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Science News

2005 Was the Hottest Year on Record 645

Posted by samzenpus from the no-more-snow dept.
Gulthek writes "As predicted, 2005 was the hottest year since accurate temperature recording began in the late 1800s. This news is all the more interesting because 2005 was not an "El Niño" year like 1998, the previous record holder."
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2005 Was the Hottest Year on Record More

2005 Was the Hottest Year on Record

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  • HOT HOT HOT. OK, I know it is not fun to poke fun at the global warming, but it was 65 F in the middle iof January in Baltimore, MD, USA and I was wearing shorts and a tee and I loved it. Use more hairspray Jersey!

  • No such thing as global warming... (Score:3, Funny)

    by thewiz ( 24994 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:49AM (#14566266)
    Yeah, right.
    Now where did that ice cap go?

  • It was pretty cold in Eastern Canada last year.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ip_freely_2000 ( 577249 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:49AM (#14566269)
    ...this winter has been mild, but the start of 2005 was pretty cold IIRC. Around New Years, I always see those chuckleheads at football games in California without their shirts on and I always think "We need more greenhouse gases up here"
  • This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone... we're obviously dealing with the direct effects of global warming that have been talked about forever. Over the past few years, we've had more severe weather (hurricanes), higher average temperature, melting ice (Ross ice shelf). Perhaps the most telling sign is the slump in SUV sales (Ford cuts jobs)... are people finally getting the point? I hope so!
    • I get the point! We should have more pirates [venganza.org]! Or even better, more people should read Michael Crichton's aliens cause global warming [crichton-official.com] and discover the difference between correlation, consensus and actual science.

      No one is saying the climate is not changing, criticism of the global warming theory raises uncertainty about the actual cause. Until that uncertainty has been eliminated, I'd rather invest in science and protection against rising sea levels and extreme weather (such as the Dutch Delta works [wikipedia.org]) than in
    • Obviously, because the glaciers from the ice age just started retreating from the Carolinas when the industrial revolution began in the 1800s.

      I may have fallen asleep because of the lack of O2 all the CO and CO2 in the air, but has the global warming effect been irrefutably proven? I still find many articles that speak for and against the global warming claim.

      Weather is a cyclical pattern, but just because it is cyclical it doesn't mean that on Feb. 2 of every year it will be sunny. For those of us

      • Look at the balance points (Score:4, Informative)

        by snowwrestler ( 896305 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:44AM (#14567852)
        If you want to understand climate as a whole and not just weather, you have to look at the geological systems that represent the balance of all the weather effects.

        Good examples: alpine glaciers. The extent of an alpine glacier in any given year depends directly on how much snow falls on it (how much it grows) vs. how warm it has been (how fast it melts).

        Alpine glaciers throughout the world are in retreat. This means that either less snow that recent historical average is falling on almost every glacier in the world, or almost every glacier in the world is melting faster than its recent historical average. But wait, you can measure precipitation separate from the glacier--you can control for that variable. And when you do so it becomes clear that for most glaciers the issue is a higher melting rate. Alpine glaciers are melting faster than they used to, all over the world. This is a pretty good clue that something is changing in the climate as a whole.

        And, as an extra bonus, it's visible to the layman's naked eyes. In fact there have been hundreds of news stories over the last 5 years about the retreat of the glaciers world wide. Or you can just ask mountaineers or local villagers.

        Are we causing it? That's a tougher nut to crack. We know of a mechanism that can contribute to greater global atmospheric heat storage--greenhouse gases. We also know that human systems create and store an unnatural amount of heat (car exhaust, AC exhaust, plus the urban "heat island" effect). And we know that global overall temperature is going up.

        We'll probably never know the exact percentage of our responsibility vs. sunspots. But the point is we know there's a trend and we know we probably are contributing to it to some degree.

  • Russia (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cyriustek ( 851451 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:51AM (#14566276)
    I am sure the Russians wish a little global warming would go their way considering they have reached record lows as of late.

  • Global warming stories (Score:3, Informative)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:53AM (#14566282) Homepage
    We all know what we believe in regards to Global warming. Most of the time we want to believe the worst... or the best. Here in Texas, it has been a very weird winter indeed. There's no denying that. When I was a kid, I remember snow in this area. I haven't seen snow in a really long time. There has been ice and the occasional white stuff that never sticks to the ground, but nothing that could make a christmas white.

    The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable. The interesting thing about that particular story was that they believed it has been past the point of no return for quite some time now and that even if any of the "green people" had been able to make a bigger difference, it wouldn't have changed anything.

    And so long as everything costs money, (i.e. that money can be worth more than people) we'll never pull ourselves together enough to find another place to go, let alone get off this rock in any efficient manner.

    I think it's time to make peace with whatever the future holds and enjoy the moment like the 80's.
    • The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable.

      Melting at an unstoppable rate? Change very rapidly into something uninhabitable? Exaggerate much?

      The planet's climate has shifted drastically over the course of time without our interference

      • The problem is not the danger to the Earth's Biosphere (which will do just fine, thank you, despite the whining of the treehuggers). The problem is tha danger to humanity. Which, if you listen to some of them treehuggers, might or might not be a problem.

        The Biosphere has survived way more than the puny stuff we throw at it.
    • You mean an impending doom is coming? Maybe Slashdotters will finally get laid.

    • Fear Mongering (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Shihar ( 153932 )
      The worst story I have heard about global warming was on NPR and some research group claimed that we are past the point of no return meaning that it doesn't matter what we do at this point, the permafrost is melting at an unstoppable rate and our world is going to change very rapidly into something uninhabitable.

      This is just fear mongering. The world might very well have shifted its weather equilibrium. We might see some drastic weather changes. Populations might be displaced and poor nations might expe

      • Re:Fear Mongering (Score:5, Insightful)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@nOSpam.keirstead.org> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:47AM (#14566616)

        Nature doesn't give a shit what we do. We don't have it in our capacity to make this world uninhabitable.

        I am pretty sure planting a few hundred hydrogen bombs a couple of miles below the surface of the planet at strategic locations, and detonating them, would make the world uninhabitable.

        Trust me, if we really wanted to, we could.

        • Re:Fear Mongering (Score:5, Funny)

          by Jonny_eh ( 765306 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @09:02AM (#14566718)
          Hey, Iran, is that you?

        • Re:Fear Mongering (Score:3, Insightful)

          by david.given ( 6740 )
          I am pretty sure planting a few hundred hydrogen bombs a couple of miles below the surface of the planet at strategic locations, and detonating them, would make the world uninhabitable.

          No, we couldn't. Hydrogen bombs just aren't big enough.

          Oh, we could probably screw up the global ecosystem enough that we'd kill ourselves off, and probably most other large mammals, but we couldn't come anywhere close to sterilising the planet. Not like that.

          (A better approach would be to use those bombs to change the

  • This is trivial and obvious (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BriSTO(V)L ( 668928 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:55AM (#14566295) Journal
    Weather records can only "increase" (ie. get more extreme) - they cannot, by definition, get smaller.
    See the "Record Fallacy" at:

    numberwatch [numberwatch.co.uk] get with the maths, people...

    • Re:This is trivial and obvious (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hanwen ( 8589 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:00AM (#14566327) Homepage Journal
      The interesting thing really is the graph, which is next to the article. We've been on a more or less steady temperature increase for the past century and a half.

    • Re:This is trivial and obvious (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:15AM (#14566414)
      That's true, but if the overall average weather isn't changing, we should also expect new records to become increasingly rare with time, and the frequency of record cold years to be about the same as the frequency of record hot years.
      • With as chaotic a system of weather as our planet has (and has always had), it would take an awful lot of samples to reach your "frequency equalibrium". There's so many cycles going on it could take tens of thousands if not millions of years to record each cycle. Our planet has been continuously heating and cooling; people talk about "the ice age" as if there were only one. And it would be happening if we were here or not.

        Note that I'm not saying we're NOT having an influence, just that, IMO, it's neglig

    • Re:This is trivial and obvious (Score:4, Informative)

      by Billosaur ( 927319 ) * <wgrother AT optonline DOT net> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:41AM (#14566580) Journal
      Weather records can only "increase" (ie. get more extreme) - they cannot, by definition, get smaller.

      Definitely obvious, but the reasoning is "trivial". Weather is not a stochastic process, but is linked to variables including (but not limited to) the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. If you look in terms of only records, then your argument is correct. However, if you look at average global temperature rise [earth-policy.org], you'll note that while the global temperature fluctuates, the overall trend is a steady rise.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Bah humbug (Score:3, Insightful)

    by penguin_strut ( 751980 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @07:57AM (#14566309)
    Seriously guys. If you get a chance, look at the real data. Statistics are skewed on both sides of the battle. The major polluters have us NEVER causing any issue, and the eco-folks have the world ending in 10 years. Guess what - neither's really the case. Big shocker. We don't know NEARLY enough about climate to take stabs at the end result of all this. Several things are certain though: that last 'little ice age' was less than 200 years ago, and the current overall warming trend began before the industrial revolution, back when agrarian farming was the average way of life. Also, in many places around the globe, glaciers are still advancing...

    Seriously, take the time to do some real reading.

    • while there are always extremists in any argument, and while models are not perfect, global warming in general and global warming enhanced by human activity are accepted scientific facts.

      denying them makes as much sense as denying evolution. oh, wait...

      with both global warming and evolution, the only arguments among real scientists are the *details* of the mechanisms, not whether they actually exist or not.

    • Re:Bah humbug (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jridley ( 9305 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @09:28AM (#14566883)
      We don't know NEARLY enough about climate to take stabs at the end result of all this.

      That's my opinion as well. However, what to do about our ignorance is the question. IMHO since we know so little, we should strive to minimize our impact until we really understand what our impact is. Some people think that because we don't know what our impact is, screw it, let's pave the planet, and subdue the oil producing nations so we can all buy houses 50 miles from where we work every day and drive to work on $1.50/gal gas.

  • Hadeon Eon was hot (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:02AM (#14566333)
    The Hadean Eon [palaeos.com] were the hottest years of the Earth. It is theorized that it was over 1000 degrees Celsius in surface temperature.

    Paris Hilton was quoted as saying, "That's hot!"

    Incidentally no SUVs, chemical plants, aerosol cans or overclocked processors were found at the scene.
    • Incidentally no SUVs, chemical plants, aerosol cans or overclocked processors were found at the scene.

      Know what else was missing? Humans. We don't like those kind of temperatures very much so even if Earth will survive global warming, we might not.

      • Know what else was missing? Humans.

        I agree, the Earth is warming and humans are most likely exacerbating the problem. It is unfortunate that people deny that Global Warming is happening when most of the world's top scientists say that it is. As an earlier post noted, it may be too late for humans to actually do anything about in the short term. Maybe in the long term we will be more Earth-friendly, that is if were are still around to make that choice.

        But if there ever was a post deserving 'Flameba
    • Incidentally no SUVs, chemical plants, aerosol cans or overclocked processors were found at the scene.

      Well duhh. They melted.

  • Science vs economics (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ogemaniac ( 841129 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:06AM (#14566354)
    It is funny. One political party hates the science of global warming, as it contradicts their party line. The other party, though, is just as bad. They don't like the economics of global warming.

    Simply put, the economics of global warming solutions are just terrible. You really have to stretch to come up with a cost-benefit that justifies actually doing much about global warming. Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" goes into this in detail, basically demonstrating that beyond a doubt, we can do much, much, much more good for the world by doing things like fighting AIDS or providing clean water to the poor than we can by spending hundreds of billions to put a micro-dent in the projected warming trend. The reason for the cost-benefit results should be obvious if you look at the map in the article. Where is the warming? In "#$"#$ cold places! There are lots of benefits to global warming that offset the costs.

    Yes, global warming is happening. What we should do about it is an another matter entirely.
    • I live at 248 above mean sea level in an area with moderate temperatures and 40 inches a year rainfall. Global warming worries me not a bit.

      However, if I lived in London, New York, or Bangladesh, I would be rather more concerned for the long term. It's true that clean drinking water and medicines will benefit many people, but the effects of flooding on migration, population disruption and interruption to trade will start off wars. In fact, perhaps I should be worried. I will probably need a few RPGs and mac

    • Re:Science vs economics (Score:5, Interesting)

      by electroniceric ( 468976 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:32AM (#14566519)
      The question is not the present economics, which undoubtedly offer big initial costs to make any dent in global climate, nor about the potential present gains from climate change (e.g. longer growing season in temperate latitudes). The question is what happens in a century or two. The scientific community now speaks basically in unison saying it looks pretty grim. People can point to the various uncertainties in models all they like, but the driving mechanisms are rock-solid. It is a huge mistake to continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, period. By whatever metric, this is not a "good" for humanity. If this massive forcing is stopped, the earth could well move itself into another mode, but the cost of dealing merely with rising sea level will be staggering.

  • ridiculos! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well I'm colder than I was a few months ago! I don't know where they are getting their data from but it's obviously biased.

  • Wonderful with all these experts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:19AM (#14566438)
    It's always wonderful to see that some of the slashdot-readers are so much smarter than people that actually do research in the area. While there among researchers, that has spent years working in the field, are close to a consensus on the existence of global warming and the man made causes of it, the supreme slashdoters can without reading any peer reviewed journals on the subject at all, judge the results as bogus, the data as flawed and the hypotheses as false. Some even come up with new ideas that I'm sure no one has ever thought about before. Some slashdoters have even made their own much more reliable data collection, in the style of "it's really cold here right now". Impressive!

  • More greenhouse gasses.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OneSmartFellow ( 716217 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:36AM (#14566542)
    , in particular carbon dioxide (but also, sulfer dioxide, and others), are emmitted by this one volcanic field http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/current_volcs/ nyos/nyos.txt [nodak.edu] than are emmitted by all the industrialised countries of the world in the same period.

    Shall we devote our resources to stopping that ?

    The answer is, of course not.

    Energy waste is bad for one simple reason, it is wasteful.

    Let's devote our energy to reducing energy waste. Let's tighten up the efficiency regulations of automobiles so that SUV's aren't a 'loop-hole' (http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/gu est_commentary/lynch-cafe-standard-insanity.htm [cfif.org]) in the CAFE standards. Let's stop producing so much light pollution (url:httpwwwdarkskyorg [url]>)that I can no longer make out the Milky Way from my back garden in a surburb of a small mid-western city . Let's insist that fuck-brains who choose to buy Harley Davidson motorcycles aren't buying them because they make A LOT OF NOISE (http://www.noisefree.org/motorcycles/loudpipes.ht ml [noisefree.org]), and really only want to look macho http://www.havasy.net/images/bike/chapsleather01_t humbnail.jpg [havasy.net]!

  • I Want to See Temps vs. Solar Output (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geoffrobinson ( 109879 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @08:37AM (#14566546) Homepage
    Call me a skeptic, it doesn't bother me.

    I'm open to believing in _human caused_ global warming. But I want to see what the year to year output of the Sun has been.

    Remember that story last year about the ice caps on Mars shrinking? It was on slashdot. Output from stars is not static.

    Just humor me before we start pronouncing doom and gloom.

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