British scientists have calculated 2005 was the warmest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere, at least since records began being kept in the 1860s.
The United Kingdom's Met Office and the University of East Anglia say the data indicate more evidence of human-induced global warming, the BBC reported Friday.
The average temperature during 2005 in the Northern Hemisphere was 0.65 C above the average for 1961-90 -- the baseline against which scientists compare temperatures. The Northern Hemisphere Atlantic Ocean has also been the hottest on record.
"The data also show that the sea surface temperature in the northern hemisphere Atlantic is the highest since 1880," said David Viner, from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Viner says no measurements of average temperature can be completely accurate and the team's calculations are subject to an error of about 0.1 C, however, the long-term trend is clearly upwards.
"It's simple physics; more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, emissions growing on a global basis and consequently increasing temperatures," Viner told the BBC.
Copyright 2005 by United Press International
Related stories:
Patagonian glacier yields clues for improved understanding of global climate change
Although ice cores obtained from Antarctica have now provided more than 800 000 years’ worth of climate records, analysis of them alone is insufficient for understanding the history of climatic interactions between the diverse regions of the world. Boreholes drilled during the 1990s on six glaciers in the tropical zone of the Andean Cordillera gave rise to a substantial collection of data on the changes and developments of the tropical climate of the Southern Hemisphere.
Penguins setting off sirens over health of world's oceans
Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, and the culprit isn't only climate change, says a University of Washington conservation biologist.
Amazon under threat from cleaner air
The Amazon rainforest, so crucial to the Earth’s climate system, is coming under threat from cleaner air say prominent UK and Brazilian climate scientists in the leading scientific journal
Nature.
The Vanishing Rings of Saturn
Saturn: jewel of the solar system, taker of breaths, ringed beauty. Even veteran astronomers can't help but gasp when they see her through a small telescope. Red Alert: Saturn's rings are vanishing.
NASA Sees Arctic Ocean Circulation Do an About-Face
A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming.
The conservation lens
The definition of conservation priorities for biodiversity often focuses only on the numbers of vertebrate animals and seed plants in the northern hemisphere or in the tropics. But what about the other organisms, and the more extreme regions of the world, where the species richness of flowering plants and mammals is low?
Cave records provide clues to climate change
When Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Kim Cobb and graduate student Jud Partin wanted to understand the mechanisms that drove the abrupt climate change events that occurred thousands of years ago, they didn't drill for ice cores from the glaciers of Greenland or the icy plains of Antarctica, as is customary for paleoclimatolgists. Instead, they went underground.
Flu virus trots globe during off season
The influenza A virus does not lie dormant during summer but migrates globally and mixes with other viral strains before returning to the Northern Hemisphere as a genetically different virus, according to biologists who say the finding settles a key debate on what the virus does during the summer off season when it is not infecting people.