News | Climate Change

http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/emissions-blamed-2010-ties-warmest-3997085?ref=rss

Last year tied for the warmest globally since data keeping began, capping a decade of record high temperatures that show mankind's greenhouse gases emissions are heating the planet, a US agency said.

Global surface temperatures in 2010 were 0.62 Celsius above the 20th century average, tying the record set in 2005, the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
"These results show that the climate is continuing to show the influence of greenhouse gases, it's showing evidence of warming," David Easterling, the chief of the scientific services division at the NCDC, said.
Each year since 2000 has ranked as one of the 15 warmest years on record since 1880 when the records, began, he said.
Despite last year's frigid temperatures and snow storms in the United States and Europe, many places such as Russia and Pakistan, suffered from heat waves and floods that wrecked crops and helping lead to record global food prices.
It's not possible to link one weather event directly to global warming, but the trend of rising temperatures since 2000 increases the possibility that such events will happen, Easterling said.
From mid-June to mid-August last year an unusually strong jet stream shifted northward of western Russia and plunged southward into Pakistan. The pattern locked in place for weeks, bringing a two-month heat wave to Russia, wrecking wheat crops. It also contributed to devastating floods in Pakistan at the end of July, NOAA said.
The El Nino weather pattern also helped raise temperatures early in the year.
NOAA's report, which did not forecast what temperatures would be this year, was the first of several on global 2010 temperatures. NASA will issue its report as soon as this week and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre will report later this month. The UN's World Meteorological Organization will have the final say when it releases its report around the end of the month.
Frigid winters in parts of Europe and the United States in 2010 may be a paradoxical side effect of climate change, some scientists said. Rising temperatures mean a shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic, heating the region and pushing cold air southwards during the winter, according to a study last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Warming of the air over the Barents and Kara Seas, for instance, seems to bring cold winter winds to Europe.
"This is not what one would expect," Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and climate scientist at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a statement. "Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far away sea-ice won't bother him could be wrong."
The release of the NOAA report itself was delayed one day by unusually hard snow storm in North Carolina.
"These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia," he said. "Recent severe winters like last year's or the one of 2005-06 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it."