LONDON: Data from hundreds of monitoring stations around the world, released in Britain, show that global surface temperature have risen significantly over the past 150 years.
The statistics are being made public as countries from around the world are locked in United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen which could lead to a new deal to cut emissions blamed for global warming to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Perhaps the most striking finding is that the rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade since the middle of the 1970s.
Britain's Met Office (or meteorological office) released millions of records from over 1,500 of 5,000 stations worldwide which monitor land surface temperatures.
The records, which it has only just received permission to release, date back to 1850 and the Met Office eventually hopes to publish all 5,000.
"Global average temperature has increased over the past century and this warming has been particularly rapid since the 1970s," said the Met Office climate scientist Peter Stott, commenting on the findings.
The data is a subset of the so-called HadCRUT record which is used by top U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC).
The Met Office works alongside two centres in the U.S. to calculate monthly global temperature averages - the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is part of the U.S. space agency NASA, and National Climatic Data Centre, part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It also collaborates with the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia, recently embroiled in a controversy after 13 years' worth of emails and records were hacked into, and selections of them made public on sites hostile to the climate change consensus among scientists.
The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, has stood aside while an investigation is being conducted. Some of the emails paint a sporadic picture of CRU and other scientists papering over uncertainties to better conform with data elsewhere that shows large-scale warming.
In one private email, Jones referred to a 'trick' being employed to massage temperature statistics to "hide the decline". The academic said they had been taken out of context.
As the Met Office released its information, the head of the World Meteorological Organisation, Michel Jarraud, said in Copenhagen that the first decade of the 21st century is set to be the warmest on record.
You've got to be kidding me!
You've got to be kidding me.
Your measurements NOW line up with exactly what you want in Copenhagen (after every other measurement all over the world has said just the opposite)?
Do you think for one moment that anyone believes you?
Your junk science has had its day. No one is going for it anymore.
why such negative affirmations about our future
I don’t understand the rationale of those who lash out at climate change, throwing remarks around like "junk science” etc. It only delays time and decision making on critically important issues that must be addressed now! It bothers me that you would have such little regard for our planets future or the foresight to want to change its bleak outlook. This debate back and forth between those who want a better world and those who are afraid, "unable to change" or are unwilling to change there mindset for a better future. The logic is sound, the reasoning is more than sound, the evidence is both objective and numerous, so why still this negative “confusion mongering”? I can’t see why when the evidence is so tangible and obvious that they would insist down this negative path of apathy. Please reconsider your negative statements against climate change, what wrong could possibly come with: better managed forests, planting more trees, becoming better stewards of agriculture, farming, fisheries, and sustainable environments, finally become responsible for our immediate and long term impacts on our environment, drive less, exercise more, eat healthier, live healthier, and with less cost and less environmental impact, do more either unconsciously or consciously for your community through smarter more responsible living, live in a shaded community, and leave a future worth living in.
And remember:
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. ~Nelson Henderson
psychological basis for climate denial
last week 12-03-2009 COSMOS printed a most enlightening article titled 'complex psychology of climate denial'; I'm sure it is even deeper than the article suggests probably bordering on a mild form of psychosis or delusion but the mere talk about climate change is so upsetting to some people that their fears just win out; couple that with the fact that so many people just don't understand the science and that much of it seems counter-intuitive and you have more than enough to strike the wrong chord with some people; people who deal in evidence obviously see this differently; let the data speak for itself; I'm planning on searching out this new release of data to see what it actually says;
Cool it hothead
It's funny. Does the argument even matter? Fossil fuel is going to run out and we shouldn't be wasteful with energy anyway. Just get on with it and enjoy the innovation that will be inspired as a result.
You've got to be kidding me!
Hmmmmm - another owner operator leaves their mark!!
Consider this the last time you grace my computer screen
Give me a freaking break.
You, your staff and all of your 'scientists' can GO TO HELL.
You have some nerve.
Thanks for setting science back 150 years you frauds.
Ken Mac
Toledo, Oh ( where it is currently 17F / -12 wind chill)
I will now unsubsubscribe from your magazine. Which really is a craying shame but after reading that drivel of an article, I have lost all faith in you and your organization.
'Scientists' ... PUHLEEEEASE.
Good riddance
Hi Ken
Good to see you're being true to type for a climate change denier: using insults as argument, haranguing people you disagree with, throwing out sporadic and unrelated facts.
The ones targeting this site all claim to be "subscribers" who will never be so again. Is there like a training course you can take to learn this? Cause you're all singing from the same freakin' song sheet. Who's paying you?
Oh that's right, you're never coming back to this site, so we won't hear your response. And if we do, we'll know you're been lying about that too.
I for one hope you and your cantankerous, bully-boy denier friends stay away from this site, and let us all get on with fixing the problems you deny exist.
(PS. If there's any justice in the world, all of the deniers have bought, at great expense, seafront property that will be inundated in the next few decades).
Strange response
Isn't it weird that people like Ken Mac regularly choose to shoot the messenger! The magazine is just reporting some information that has to be considered currently relevant to the climate discussion. No where does it vouch for its correctness or otherwise. Whats the point of unsubscribing from a great publication just because you disagree with data made available from an institution the magazine has nothing to do with.
Your loss.
Phil.
Australia
The Fix Is In!
I suggest that, before we all say that "the science is settled", we stop to take a look at the raw data as compared to the massaged data that the Met says shows a rapid increase since the 1970's. Anthony Watt, Marc Sheppard, Robert Felix, Tim Ball, Chris Horner, Roy Spencer and a host of others have done the heavy lifting here, exposing the bias toward recent warming and toward cooling in past years, all thanks to the "homogenizing" and "adjusting" of the raw data.
Meanwhile, here are a few points to ponder:
1) The Earth has been warming since 1850. It also appears that the Little Ice Age, which Michael Mann's "trick" concealed quite nicely, ended in 1850. So, if a cooling climate event ended that same year, then why wouldn't we expect warming since then?
2) Temperatures have been ramping up since the 1970's? I'm sorry, but weren't the very same people crying "The End is Nigh!" about global warming telling us we had to increase our CO2 production to avert the "Impending Ice Age"? Yes, things were cooling down from 1941 to the mid '70's, but then the trend reversed. What makes us so sure that the current trend won't reverse? And what of the cooling trend that has been going on since 1998?
3) Calling apostates to The Dogma of The Church of Gore "deniers" is something of a red herring. No one with any sense denies that climate changes. In fact, if the climate can be said to stay exactly the same throughout time in any way, it is that it just keeps changing. What we skeptics question is whether Mankind is such a game changing event in climate history. I have yet to be shown anything Man does that Nature doesn't do -- only bigger, badder, and dirtier.
4) Another thing the skeptics question are the so-called "solutions" to the "problem" of climate change. The only answers we see tend toward global governance, tighter control over every aspect of the world's economy, oppressive intrusions into each individual's life and decisions, and a massive redistribution of wealth and property from those who own and have earned to those who have neither. This last will also guarantee that the Third World will remain in squalor, as the history of various welfare states around the world clearly demonstrates.
You can make all the claims that "the science is settled" and all you'll do is sound like the prelates of the late Middle Ages, denying Copernicus, Gallileo, and Kepplar. The Climategate documents (not the emails, but the documents) clearly show that the "science" was fixed, that we have been had by a cabal of Statists, whose only goal is total dominion over as any people as they can get.
What better way to control masses of people than to strangle their energy requirements, while making "True Believers" into Carbon Billionaires"?
I thought you guys at Cosmos were smart. You can't see this charade for what it is?
Boring, carping deniers
Problem with the deniers (like the one above) is that no amount of evidence will ever convince them. They will go on arguing the toss right up to the point where they are swallowed up by rising seas.
They are loud and demanding, but about as numerous as member of the Flat Earth Society. And about as accurate.
The best scientists in the world have pored over the issue and pronounced the result: anthropogenic global warming is real. The issue is not the validity of their argument - it's your lack of intelligence to understand it.