Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
2008 to be 10th hottest year: warming trend up, or stalling?
This year is set to be about the 10th warmest since records began in the 19th century, according to Phil Jones, a leading British climate scientist — see story here.
But does that confirm a long-term trend of global warming, stoked by human emissions of greenhouse gases, or show that it has stalled? The warmest year on record is now a while ago, in 1998.
Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has no doubt that the underlying trend is still up — 1998 was an unusual year when global temperatures were boosted by an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean. And this year, the opposite La Nina effect is cooling the planet.
(Among signs of a cooler 2008, some high Alpine ski resorts in Switzerland have opened early…)
