The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has in a preliminary report has concluded that last year the global mean temperature was 14.3 °C which makes 2008 "the tenth warmest year on a record that dates back to 1850."
Climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia says that the global mean temperature for 2008 “is slightly down on earlier years†due to La Nina, an ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that has a cooling effect on the earth.
I wrote about La Nina and the cooling effect it had for global temperatures during the first half of 2008 in September last year. Back then John Kennedy, climate monitoring and research scientist at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, expected that 2008 would be the 10th warmest year since 1850.
"2008 will still be significantly above the long-term average," and that "there's been a strong upward trend in the last few decades, and that’s the thing to focus on," Kennedy said back then. And it seems he was correct.
The new report concludes that "human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years".
So there you have it. The science, yet again, says that the planet continues to warm up and that human activities are to be blamed.
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