Past Decade the Warmest Since 1880
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 23 January 2010 10:50 am ET
Buzz up!
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Except for a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s, Earth's surface temperatures have increased since 1880. The last decade has brought the temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded. The graph shows global annual surface temperatures relative to 1951-1980 mean temperatures. As shown by the red line, long-term trends are more apparent when temperatures are averaged over a five year period. Credit: NASA/GISS
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When an unusually cold stretch of weather grips much of the world, as one did in December, it can leave people wondering what ever happened to global warming. The gradual inching up of temperatures popularly known as climate change is alive and well, according to NASA.
The decade 2000 through 2009 was the warmest since reliable modern records have been kept, going back to 1880. There are, of course, monthly and even annual variations that buck the trend.
According to NASA's Earth Observatory, 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, and 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures (despite that frigid December, which was unseasonably cool for much of North America, Europe, and Asia).
2009 was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, which is the warmest year on record. Importantly, 2009 tied with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 1998 and 2007 — as the second warmest year since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.
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Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade.
Since 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, NASA said in a statement this week. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880.
"That's the important number to keep in mind," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). "In contrast, the difference between, say, the second and sixth warmest years is trivial since the known uncertainty — or noise — in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years."
"There's always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year's ranking, but usually that misses the point," said GISS Director James Hansen. "There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."
And what about that chilly December? Climate experts say we can continue to expect stretches that vary considerably from the norm.
In December, high air pressures in the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while also increasing its tendency to blow from north to south and draw cold air southward from the Arctic. This resulted in an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north.
"Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much," Hansen said.
El Niño can have a great effect on any given month or year. El Nino is marked by warmer water in the Pacific off the coast of South America. It alters weather patterns in the United States and around the world.
An especially powerful El Niño cycle in 1998 is thought to have contributed to the unusually high temperatures that year, and Hansen's group estimates that there's a good chance 2010 will be the warmest year on record if the current El Niño persists. At most, scientists estimate that El Niño and its cool sister La Niña can cause global temperatures to deviate by about 0.2°C (0.36°F).
Warmer surface temperatures also tend to occur during particularly active parts of the solar cycle, known as solar maximums, while slightly cooler temperatures occur during lulls in activity, called minimums.
A deep solar minimum has made sunspots a rarity in the last few years. Such lulls in solar activity, which can cause the total amount of energy given off by the sun to decrease by about a tenth of a percent, typically spur surface temperature to dip slightly. Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.
"In 2009, it was clear that even the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data hasn't stopped global warming from continuing," Hansen said.
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Comments (45)
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posted 23 January 2010, 12:19 pm ET
evoman wrote:
and half the people that will read this wont believe it.
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posted 23 January 2010, 12:52 pm ET
Aaronc wrote:
People can deny it all they want because of some political agenda. Regardless, I don't see us being able to change things, even if we had the political will, because the rest of the developed world will continue to use fossil fuels regardless of what any treaties say. So the anti-global warming people should just relax, because, in the end, we will end up doing nothing about the problem until its too late to fix anyway. So you will get your wish of sabotaging the life support system on Earth, in the name of corporate greed and laziness. In the end, we will have to count on some miraculous new technology to save us from ourselves, because we certainly can't count on people doing the right thing on their own.
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posted 23 January 2010, 1:00 pm ET
moldycheesehead wrote:
THIS IS PURE PROPAGANDA!!! How can they make such outrageous claims?!?!?
Oh.
You mean the article DIDN'T say this was all mankind's fault?
Hmmmm. My bad.
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posted 23 January 2010, 2:48 pm ET
northern_nonsense wrote:
Why, I do believe things are warming up! Whether it's the fault of humans or not just isn't in my authority to say, and frankly it doesn't matter anyway. It's right up there with the origin of the universe as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't change what I'll do today.
In this region we're all still waiting for that January deep freeze that usually frosts our jungle bells for a straight week, plunging our mercury deep into the negatives. Instead, the snow is melting! The hardpack on the side roads is turning to mush and the sled dogs have to wear booties to keep their toes from icing up. The window of opportunity for the freeze is closing fast, and the forecast says it just aint gonna happen.
So enough of this quibbling. The mercury is rising and the world is changing. Adapt already!
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posted 23 January 2010, 5:24 pm ET
rreilly656 wrote:
moldycheesehead:
posted 23 January 2010, 5:43 pm ET
Bytrat wrote:
rreilly656 : Prove that this may not happen! You can't tell me that burnng an already sequestered source of carbon (baried fossil fuels) won't eventually change our environment. It has been proven that the poles have had ice free periods in the past. What makes you believe that we can't be the source of this event happening again? There are alternatives available that won't contribute to global climate change. It's just a matter of getting them deployed and in general usage. It just takes a change in our collective thinking and the regulations that have been put in place to support the cheap energy available from the fossil fuels industry. You don't have to give up your current lifestyle to get environmental sustainability.
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