NASA confirms what most of us already know-2010 warmest year...

Green: A Photo Finish for Warmest Year on Record
    Jan 13, 2011     New York Times    

JUSTIN GILLIS

4:35 p.m. | Updated NASA has just come out with its temperature numbers for 2010, and they match the NOAA analysis, showing a tie between 2010 and 2005 for hottest year on record. The NASA analysis can be found here.

It might come as something of a shock to hear this just now, with snow on the ground in 49 of the 50 states, but a new report shows that 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in the historical record.

Government scientists reported Wednesday morning that the global average surface temperature was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the entire 20th century. It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average, and federal researchers said the figures showed that global warming was continuing unabated. According to the latest statistics, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the year 2000.

Those numbers come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that oversees weather forecasting and climate analysis. Two other groups, a NASA unit in New York and a research collaboration in Britain, compile global temperature records, and they have yet to report their findings for the full calendar year. (In the British data set, 1998 was the warmest year on record, rather than 2005 as a result of differences in the way the records are compiled.)

Perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who marveled at the weather events of 2010, the NOAA report shows the year to have been exceptional in many ways. Globally, it was the wettest year in the climatological record, perhaps no surprise to the Pakistanis, Australians, Tennesseans and Californians who lived through epic floods. They have yet to abate in the Australian state of Queensland.

Among the most impressive events in the annals of weather was a heat wave that baked Russia for two months in the summer, shattering temperature records over large parts of that country.

"The climate is continuing to show the influence of greenhouse gases," said David R. Easterling, a scientist at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

The United States was wetter and hotter than the average values for the 20th century, but over all, the year was not as exceptional for the United States as for the world as a whole. In the contiguous United States, it was only the 23rd hottest year on record, for instance.

But still, some remarkable events occurred at a regional scale, including snowstorms in February 2010 that shattered seasonal records in cities like Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. That was followed by a summer heat wave that broke records along much of the East Coast.

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