Your Letter: 2010 Equal Warmest Year on Record.
Thank you to our local climate sceptics for their continued interest in the positive work being done by many governments, industries, communities and individuals to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
I acknowledge that there will always be a negative minded element to any structural change, and I accept the sceptics’ rights to their own viewpoint, however radical. However, climate science is based on measured data, not opinions.
Experiments dating back to the 1820s have established the relationship between the warming properties of carbon dioxide and the thermal properties of the atmosphere. In the last half century, the burning of fossil fuels has caused a sharp increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations, to a point where they are now higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.
2010 has tied with 2005 as the warmest year since people have been keeping records, according to data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. That difference is so small that it puts them in a statistical tie.
In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007, which are statistically tied for third warmest year.
The GISS records began in 1880. The analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and Antarctic research station measurements.
The resulting temperature record closely matches others independently produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
The record temperature in 2010 is also noteworthy because, in the last half of the year, there was a move to La Nina conditions, which bring cool sea surface temperatures to the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Collected scientific base data is trending toward a warming planet. This is unequivocal.
Stephen Lockhart,
Presenter for The Climate Project.
