UPI ARCHIVES JUNE 8, 1998

WASHINGTON, June 8 — After the past several years of record warm temperatures worldwide, the first several months of 1998 brought some of the warmest U.S. temperatures ever on record, the federal government announced. The data was collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and announced by Vice President Al Gore, who said some of this year’s warming could be attributed to the cyclical El Nino patterns.

US Vice President 1998

But, Gore said, the overall trend found by NOAA ‘is a reminder once again that global warming is real, and that unless we act, we can expect more extreme weather in the years ahead.’ He cited such events as record levels of precipitation, record deaths from tornadoes, damage to coral reefs from the Florida Keys to Australia, and wildfires in Malaysia, Brazil and Mexico. Gore announced the NOAA findings as a means of increasing pressure on Congress to approve President Clinton’s budget request for $6.3 billion over five years for tax and research incentives to promote more energy- efficient products and technologies. Gore insisted U.S. industry had the expertise and ability to make affordable changes to combat global warming, saying, ‘We can do that. We know how to do that.’ “Worldwide average temperatures in the 1980s and the 1990s have been the highest on record, and the Earth’s average surface temperature last year of some 62 degrees Fahrenheit represented the highest level ever recorded. Federal researchers said new temperature records were set in five states in the first five months of 1998, with the average global surface temperature running 1.76 degrees above the average of 61.7 degrees for the benchmark period 1961-1990″.

”We believe this tendency for increased global temperatures is related to human activity,” specifically the gas emissions, Thomas R. Karl, senior scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said in announcing the latest temperature data at a briefing in Washington.

Other scientists pointed out that the warming trend was heightened last year by El Nino, the expanse of warm water that heated the surface of the tropical Pacific in the latter half of 1997 and continues to do so. David Parker, a climate analyst at the British Meteorological Office, credited El Nino for most of the global temperature rise from 1996, which was not a year of record warmth.

But despite that, Mr. Parker said, ”the underlying warming trend is still there.”

According to the data presented by Mr. Karl, combined land and ocean temperatures last year averaged three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit above normal, the mean temperature for the years from 1961 to 1990. The temperatures exceeded the record, set in 1990, by fifteen-hundredths of a degree. The actual average surface temperature last year was a little more than 62 degrees Fahrenheit, said the report by the National Climatic Data Center.