It’s official now

WASHINGTON, January 9: The year 1997 was the warmest on record, as measured by land and ocean surface temperatures, according to top US Gove...

WASHINGTON, January 9: The year 1997 was the warmest on record, as measured by land and ocean surface temperatures, according to top US Government scientists. Global temperatures last year increased by an average of.083 degrees celsius over the previous record year, 1990.

The greatest increases were recorded in the eastern Pacific, the northeastern Atlantic, and much of northern and east Asia, according to data released on Thursday by the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

According to a NOAA map of global temperatures anomalies recorded during 1997, the greatest above-average increases in temperature — two degrees celsius or more — occurred in west Europe, the west coast of the Americas, the Caribbean, sub-Arctic regions, west and southeastern Africa, southern India, and northern southeast Asia.

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Lower-than-normal temperatures, on the other hand, were recorded in eastern north America, the Black Sea area, northern India and Pakistan, Indonesia and northern Australia. The fact that specific regions of the world were actually cooler than usual does not undermine the general global warming thesis, NOAA senior scientist Tom Karl warned today.

“Everything we know about it is consistent with natural variability coupled with human impacts,” he added.

The precipitation map released yesterday shows that most of the Caribbean, Chile, and entire band of Africa have experienced progressively less rainfall since 1901.