Commenting on the Met Office’s announcement today that 2010 was the second warmest year since records began in 1850, Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, said:

“These results show that 2010 was historically an exceptionally warm year. Although the Met Office records it as the second warmest year, NASA and the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that it was tied as the warmest year on record. Self-proclaimed climate change ‘sceptics’ may still try to claim that global warming stopped in 1998, but they cannot explain away the fact that nine of the ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 2000. Whereas 1998 was an extraordinarily warm year compared with the rest of the 20th century due to a very strong El Niño, it looks fairly typical compared with the last decade. In fact 2010 was very close to being even warmer than 1998, and it was only the onset of the strongest La Niña event for 30 years which stopped last year from topping the Met Office’s records.”

“The Met Office has indicated that the UK had its coldest year since 1986, mainly due to very cold weather in December. Climate change ‘sceptics’ will no doubt try to make much of this statistic, but it is important to remember that the UK covers less than 0.05 per cent of the Earth’s surface and our local weather does not provide a guide to the global climate.”

Notes for Editors

  1. The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment was launched at the London School of Economics and Political Science in October 2008. It is funded by The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
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