Bideford Summers May be Disappointing but This Year Has Been One of the Warmest on Record

We may feel that Bideford missed out on a Summer this year.  In fact I can't remember when we last had proper summer weather in the school summer holidays.

You may think it's chilly now and no-one can deny it's been WET but the past decade has been the warmest on record and this year is set to be the fifth warmest year worldwide since 1850.

The first decade of this

century has been by far the warmest decade on the instrumental record

according to the Met Office. New figures released today in Copenhagen

show that, despite 1998 being the warmest individual year, the last ten

years have clearly been the warmest period in the 160-year record of

global surface temperature maintained jointly by the Met Office Hadley

Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Similar

results are revealed in the independent analyses made by the USA’s

National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and the NASA Goddard Institute for

Space Studies (GISS).

These figures highlight that the world

continues to see global temperature rise most of which is due to

increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and

clearly shows that the argument that global warming has stopped is

flawed.

In a separate announcement, the World Meteorological

Organization (WMO) has revealed today that 2009 will become another top

ten warm year according latest figures, with a provisional warming of

0.44 °C above the long-term average of 14.0 °C

2009 has been

warmer than 2008 owing to the emergence of El Niño conditions in the

eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, and is expected to become the 5th warmest year in the instrumental record that dates back to 1850.