Last year was the warmest year of the century, based on land and ocean surface data, reports a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Led by the center’s Senior Scientist Tom Karl, the team analyzed temperatures from around the globe during the years from 1900 to 1997 and as far back as 1800 for land areas. For 1997, land and ocean temperatures averaged three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit above normal. (Normal is defined by the mean temperature, 61.7 degrees F, for the 30-years 61-90) The 1997 figure exceeds the previous record warm year, 1990, by 0.15 degrees Fahrenheit. The record breaking warm conditions of 1997 continued the pattern of very warm global temperatures.

NOAA Graph 1997

Nine of the past eleven years have been the warmest on record. “Land temperatures did not break the previous record set in 1990, but 1997 was one of the five warmest years since 1880” said Karl. Including 1997, the top ten warmest years over land have all occurred since 1981, and the warmest five years all since 1990. Land temperatures for 1997 average three quarters of a degree above normal, falling short of the 1990 record by one-quarter of a degree. Ocean temperatures during 1997 also averaged three-quarters of a degree above normal, which makes it the warmest year on record, exceeding the previous record warm years of 1987 and 1995 by 0.3 of a degree Fahrenheit.With the new data factored in, global temperature warming trends now exceed 1.0 degree Fahrenheit per 100 years, with land temperatures warming at a somewhat faster rate. “It is likely that the sustained trend toward increasingly warmer global temperatures is related to anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases”.

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Record warm intensified in early 1998

UPI WASHINGTON, June 8, 1998 — 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. 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.