This year will be the coolest year since 1997, according to new figures release by the World Meteorological Organization, however, it is still the tenth hottest year on record, marking the end of a decade that has set record after record.
In a preliminary report, released today by the WMO, the global mean temperature for 2008 is 14.3 °C (57.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia maintain the global climate records, which date back to 1850.
The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global
temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 °C warmer than the
average for the decade 1990-1999.
They say this year’s figure is slightly down on earlier years this century partly because of the La Niña weather pattern that developed in the Pacific Ocean during 2007. La Niña events typically coincide with cooler global temperatures, and 2008 is slightly cooler than the norm under current climate conditions, the researchers said.
"Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years," Dr. Peter Stott of the Met Office said. "As a result of climate change, what would once have been an exceptionally unusual year has now become quite normal"
Calculating the changing risk attributable to human influence is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of Oxford. Commenting on the dramatically increased odds of such warm years because of human induced climate change, Dr Myles Allen from Oxford University said: "Globally this year would have been considered warm, even as recently as the 1970s or 1980s, but a scorcher for our Victorian ancestors."
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