Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world’s leading climate research centers.
Scientists have also released what they described as the “best evidence yet” of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators — from air and sea temperatures to melting ice — each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.
The newly released data follows months of scrutiny of climate science after skeptics claimed leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia suggested temperature records had been manipulated — a charge rejected by three inquiries.
Publishing the newly collated data in London, Peter Stott, the head of climate modeling at the UK Met Office, said despite variations between individual years, the evidence was unequivocal.
“When you follow those decade-to-decade trends, then you see clearly and unmistakably signs of a warming world,” Stott said. “That’s a very remarkable result, that all those data sets agree. It’s the clearest evidence in one place from a range of different indices.”
Currently 1998 is the hottest year on record. Two combined land and sea surface temperature records from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) both calculate that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record. According to GISS, four of the six months also individually showed record highs.
A third leading monitoring program, by the Met Office, shows this period was the second hottest on record, after 1998, with two months this year — January and March — being hotter than their equivalents 12 years ago.
The Met Office said the variations between the figures published by the different organizations are because the Met Office uses only temperature observations, NASA makes estimates for gaps in recorded data such as the polar regions and the NCDC uses a mixture of the two approaches. The latest figures will give weight to predictions that this year could become the hottest on record.
Despite annual fluctuations, the figures also highlight the clear trend for the 2000s to be hotter than the 1990s, which in turn were clearly warmer than the previous decade, Stott said.
“These numbers are not theory, but fact, indicating that the Earth’s climate is moving into uncharted territory,” said Rafe Pomerance, a senior fellow at Clean Air Cool Planet, a US group dedicated to helping find solutions to global warming.
The cause of the warming was “dominated” by greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, Stott said.
“It’s possible there’s some [other] process which can amplify other effects, such as radiation from the sun, [but] the evidence is so clear the chance there’s something we haven’t thought of seems to be getting smaller and smaller,” he said.
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