GLOBAL WARMING -

According to the Old Farmer's 2007 Almanac this ought to give us food for thought-

It is estimated that 386,000 square miles of seaice have disappeared since 1974.

Record warmth in 2005 is notable, because global temperature has not received any boost from a tropical El Niño this year. The prior record year, 1998, on the contrary, was lifted 0.2°C above the trend line by the strongest El Niño of the past century.

Global warming is now 0.6°C in the past three decades and 0.8°C in the past century. It is no longer correct to say that "most global warming occurred before 1940". More specifically, there was slow global warming, with large fluctuations, over the century up to 1975 and subsequent rapid warming of almost 0.2°C per decade.

Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. Climate models show that the rate of warming is consistent with expectations . The observed rapid warming thus gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions.

Current warmth is nearly ubiquitous and largest at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Our ranking of 2005 as warmer than 1998 is a result mainly of the large positive Arctic anomaly. Excluding the region north of 75N, 1998 is warmer than 2005. If the entire Arctic Ocean were excluded, the ranking of 2005 may be even lower.

Our analysis differs from others by including estimated temperatures up to 1200 km from the nearest measurement station . The resulting spatial extrapolations and interpolations are accurate for temperature anomalies at seasonal and longer time scales at middle and high latitudes, where the spatial scale of anomalies is set by Rossby waves. Thus we believe that the remarkable Arctic warmth of 2005 is real, and the inclusion of estimated arctic temperatures is the primary reason for our rank of 2005 as the warmest year.