9 pm that day, more than 25,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strokes (雲對地閃電) were detected over Hong Kong. That broke the record.

The Hong Kong Observatory's seasonal forecast for Autumn (September to November) 2010 says Hong Kong citizens should expect above-normal temperatures (higher than 25.0℃) and below-normal rainfall (less than 380mm). Director of the Hong Kong Observatory Dr Lee Boon-ying (香港天文台長李本瀅) said that, because of global climate change and urbanisation (城市化), both the mean temperature and the annual total rainfall at the Observatory headquarters had trended upwards. "Between 1900 and 2000, the frequency of occurrence of heavy rain doubled in Hong Kong," said he.