2007 Was Tied As Earth's Second Warmest Year
Pastor Dale Morgan
2007 Was Tied As Earth's Second Warmest Year*
by Staff Writers
New York NY (SPX) Jan 17, 2008
Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in
New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second
warmest year in a century. Goddard Institute researchers used
temperature data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements
of sea ice temperature since 1982 and data from ships for earlier years.
The greatest warming in 2007 occurred in the Arctic, and neighboring
high latitude regions. Global warming has a larger affect in polar
areas, as the loss of snow and ice leads to more open water, which
absorbs more sunlight and warmth. Snow and ice reflect sunlight; when
they disappear, so too does their ability to deflect warming rays. The
large Arctic warm anomaly of 2007 is consistent with observations of
record low geographic extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2007.
"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.
"It is unlikely that 2008 will be a year with truly exceptional global
mean temperature," said Hansen. "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."
The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998,
and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.
A minor data processing error found in the GISS temperature analysis in
early 2007 does not affect the present analysis. The data processing
flaw was failure to apply NOAA adjustments to United States Historical
Climatology Network stations in 2000-2006, as the records for those
years were taken from a different data base (Global Historical
Climatology Network). This flaw affected only 1.6% of the Earth's
surface (contiguous 48 states) and only the several years in the 21st
century.
The data processing flaw did not alter the ordering of the warmest years
on record and the global ranks were unaffected. In the contiguous 48
states, the statistical tie among 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest
year(s) was unchanged. In the current analysis, in the flawed analysis,
and in the published GISS analysis, 1934 is the warmest year in the
contiguous states (but not globally) by an amount (magnitude of the
order of 0.01C) that is an order of magnitude smaller than the certainty.