2007 was tied as Earth's second warmest year
NEW YORK - Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS) in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth’s
second warmest year in a century.
The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990. A minor data processing error found in the GISS temperature analysis in early 2007 does not affect the present analysis. The data processing flaw was failure to apply NOAA adjustments to United States Historical Climatology Network stations in 2000-2006, as the records for those years were taken from a different data base (Global Historical Climatology Network). This flaw affected only 1.6% of the Earth’s surface (contiguous 48 states) and only the several years in the 21st century. The data processing flaw did not alter the ordering of the warmest years on record and the global ranks were unaffected. In the contiguous 48 states, the statistical tie among 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest year(s) was unchanged. In the current analysis, in the flawed analysis, and in the published GISS analysis, 1934 is the warmest year in the contiguous states (but not globally) by an amount (magnitude of the order of 0.01°C) that is an order of magnitude smaller than the certainty. |