Warming Trends

The National Climatic Data Center(NCDC) says 2006 was the warmest year on record in the contiguous U.S.. Globally, it ranked sixth. The previous warmest-year in the US (and globally) was 1998, when a very strong El Niño in the Pacific exacerbated warming. El Niño has struck again this year, and it's the combined effect of global warming and El Niño that led the British Meteorological Office recently to predict that worldwide average temps would hit a new high in 2007.

Globally, the 10 hottest years in 150 years of record keeping have all been logged since 1994. And according to the NCDC, (which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- NOAA), "The past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak which is unprecedented in the historical record."

New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin notes that the report marked the first time under the Bush Administration that NOAA had ever explicitly acknowledged anthropocentric global warming as a fundamental factor in its annual climate report.

Revkin quotes Jay Lawrimore, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center, who says,

Year after year as we continue to see warmer temperatures, there are more and more converts convinced that it’s not just natural variability and not just something that’s going to return back to temperatures we saw 40 or 50 years ago — that in fact we are doing something to the climate.