2010 is One of the Hottest Years on Record

It’s hard to believe when the temperature outside has been below zero for days on end and when Scotland is brought to a snow and ice-bound halt amid even lower temperatures (down to minus twenty in parts of the Highlands) that 2010 has been, globally, one of the hottest on record.

Yet this is the situation as recorded by the Met Office (and backed up by NASA), which notes that 2010 will most likely match 1998 as the hottest ever recorded.  The cause?  Man-made global warming.  

2010 temperatures become even more alarming when the El Nino climate warming phenomenon is brought into the equation.  Like 1998, 2010 is also an El Nino year.  However, this year's was much weaker and was followed by a cooling event, called El Nina.  All of which means that the temperature would have been expected to have been much lower than 1998's.  This hasn't happened.

Globally, more extreme weather events are taking place, from the searing heat in Russia causing devastating forest fires to the more intense monsoon conditions that wreaked utter havoc in Pakistan.  Climate models tell us that such extreme weather events can be expected much more commonly as temperatures rise, with local effects likely to manifest as more intense versions of existing climatic patterns- the monsoon gets more intense, rainy areas get rainier, hot regions get hotter...

So while the current freezing temperatures cannot definitively be traced, ironically, to global warming, they are certainly in line with what the science is predicting.

The Met Office press release can be found here:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20101202b.html