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2007 ties 1998 as second warmest year in past century
mongabay.com
January 17, 2008


2007 tied 1998 as the second warmest year in a century say climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). 2005 remains the warmest year over the past 100 years.

Using temperature data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements of sea ice temperature since 1982 and data from ships for earlier years, Goddard Institute found the greatest warming in 2007 occurred in the Arctic and neighboring high latitude regions.

"As we predicted last year, 2007 was warmer than 2006, continuing the strong warming trend of the past 30 years that has been confidently attributed to the effect of increasing human-made greenhouse gases," said James Hansen, director of NASA GISS.

0 Temperature anomalies that were present during 2007. Credit: NASA This shows temperature anomalies for the 2007 calendar year relative to the 1951-1980 mean. Warmer areas in red, cooler areas in blue. Largest increases were in the northern hemisphere. Credit: GISS

"It is unlikely that 2008 will be a year with truly exceptional global mean temperature," Hansen continued. "Barring a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next few years, at the time of the next El Nino, because of the background warming trend attributable to continuing increases of greenhouse gases."

According to the Goddard Institute, the eight warmest years have all occurred since 1998 and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.

The Goddard Institute said that a data processing error discovered in 2007 did not affect the latest analysis. That flaw, seized upon by global warming skeptics at the time, resulted in adjustments to mean temperatures for the United States from the 2000-2006 period.