Global temperature at its warmest ever, NASA scientist says
LONDON — The global temperature this year reached its warmest on record based on a 12-month rolling average, James Hansen, the top climate change scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said yesterday.
The mean surface temperature in the year through April was about 1.17 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to a graph in a 37-page draft paper on the website of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That makes it a fraction warmer than the previous peak in 2005. Absolute temperatures weren’t published in the paper.
“Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010,’’ Hansen and three coauthors wrote in the paper. “As for the calendar year, it is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature in the GISS analysis also will be a record.’’
The figures strengthen the case that temperatures show a warming in the climate. Critics of efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels had pointed to other data, compiled by the British Met Office, which put 1998 as the warmest year, as evidence that the Earth is cooling.
The document will be submitted to Reviews of Geophysics, a scientific journal, Hansen said yesterday in an e-mail. The NASA data series use information from 6,300 monitoring stations around the world and are one of the three main gauges of global temperature used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compile its assessments.
Hansen’s paper “looks like a modest addition to the continuing buildup of evidence’’ for global warming, Michael Grubb, a member of Britain’s Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, said yesterday in a telephone interview.
Efforts to stem global warming have taken a knock in the past six months after parts of the United States, China, and Europe were suffering a cold winter even as errors were revealed in the United Nation’s biggest climate change report and scientists at Britain’s University of East Anglia were accused of suppressing dissent on the issue.
“Public perception has been radically impacted by a short campaign’’ by climate skeptics, said Grubb, who is also chairman of the advisory group Climate Strategies at the University of Cambridge. “That is deeply troubling if you want a sensible long-term solution to climate change.’’
The latest findings could reinvigorate international talks in Bonn this week on fighting global warming. Those discussions stalled in Copenhagen in December. Skepticism about man-made global warming by senators including James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, has helped undermine efforts to pass federal laws to limit greenhouse gases.
Grubb and Abyd Karmali, global head of carbon markets at
“One year is not going to make or break anything. The most important thing is the long term trend,’’ Karmali said yesterday in a telephone interview in London. “I don’t see any reason why public opinion would change one way or another’’ because of the latest data.
