2008 colder than previous years but world still warming: WMO

Yahoo News 16 Dec 08;

GENEVA (AFP) – The past 12 months have been cooler than previous years but longer-term trends show the world is still warming due to climate change, the World Meteorological Organisation said Tuesday.

"The global temperature is likely to rank around the 10th warmest year" on record, WMO Director General Michel Jarraud told a press briefing.

"The trend for warming is still very much there," he said, noting that all the years that have been warmer than 2008 have been during the last 12 years.

The slight dip in 2008 was explained by the moderate-to-strong La Nina that developed in the latter half of 2007, he said.

The effects of El Nino and La Nina -- respectively the warming and related cooling of Pacific sea surface temperatures -- are felt in many parts of the globe. They have been blamed for a lengthy drought in Australia, flooding in the Horn of Africa and Bolivia, and more severe winter monsoons in South Asia in 2006-2007.

Jarraud said both phenomena should be "neutral" in 2009 and should not have a discernible impact on climate.

But he voiced concern that ice in the Arctic Sea dropped to its second-lowest level during the melt season since satellite measurements began in 1979. He noted that 2008 saw many devastating floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms, most notably Cyclone Nargis which devastated Myanmar in May.

He added that it was too early to give any forecasts for 2009 but cited the most recent report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which predicted a 0.2 percent rise in temperature over the next decade.

Earlier this year the WMO said that the ozone hole over Antarctica and the South Pacific was larger in 2008 than the previous year but is not expected to reach the size seen two years ago.

This year is coolest since 2000
Richard Black, BBC News 16 Dec 08;

The world in 2008 has been cooler than at any time since the turn of the century, scientists say.

Cooling La Nina conditions in the Pacific brought temperatures down to levels last seen in the year 2000.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) notes that temperatures remained about 0.3C above the 1961-1990 average.

Computer models suggest that natural cycles may cool the Earth's surface in the next few years, masking the warming impact of rising greenhouse gas levels.

One recent analysis suggested there may be no warming for about the next decade, though other scientists dispute the conclusion.

What is beyond dispute is that 2008 saw temperatures a shade below preceding years.

Using data from two major monitoring networks, one co-ordinated by the UK's Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia (UEA) and the other by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the WMO reports that despite the cooling, 2008 still ranks among the 10 warmest years on record.

At 14.3C, the average temperature for the year was significantly above the 14.0C average for the 1961-1990 period, a commonly used baseline.

Temperatures are about 0.7C above pre-industrial times.

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office of which the Hadley Centre is a part, suggested that in previous decades 2008 would have stood out as unusually warm.

"Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years," he said.

Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), which produces its own record of atmospheric temperature, agreed that 2008 was the coolest year since the turn of the century.

But Giss still ranks it as the ninth warmest since 1880.

The warmest of all remains 1998, when exceptionally strong El Nino conditions added to rising greenhouse gas levels sent thermometers to an average of about 14.5C.

"The most important component of year-to-year variability in global average temperatures is the phase and amplitude of equatorial sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that lead to La Nina and El Nino events," observed UEA's Dr Phil Jones.

Millennial warmth

John Christy, a scientist noted for taking a cautious approach to the likely impacts of human-induced climate change, agreed that the Earth's atmosphere had warmed by about 0.4C over 30 years.

His own research team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) measures atmospheric temperatures from weather balloons.

Professor Christy suggested that the trend in the immediate future would be decided by whether conditions in the Pacific veer towards El Nino or La Nina.

"If you look at the 30-year graph of month-to-month temperature anomalies, the most obvious feature is the series of warmer than normal months that followed the major El Nino Pacific Ocean warming event of 1997-1998," he said.

"Right now we are coming out of one La Nina Pacific Ocean cooling event, and we might be heading into another.

"It should be interesting over the next several years to see whether the post La Nina climate 're-sets' to the cooler seasonal norms we saw before 1997, or the warmer levels seen since then."

The effect of El Nino and La Nina conditions are one reason why scientists prefer to average temperatures over 10-year periods, which smoothes out the annual variations and gives a better picture of long-term trends.

On average, the decade from 1990 to 1999 was 0.23C above the 1961-1990 baseline, while in the period 2000-2008 it was 0.40C over, indicating a warming trend.

It is almost certain that the first decade of this century will turn out to have been significantly warmer than the last decade of the last century, notwithstanding the freak El Nino year of 1998.

The question for the next decade or so will be whether natural cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation continue to moderate the warming effect of rising greenhouse gas concentrations.