By IANS,
Washington : The last decade from January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest on record, according to a NASA analysis.
Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, although there was a levelling off between the 1940s and 1970s.
The past year happened to be the second warmest year on record, just a tiny fraction of a degree cooler than 2005. This puts 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest slot on record.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina — an ocean-atmosphere phenomenon — that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures as La Nina diminished, said a NASA release.
The results were based on a new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
In the past three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880.