WMO Concludes 2010 Global Temperature Likely Highest Ever, Though Statistically Tied W. 98, 05

[hatrack]

2010 was the warmest year since global temperature records began in 1850 - although margins of uncertainty make it a statistical tie with 1998 and 2005. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) concludes 2010 was 0.53C warmer than the average for the period 1961-90 - a period commonly used as a baseline.

The 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1998, it notes.

The WMO analysis combines data from three leading research agencies, and is regarded as the most authoritative. The three records are maintained by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and jointly in the UK by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

They use broadly the same data from weather stations, ocean buoys and satellites across the world; but each analyses that data in different ways, leading to slight differences in their conclusions. The University of Alabama at Huntsville team, which runs the satellite temperature record, has already called 2010 as the second warmest year in its 41-year series, just behind 1998.

EDIT

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12241692

[joshcryer]

1. And 1998 was a strong solar year, while 2010 was medicore at best.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. An interesting analysis by 'Tamino' to try to remove the el Nino, solar, volcanic influences

on the global temperature numbers.

Just as before, we’ll use MEI (multivariate el Nino index) to characterize el Nino, and the volcanic forcing data from Ammann et al. (2003) to characterize volcanic influence. Also as before, we’ll allow for an annual cycle in the data (a residual annual cycle) by including a 2nd-order Fourier fit.

We’ll characterize solar fluctuation by the international sunspot numbers.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/how-fast-is-earth-warming/

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/phil-jones-was-wrong/

Note this is statistics, not climate science; it takes data for el Nino, volcanic and solar activity, and tries to find subsequent variations in global temperatures that appear to correlate with those, and then removes those apparent influences from the global figures. And you end up with a temperature rise of about 1.7 degrees celsius per century, and what's more, it's statistically significant over the past 10 years (hence the title of the second blog post). And that gives, for example, a peak in temperature early in 2010, higher than anything before (the highest before that was in early 2007).

[jpak]

3. But we have been told this is clear evidence that global warming is a fraud!!11

yup