All signs point to an ever-warming world, new study finds

Jul 28, 2010, 23:41 GMT

Washington - Evidence of global warming is 'unmistakeable,' found a new global report by scientists Wednesday that looked at 10 different temperature measures over the past decade.

The annual State of the Climate Report, released in Washington and compiled by more than 300 scientists in 48 countries, found that each of the last three decades had been warmer than the previous one, making 2000-2009 the warmest decade on record.

While there have been cooler moments on a year-to-year basis, authors said evidence over the long term was unequivocal across the broad section of data, and was already beginning to create more extreme weather events like droughts and violent storms.

'When we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world,' said Peter Stott of Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre, a contributor to the report.

The study, released by the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), aims to assuage global warming sceptics, who have gained momentum in recent months after a series of public flaps by scientists from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The NOAA study argues that the debate has been 'confined to a small set of reiterated disputes' over land surface air temperatures and doesn't take into account other ways of measuring the warming.

The period from 2000-2009 was about 0.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the average over the past 150 years, the study found. The increase 'may seem small, but it has already impacted our planet,' said Deke Arndt, a co-editor of the report from NOAA's climate monitoring arm.

The study looked at 10 different measures and found that seven of them were rising. Those climbing were the air temperature over land and oceans, sea-surface temperature, sea levels, ocean heat, humidity and tropospheric temperature in the atmospheric layer closest to the Earth's surface.

The three indicators declining were Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere.