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Draft report- has not received peer review yet:
Temperatures have risen steadily since the 1970s, Jim Hansen and fellow scientists conclude.
Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The analysis, led by Goddard director Jim Hansen, attempts to debunk popular belief that the planet is cooling. It finds that global temperatures over the past decade have "continued to rise rapidly," despite large year-to-year fluctuations associated with the tropical El Ni?o-La Ni?a cycles.
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Filtering that "noise" makes long-term temperature trends visible, the authors said. It is also what allows them to predict that 2010 will emerge as the hottest year on record.
At first blush, it doesn't seem likely: The sun is near the bottom of deepest solar minimum in a century; this year's El Ni?o, while strong, is nowhere near as powerful as the 1998 cycle that drove temperatures higher across much of the globe.
But the trend, Hansen and colleagues conclude, is up. "This new record temperature will be particularly meaningful," they wrote, "because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect."
Temperatures have risen steadily since the 1970s, Jim Hansen and fellow scientists conclude.
Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The analysis, led by Goddard director Jim Hansen, attempts to debunk popular belief that the planet is cooling. It finds that global temperatures over the past decade have "continued to rise rapidly," despite large year-to-year fluctuations associated with the tropical El Ni?o-La Ni?a cycles.
/snip/
Filtering that "noise" makes long-term temperature trends visible, the authors said. It is also what allows them to predict that 2010 will emerge as the hottest year on record.
At first blush, it doesn't seem likely: The sun is near the bottom of deepest solar minimum in a century; this year's El Ni?o, while strong, is nowhere near as powerful as the 1998 cycle that drove temperatures higher across much of the globe.
But the trend, Hansen and colleagues conclude, is up. "This new record temperature will be particularly meaningful," they wrote, "because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect."
