And it keeps on coming.
Posted on 02/15/2007 6:35:24 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON – It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever.
The broken record was fueled by a waning El Niño and a gradually warming world, according to U.S. scientists who reported the data Thursday. Records on the planet's temperature have been kept since 1880.
Spurred on by unusually warm Siberia, Canada, northern Asia and Europe, the world's land areas were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than a normal January, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. That didn't just nudge past the old record set in 2002, but broke that mark by 0.81 degrees, which meteorologists said is a lot, since such records often are broken by hundredths of a degree at a time.
“That's pretty unusual for a record to be broken by that much,” said the data center's scientific services chief, David Easterling. “I was very surprised.”
The scientists went beyond their normal doublechecking and took the unusual step of running computer climate models “just to make sure that what we're seeing was real,” Easterling said.
It was.
“From one standpoint it is not unusual to have a new record because we've become accustomed to having records broken,” said Jay Lawrimore, climate monitoring branch chief. But January, he said, was a bigger jump than the world has seen in about 10 years.
The temperature of the world's land and water combined – the most effective measurement – was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, breaking the old record by more than one-quarter of a degree. Ocean temperatures alone didn't set a record.
In the Northern Hemisphere, land areas were 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for January, breaking the old record by about three-quarters of a degree.
But the United States was about normal. The nation was 0.94 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for January, ranking only the 49th warmest since 1895.
The world's temperature record was driven by northern latitudes. Siberia was on average 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Eastern Europe had temperatures averaging 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Canada on average was more than 5 degrees warmer than normal.
Larger increases in temperature farther north, compared to mid-latitudes, is “sort of the global warming signal,” Easterling said. It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month.
Meteorologists aren't blaming the warmer January on global warming alone, but they said the higher temperature was consistent with climate change.
Easterling said a weakening El Niño – a warming of the central Pacific Ocean that tends to cause changes in weather across the globe – was a factor, but not a big one. But Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said El Niño made big changes worldwide that added up.
Temperature records break regularly with global warming, Trenberth said, but “with a little bit of El Niño thrown in, you don't just break records, you smash records.”
As much of the United States already knows, February doesn't seem as unusually warm as January was.
“Even with global warming, you're not going to keep that cold air bottled up in Alaska and Canada forever,” Easterling said.
Exactly. Cherry-picking data to bolster your agenda isn't science.
Yeah, averages are average. What goes up, must come down.
Man...these days, Mexicans get blamed for more stuff than even president Bush does.
About 600 years ago they were growing grapes in England....we're just reverting back to what it USED to be in Europe and environs.......WARMER...you idiot "scientists!"
bttt
Actually, we do, cause we'd get Februarys like this even if January wasn't warm. It was nice to have winter only be 5 weeks long insted of 5 months long.
And scientists wonder why people don't trust them.
And it keeps on coming.
"It was nice to have winter only be 5 weeks long insted of 5 months long."
BS! I've already worn long pants for over 2 months and I can't remember a past year that i've ever worn long pants more than 5 weeks at the most.
Why are most conservative anti-science?
Recall that the explosion in funding for embryonic stem-cell research came as a result of the fraudulent Korean research and after that research was known to be a fraud.
Most conservative pro-grammar. AmishDude say trolls need learn English good.
1 is prime
3 is prime
5 is prime
7 is prime
9 is prime
11 is prime
13 is prime
15 is prime
17 is prime
19 is prime
All odd numbers are prime!
Cheers!
Hey, newb, great way to start a career on FR. Did you sign up today just to post that? Which recycled troll are you?
Ah, yes. Nothing like a good retrofitted math joke!
Everything's conistent with "climate change" hypotheses, that's what makes them so wonderful.
Well, obviously you don't live in NY.
30 years ago, Newsweek published an article on the dangers of global cooling. Before then, it was the "population bomb" which was going to overpopulate the earth by the 1980s.
Promulgating these scares is an effort to attract grant funding and spread a political agenda. It isn't science.
It's well to remember what the great journalist H.L. Mencken said: ""The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
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