Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

Global warming sceptics believe that temperatures have fallen in the last 10 years. The evidence is quite to the contrary.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) says that in terms of global temperature, “2009 was the second warmest year (after 2005) in the modern record.” In the Southern Hemisphere, it was “the warmest year since modern records began in 1880. The largest temperature increases were in the Arctic and Antarctic Peninsular.“

“Except for a levelling off between the 1940s and 1970s, Earth surface temperatures have increased since 1880. The last decade has brought the temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded.” (1880 was the year when modern instrumentation was introduced.)

“Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near record temperatures. 2009 was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years -1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007.”

An alternative global temperature analysis used by the World Meteorological Organisation says that 2009 was the fifth warmest year on record. But whether it is the second or fifth warmest year, the temperature trend is definitely up, with the first decade of the new century the hottest on record.

The president of the WMO, Michel Jarraud highlights the extent of weather adversities- the decade’s worst drought on record in Australia, the worst drought in five decades in China, a poor monsoon in India causing severe droughts, the big drought in Kenya leading to massive food shortages.

There are two recognised global temperature analysis techniques.

GISS uses publicly available data from three data sets. One is weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations around the world. The second is satellite observations at sea surface. The third data base is Antarctica research station measurements. Loaded into a computer program, the summaries calculates trends in temperature anomalies, relative to the average temperature for the same month during the period 1951-1980.

The other recognised temperature analysis technique used by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is based on the Hadley Center-Met Office (UK), Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of University of East Anglia (UK), which the sceptics deride, along with two US data sources.