Copenhagen summit: decade is world's warmest on record

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate. -- Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change

The absurdity just compounds. It's almost like they want us to know it's a sham, and that they're going to ram it down our throats anyway. The Earth is cooling. Everybody knows it's cooling. As shown above, the leaked emails associated with Climategate show that they know the Earth is cooling, and they are frustrated that the science doesn't cooperate with their quacked ideology. But they'll just lie anyway and ridiculously claim that this decade - by all accounts a decade of cooling - was the warmest ever. Ever. And, despite a decade of cooling, next year will be the warmest ever. Ever.

I find it amusing that, after changing the name of their scam from global warming to climate change, due to the fact that the Earth was cooling, now these quacks, put on the defensive by the Climategate scandal, have reverted back to their "warming" lies. You're all going to die. Take a deep breath, and never exhale.

Times of London -

This decade has been the warmest on record and this year is likely to be the fifth warmest, according to the World Meteorological Organisations’s (WMO) assessment of global average temperatures.

The WMO released the preliminary data at the Copenhagen climate summit in what the Met Office, which contributed to the figures, admitted was an attempt to influence the negotiations over cutting greenhouse gases.

The Times has also learnt that the Met Office will announce later this week that next year is likely to be the warmest on record, with the global average temperature higher than in the previous peak year of 1998.

The prediction, which comes just weeks after the Met Office put the chances of next year breaking the temperature record at just 50/50, may deepen the row over the scientific analysis of temperature records raised by the publication of stolen e-mails in the “Climategate” scandal.

The WMO and the Met Office base their reports partly on data and analysis supplied by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

Phil Jones, the unit’s director, has stood down while an investigation takes place into allegations that he manipulated data, attempted to block publication of alternative scientific views and tried to delete information requested by climate change sceptics.

The Met Office has revised its prediction for next year after taking into account the effect of the natural El Niño cycle, the warming phase in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean which began this summer and is now expected to continue for at least another six months.

But climate change sceptics claimed it demonstrated that data was being manipulated in order to prove the case that global warming is man made.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of the The Skeptical Environmentalist and opponent of carbon reduction targets, said: “The timing of the Met Office prediction seems a brazen attempt to influence the political process at Copenhagen. It’s precisely not what climate science needs after the ‘Climategate’ affair.

“It’s possible that next year would be the warmest but it’s also possible that it could remain cool for another 15 years.”

The WMO, which has data going back to 1850, said that the ten years from 2000 to 2009 were 0.44C warmer than the annual average of 14C between 1961 to 1990.

The Met Office, one of three main sources for the WMO figures, said its records showed that each of the past six decades had been warmer than the previous one.

Since the 18th century, the global temperature has risen just over 0.7C - the most rapid rise since the last ice age.

The Copenhagen summit is trying to agree global action to prevent the temperature rising more than 2C above the pre-industrial average. Many low-lying small islands, including the Maldives and Cook Islands, want the temperature rise to be capped at 1.5C because any increase above that could result in sea levels rising more than a metre.

Professor Mark Maslin, Director of the UCL Environment Institute, said the weight of scientific evidence for manmade climate change was now irrefutable. “Data from two of the world’s most respected scientific organisations, the Met office and WMO, show that this is the warmest decade that humanity has ever recorded and that 2009 is the fifth warmest year on record. Combine this data with scientific evidence collected from satellites showing the retreat of arctic sea ice, the retreat of nearly all the world’s glaciers and even the evidence from the great British public that spring is now arriving two weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago, and climate change is shown to be incontrovertible.”

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said the final figures for 2009 would not be available until early next year but the preliminary estimates based on January to November data were being released today to influence the debate at the summit.

The Met Office today responded to criticisms about lack of transparency by releasing land temperature records gathered from more than 1,500 stations around the world.

It said it would release the data from the other 3,500 other stations as soon as it received permission from the national meteorological offices which owned it.

The Met Office said: “We intend that as soon as possible we will also publish the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global land temperature record.

“The University of East Anglia fully supports the Met Office in making this data publicly available and is continuing to work with the Met Office to seek the necessary permission from national data owners to publish, as soon as possible as much of the data that we can gain permission for.