Skip to main content

Greenhouse gases blamed for making 2005 hottest year to date

The Scotsman
LAST year was the warmest the world has experienced since records began more than a century ago, the United States space agency, NASA, revealed last night.

Researchers have calculated that 2005 saw the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since the late 1800s.

They believe it beats the previous record, set in 1998, when El Niño, a natural phenomenon caused by shifts in prevailing winds and ocean currents that occurs every two to ten years and brings unusually warm seas in the eastern Pacific and cooler waters in the west, boosted global temperatures.

James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that because no direct data was available in the Arctic, analysts had to estimate temperatures from nearby weather stations.

As a result it was not possible to say with certainty that 2005 had been the hottest year yet, but he added: "I'm reasonably confident it was".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...
6 comments
Read more

Play against Xbox360 gamer on PC in Vista

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates on Tuesday announced a cross-platform gaming service that integrates games played on cell phones, Xbox 360 consoles and the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. The "Live Anywhere" service will be available as part of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next-generation PC operating system. The consumer version is scheduled for release early next year. "It means that you have one online community," Gates said in a news conference. "This platform can really unleash developers to do amazing new things." The system would extend the company's existing Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360 console into millions of Internet-enabled PCs and cellular phones. No pricing information on the new service was announced. In recent months, Microsoft has been pushing a number of online services that it hopes will boost revenue as markets for its traditional software become increasingly saturated. The company expects to make money off s...
9 comments
Read more

Microsoft shows off JPEG rival

If it is up to Microsoft, the omnipresent JPEG image format will be replaced by Windows Media Photo. The software maker detailed the new image format Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo said in a presentation. "One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos," Crow said, noting that Microsoft has been in contact with printer makers, digital camera companies and other unnamed industry partners while working on Windows Media Photo. Microsoft touts managing "digital memories" as one of the key attributes of XP successor Vista. In his presentation, Crow showed an image with 24:1 compression that visibly contained more detail in the Windows Media Photo format than the JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats compressed at the same level. Still, the image in the Microsoft form...
1 comment
Read more