Is Global Warming Making Tibet Dustier?

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Sediments taken from the bottom of a lake on the Tibetan Plateau suggest that changes in wind patterns caused by global warming may be making the area dustier. That trend could accelerate the melting of crucial glaciers in the Himalayas and affect already imperiled water supplies.

Tricky connections. Global warming may be increasing winds that blow dust onto the Tibetan Plateau, and the sunlight-absorbing dust may be accelerating the melting of glaciers there

Jessica Conroy, a graduate student in paleoclimatology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues collected sediment cores from the bottom of Kiang Lake in southwestern Tibet using equipment suspended from rafts. The cores track the history of climate in the region back to 1050 C.E. According to Conroy, who presented the data here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on 15 December, the amount of fine-grained dust in the lake sediment increased over the 20th century. Finer dust arrives from distant desert regions hundreds of kilometers away, suggesting stronger winds with the power to deliver the material.

Scientists have previously noted the rise of dust in the region but attributed it to the increase in agriculture, grazing, and other relatively local developments. Data Conroy presented showed that dusty periods coincide with summers when a Northern Hemisphere atmospheric phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation is in a "positive phase." A positive phase of this pattern in the summer leads to stronger winds in desert areas to the north of the lake as well as south of the Himalayas.

Global warming seems to be keeping the Arctic Oscillation in its positive phase more often, which Conroy says could mean that climate, not just changes in the local landscape caused by human activity, could be making southwestern Tibet dustier. Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, who did the earlier work noting the rise of dust, says he was "impressed" with the data and called the work "thoughtful." The findings mirrored patterns he had documented within ice in a Himalayan glacier called Dasuopu, "particularly the increase in the past century or so of dust," he says. Conroy's hypothesized link between dust levels and the Arctic Oscillation "probably warrants more investigation," Thompson says.

"It's going to continue to be dusty in this region, and dust can accelerate the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas," says Conroy. That's because the dust lands on the white ice and makes it darker, absorbing radiation and accelerating melting in the Himalayas. These glaciers, which provide water for hundreds of millions of people across Asia, are in serious danger—although a well-documented typographic error in the 2007 IPCC report exaggerated the rate of their disappearance. Dust also warms the air above the Tibetan Plateau, enhancing monsoon circulation patterns, which could affect rain and alter rainfall patterns across the southern Asia.

Monitoring Glaciers To Watch Global Change

Since well before global warming became a heated political issue, scientists have been trying to determine the rate at which our planet’s temperature is increasing. While placing many thermometers around the world would appear to be the solution, local temperatures can vary widely across regions and from one year to the next. Instead, researchers have found they can obtain a measure of average global temperatures by using satellites to monitor heat-sensitive objects on the ground. Of these objects, glaciers are among the most reliable indicators of climate change.		Alpine glaciers, like this one near Mt. McKinley, Alaska, change in response to the local climate. By monitoring the change in size of glaciers around the world, scientists can learn about global climate change. (Photograph by Klaus J. Bayr, Keene State College, 1990)
		One method of measuring glaciers is to send researchers onto the ice with surveying equipment. The Muir Glacier, shown here around 1950, has been studied for over 200 years. (Photograph from the American Geographic Society Collection archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado at Boulder)
Despite typical glaciers’ massive sizes, monitoring them is not always an easy task. Only specific types of small glaciers are good measures of climate change. Some glaciers are too large to measure accurately, and others are simply too unpredictable. Once scientists find a suitable glacier, they must take satellite images of the ice for a minimum of five years and compare the results. They then have to look closely at the outside edge of the glacier (the glacier’s terminus). If a large percentage of the glacier’s edge is receding then the area around the ice is growing warmer, and if a large percentage is expanding then the area is growing cooler. When enough measurements from many different parts of the world have been gathered, the researchers can determine whether the earth is growing warmer or cooler.		The terminus of the Pasterze glacier, Austria. It dwarfs the three hikers at lower right. (Photograph by Klaus J. Bayr, Keene State College, 1988)

Flooding at home not polar bears convinces people of man made climate change

Nick Pidgeon, Professor of Environmental Psychology at Cardiff University, showed for the first time that people with a direct experience of flooding are more likely to believe in man made climate change.

He said “scare” tactics, such as warning people of floods in Bangladesh or desertification in Sudan, are less likely to motivate people to take action.

“Polar bear images and melting glaciers do raise people's concern but they feel disempowered because they cannot do anything about it, whereas the local thing they understand,” he said.

The survey of 2,000 people in Britain, published in Nature, also found victims of floods are more willing to change their lifestyles to tackle global warming. For example by reducing energy use and taking less long haul flights.

Prof Pidgeon said people are becoming immune to the extreme risks of climate change in the Arctic and Amazon but they are likely to engage on the real risks of flooding and drought at home.

He also said people are more likely to act if they are given positive messages about what they can do.

“All the evidence shows you should be measured in showing people the risk but you can also be clear about the actions they can take. Scaring them will just put them off,” he added.

A separate study by the Carbon Trust found that more than half of people in Britain want big business to be more responsible when it comes to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

However just seven per cent believe public announcements from a company about how it is reducing its impact on climate change are accurate

This week a number of initiatives to cut carbon are being held around the country for Climate Week, a nationwide event sponsored by Tesco and supported by Al Gore and Sir Paul McCartney.

The idea is to celebrate the positive things people can do to cut carbon emissions such as saving energy at home and taking public transport.

However campaigners say that some of the companies involved have failed to do enough to tackle climate change.

The World Development Movement claim that one of the main sponsors, the Royal Bank of Scotland, has invested more in coal-fired power stations than any other UK bank over the last few years.

As the Seasons Change, Will the Plankton?

Antonio Mannino had been at sea for more than a week, collecting samples of seawater and plankton and measuring the conditions in the North Atlantic Ocean. It was not exactly a luxury cruise, but to understand the planet’s biggest food source—phytoplankton—and perhaps its most important sink for carbon dioxide, you’ve got to get out on the water.

As is common in late autumn—when cold north winds of winter battle for supremacy of the North Atlantic against the lingering warm fronts of summer—the weather grew messy. Seas churned with waves rising seven to fourteen feet, and Mannino and colleagues struggled to cast water samplers and nets over the sides of the Delaware IIresearch vessel. After several days, the foul weather made it impossible to work, and the captain began steaming back from Georges Bank toward Provincetown, Massachusetts. He planned to lay anchor in the (hopefully) calmer waters of Cape Cod Bay and ride out the storm.

Mannino, an oceanographer from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was sitting in the ship’s galley, while graduate student Dave Munro dozed on a nearby couch. It was Friday the 13th.

Thud. Splash. Slosh.

A wave crashed through the porthole window, knocking out the glass and dousing Munro in a bath of seawater. A few tens of gallons sloshed around on the galley floor as the crew sealed the porthole hatch. No one was injured, and the ship was never in serious danger, but it was enough to send them back to port in Woods Hole.

The 155-foot Fisheries Survey Vessel Delaware II, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is a 40-year-old workhorse. Spare parts are not exactly lying around on a shelf. So the crew did what seamen do: they bolted steel plates over the porthole, soldered things shut, and got back out to sea. There was research to be done, and time spent in port is time and money lost.

The 155-foot survey vessel Delaware II is operated by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service for studies of fish stocks and for support of basic research like CliVEC. (Photo courtesy Charles Byrne, NOAA.)

Mannino and colleagues from NASA, NOAA, and Old Dominion University headed back out into the North Atlantic for another week, sharing cramped quarters, cozy labs, and choppy autumn seas to see how those turbulent waters influence the tiniest and most important ocean life forms.

Siberia's Lake Baikal Feeling the Heat

The "Butterfly Effect" the idea that on a global scale, even small events can have a ripple effect around the world is demonstrated in the work of a Russian family in Siberia that have for three generations studied Lake Baikal -- one of the most biologically diverse of the world's oldest and deepest lakes. In the 1940's, Mikhail Kozhov began taking detailed measurements of the lake's temperature. His granddaughter, Lyubov Izmest'eva, continues the family tradition.

Izmest'eva ventures out onto the water, or ice in the winter, to collect water samples and measure temperatures, just like her mother and grandfather before her.

Along with a team of scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Izmest'eva recently co-authored a study of Lake Baikal. The research sheds light on the way climate change is affecting temperatures in large bodies of water.

NEWS: Earth's Lakes Heating Up

"This consistent dedication to understanding one of the world's most majestic lakes helps us understand not only the dynamics of Lake Baikal over the past 60 years, but also to recognize future scenarios for Lake Baikal,” said lead author Steve Katz in a University of California at Santa Barbara press release.

"This work is important because we need to go beyond detecting past climate variation,” said Stephanie Hampton of the University of California at Santa Barbara in a press release by that school.

"We also need to know how those climate variations are actually translated into local ecosystem fluctuations and longer-term local changes. Seeing how physical drivers of local ecology –– like water temperature –– are in turn reflecting global climate systems will allow us to determine what important short-term ecological changes may take place, such as changes in lake productivity,” said Hampton.

“They also help us to forecast consequences of climate variability,” Hampton said.

NEWS: Lake Superior May Hit Record Temperature

The researchers found correlations between the lake and distant parts of the Earth. The results will help scientists understand how distant climate patterns affect the weather in central Asia.

For example, they found that changes in Lake Baikal's temperature varied along with monthly El Niño variations in the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away.

The researchers also found connections between the jet stream and Lake Baikal. Three months after changes in the jet stream's strength and direction seasonal changes began to occur at the lake. Also, a less powerful jet stream resulted in less extreme cold spells in Lake Baikal.

Overall they found the lake is warming, but didn't find evidence of early springs or late winters.

The lake's temperature even reflected decade-scale changes in the Earth's rotation. Changes in the speed of Earth's rotation result in changes in the atmospheric zonal winds, the winds that travel east to west. The zonal winds affect the amount of energy available in the atmoshpere to cause storms in central Asia. And those long-term changes showed up in the Lake Baikal temperature record.

All of these forces influence each other and created a complex pattern of climate interactions. Lower El Niño forces correlated with a stronger Siberian high pressure center and a stronger jet stream flow. That resulted in more frequent cold snaps heading southeast across East Asia, including Lake Baikal, and more intense surface winds.

But even with the new understanding of climate interactions, some of the temperature changes in Lake Baikal remain unexplained.

Global warming may bring tsunami and quakes: scientists

- Quakes, volcanic eruptions, giant landslides and tsunamis may become more frequent as global warming changes the earth's crust, scientists said on Wednesday.

Climate-linked geological changes may also trigger "methane burps," the release of a potent greenhouse gas, currently stored in solid form under melting permafrost and the seabed, in quantities greater than all the carbon dioxide (CO2) in our air today.

"Climate change doesn't just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth's crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system," Professor Bill McGuire of University College London told Reuters, at the first major conference of scientists researching the changing climate's effects on geological hazards.

"In the political community people are almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change."

The vulcanologists, seismologists, glaciologists, climatologists and landslide experts at the meeting have looked to the past to try to predict future changes, particularly to climate upheaval at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago.

"When the ice is lost, the earth's crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis," said McGuire, who organized the three-day conference.

David Pyle of Oxford University said small changes in the mass of the earth's surface seems to affect volcanic activity in general, not just in places where ice receded after a cold spell. Weather patterns also seem to affect volcanic activity - not just the other way round, he told the conference.

LONDON'S ASIAN SUNSET

Behind him was a slide of a dazzlingly bright orange painting, "London sunset after Krakatau, 1883" - referring to a huge Asian volcanic eruption whose effects were seen and felt around the world.

Volcanoes can spew vast amounts of ash, sulphur, carbon dioxide and water into the upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and sometimes cooling the earth for a couple of years. But too many eruptions, too close together, may have the opposite effect and quicken global warming, said U.S. vulcanologist Peter Ward.

"Prior to man, the most abrupt climate change was initiated by volcanoes, but now man has taken over. Understanding why and how volcanoes did it will help man figure out what to do," he said.

Speakers were careful to point out that many findings still amounted only to hypotheses, but said evidence appeared to be mounting that the world could be in for shocks on a vast scale.

Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California warned of the vast power of recently discovered "glacial earthquakes" -- in which glacial ice mass crashes downwards like an enormous landslide.

In the West Antarctic, ice piled more than one mile above sea level is being undermined in places by water seeping in underneath.

"Our experiments show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar magnitude," said Song.

"Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are particularly at risk."

He said ice sheets appeared to be disintegrating much more rapidly than thought and said glacial earthquake tsunamis were "low-probability but high-risk."

McGuire said the possible geological hazards were alarming enough, but just one small part of a scary picture if man-made CO2 emissions were not stabilized within around the next five years.

"Added to all the rest of the mayhem and chaos, these things would just be the icing on the cake," he said. "Things would be so bad that the odd tsunami or eruption won't make much difference."

Tropical forests 're-shaped' by climate changes

Future climate change could change the profile of tropical forests, with possible consequences for carbon storage and biodiversity, a study says.

It suggests that if current trends continued, the drier conditions would favour deciduous, canopy species at the expense of other trees.

US researchers based their findings on the changes they recorded in a Costa Rican forest over a 20-year period.

The team's paper has been published in the journal Global Change Biology.

"It is important because - depending on the rate of change, and the type of species that are found in the forests - it will influence a lot of ecosystem services and processes," explained co-author Brian Enquist from the University of Arizona.

"For example, we need to know how much carbon tropical forests are storing, and will store in the future. We also need to know how much CO2 they are taking out of the air."

Professor Enquist and his team examined how an area of forest had changed between 1976 and 1996.

"We were fortunate that between the two dates, there was a series of quite impressive droughts - those droughts have been increasing in severity over the longer term," he told BBC News.

He said that there had been a "tremendous reduction" in the total number of trees in the forest.

"Most of that reduction was in the smallest trees - such as the saplings and the smaller trees in the understorey," Professor Enquist observed.

"That was the first change that we immediately noticed, but then we began to look very closely and asked what was causing those trees to die.

"What we found was that there was a very distinctive signal in the types of trees that tended to survive and the types of trees that died - it came down to basic differences on how these trees functioned and worked.

"We found that those species that tended to require more moist conditions were the ones that dropped out very quickly, and those that were able to handle more drought-like conditions persisted."

Professor Enquist said the species that favoured such conditions were deciduous, canopy trees, and if the trend of drier conditions continued into the future then it would change the characteristics of tropical forests.

"The ecosystem implication is that those types of forests (dominated by deciduous, canopy species) tend to store less carbon and hold less biomass, which would then have a detrimental impact in terms of the entire biosphere's ability to help regulate or mitigate the effects of global climate change."

He said the study's findings, when combined with other results from other similar projects, created a picture of tropical forests that were changing "rather quickly".

Professor Enquist added that these forests appeared to be quite suseptible to changes in rainfall, and that future projections of changes in rainfall patterns were likely to have "immediate or very quick consequences".

Effect of urbanization on Earth’s ecosystems.

November 15, 2000 -- Watching the familiar, rural landscapes of our youth give way to suburban sameness has become as much a part of modern American life as portable electronics, instant food, and time spent in front of the television. 

Nearly all of us have had the disappointing experience of returning to what used to be the woods near our childhood homes and finding a new subdivision. Or we have been shocked to see that some corporate entity has erected aluminum-sided duplexes and an outlet mall in the middle of our favorite vacation spot. 

Like it or not, throughout this century, the United States has undergone a steady process of urbanization as a larger and larger percentage of the population has moved towards the cities. 

Above: Based upon satellite measurements of city lights, this image is a map of the urban population density of North America. Red, yellow and green are urban areas, and blue is peri-urban. The city light data is laid over elevation data (black is sea level, light grey is over 10,000 feet).

While increasing urbanization may have some positive impacts on our environment, such as the lower birth rates that come with a city lifestyle, scientists are becoming more concerned about the negative long-term effects. Unlike rural communities, urban sprawl completely transforms the landscape and the soil and alters the surrounding ecosystem and the climate.

Marc Imhoff, a biologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, is one of these concerned scientists. For the past six years, he and a team of researchers have been looking for ways to measure the effects of urbanization on the biological productivity in the U.S. and other countries around the world. 

They created a method of mapping urbanization on a countrywide scale by using satellite images of the light cities generate at night. With the resulting city lights maps, they are now zeroing in on the impacts urban sprawl has on the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the ecosystem within which we live.

Urbanization in any country generally begins when large-scale commerce takes root and most new jobs are to be found in the factories and financial centers in cities. 

In the United States, urbanization began to occur roughly around the turn of the last century. Since then, the percentage of people living in the United States in urban areas has risen from 39 percent to more than 73 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Above: Urbanization map of the United States derived from city lights data. Urban areas are colored red, while peri-urban areas are colored yellow. This image of North America was created by Flashback Imaging Corporation under contract with NOAA and NASA.

From decade to decade, the amount of rural land that has been consumed by urbanization is enormous. Between 1982 and 1992, for instance, 19,000 square miles of otherwise rural cropland and wilderness were developed in the U.S. This would be the equivalent of converting half of Ohio into one big subdivision in a ten-year period, according to the World Resources Institute.

Urbanization is not just an issue in the United States. 

Right now, researchers estimate that worldwide movement towards cities is growing at three times the rate of population expansion worldwide. Only a third of the planet's population lived in urban areas ten years ago. Now that number is up to 50 percent, and in ten more years roughly two thirds of humanity will live in the cities, the World Resources Institute reports.

Imhoff says that while working at Stanford University as a post-doctorate, he initially became intrigued by the biological implications of urbanization after he saw how urban sprawl appeared on the Earth's surface when viewed from orbit. 

"I spent a number of years looking at the Earth from space, and I found it remarkable how human development of land looked a lot like biological growth -- like mold on an orange," he says.

Right: Cities and suburban areas are growing rapidly, as shown by these two images of Plano, near Dallas, Texas. (Images courtesy USGSEarthshots) 

He wanted to know how urban sprawl was changing the landscape on a global scale, and whether this increased development was affecting food supplies, local ecosystems, and even the global climate. 

Early on, he realized that the best way to do such a study would be to construct a map of urbanization using remote-sensing data from satellites. 

"Satellite data would give us a synoptic view of the globe from which we could get an explicit idea of where the human-dominated surface features are -- especially with respect to cities," he says. "We could also merge that information with soil maps and biosphere data from other satellites to assess the impact of urbanization on ecosystems."

To construct such a map Imhoff needed a satellite instrument that would give him a snapshot of the urbanization on an entire continent all at once. 

When he began this research, he had access to data from a number of remote-sensing satellites, such as Landsat 5 and NOAA's operational satellites, which record the reflected sunlight and heat emissions from the surface of the Earth. But demarcating urban sprawl with the instruments on these satellites would require the researchers to retrieve close-up images of cities and separate each individual, urbanized area from the surrounding farms, parks, and wilderness. Doing so for an entire continent would have been labor intensive and tedious.

Imhoff found a solution in an unlikely place. He recounts a weekly astronomy club meeting he attended in 1996. 

"The people at the meeting were talking about how light pollution was a problem," he recalls. "They pulled out a satellite-generated city lights map. They were looking at it and saying, 'Look at all that awful light pollution.' And I'm there thinking, 'This is exactly what I need. There's my global map of where human beings are.'"

The images were taken by a Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's (DMSP) Operational LinescanSystem (OLS). This network of satellites was originally designed to pick up on lunar illumination reflecting off of clouds at night in order to aid nighttime aircraft navigation. 

What the Air Force discovered is that on evenings when there was a new moon, the satellites were sensitive enough to record the illumination from city lights. Over a period of several new moons, the data the satellites retrieved could be pieced together to produce a global image of city lights.

Above: A map of the night-time city lights of the world constructed from images taken by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System. "My partner in the DMSP data is Dr. Christopher Elvidge of NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center," says Imhoff.

Upon receiving the satellite data, Imhoff realized there was one big problem they'd have to overcome. 

"The raw image overestimates urbanized areas by as much as seven or eight times," he says. 

The problem came mostly from the effects of the relatively bright city lights on the satellites' sensor array. The sensors on these satellites are made up of photoelectric cells organized into in a grid-like pattern, like pixels on a computer monitor. When light emanating from the Earth's surface hits one pixel on the array, it is registered in the satellite data as a 2.7-kilometer by 2.7-kilometer square area of well-lit land surface.

Yet sometimes, bright lights trigger the initial pixel and inadvertently set off neighboring pixels in the array as well. If this happens, then an area the size of a city block will appear to be the size of three or four square blocks on the raw satellite image. 

It's somewhat similar to what happens when a flash photo is taken of a mirror. Though the flashbulb itself may not be more than a couple of inches across, the light from the flash reflecting off the mirror would likely cover an area the size of a person's head on the photograph.

To correct for this "blooming" effect, the Goddard team zoomed in on the lights emanating from individual cities, effectively isolating them from the larger, continental image. Using computers, they then lowered the overall brightness levels of the city image. The blob of lights representative of the given metropolis would begin to shrink on the outside in a manner similar to an evaporating puddle of water. 

"We scale back on the brightness levels of the imaging data, until the perimeter stops shrinking on the outside and the interior lights of the city begin to break up," Imhoff says. "At that point we stop."

Right: The black waters of Lake Michigan on the right bound the bright lights of Chicago, which fade into dark rural landscapes on the left. NASA scientists assembled a dataset of lights detected from space to measure the extent of cities and urban areas worldwide.

The researchers classified the lights left on the image, after this dimming process, as urban area. The previously lit areas on the image that shrank back were classified as peri-urban (low-density suburban areas or farmland). Any areas that had no lights to begin with were labeled as non-urban. 

They compared these classifications to the boundaries on the actual urban areas of the city and found there was a close match. 

Imhoff and his team now had a set of numbers (threshold values), which told them to what extent the lights from any portion of the United States should be dimmed to get an accurate and spatially explicit representation of urbanization. Using the threshold values, Imhoff's group categorized the entire continental United States into urban, peri-urban, and non-urban areas. 

To make sure the classifications were correct on a nationwide basis, they checked each state on their map against the 1990 U.S. Census population statistics. Imhoff explains the Census Bureau doesn't map urban areas. However, it does classify urban areas as any region where there are 1000 people or more per square mile, and it takes a tally of who lives in these areas. By merging the city urban map with the Census data, the researchers could calculate population density for the urban, peri-urban, and non-urban lands. They found that the number of people per square mile on his map measured up to the Census's definition of an urban area (1000 people and up per square mile). 

After the thresholding we had an almost perfect match, which is amazing since we didn't use any Census data to create the satellite map," Imhoff said. "We thought this is good; this is working." 

For peri-urban areas Imhoff found there were roughly 100 people per square mile, and in non-urban areas, roughly 10 people per square mile. 

While the Goddard team's map still couldn't give them the exact density of the population for these classifications, it presented them with a picture of where the landscape had been transformed to the point where it no longer resembled the natural ecosystem. The researchers could be fairly certain that any area classified as urban on their maps had at least a few subdivisions, strip malls, and parking lots. 

Imhoff and his group could now overlay this map of the United States with other maps showing where the best soils are, where fragile ecosystems exist, and where plant life is the most robust. With such comparisons, the NASA scientists could determine exactly how urbanization is affecting our planet, our natural resources, and even our climate. By repeating the entire process for other countries, they could get an idea of what was happening all over the world. 

NOAA: 2010 ties for warmest year on record

NOAA: 2010 ties for warmest year on record

Just-concluded 2010 tied with 2005 for the warmest year ever recorded on the Earth's surface, the 34th straight year of global temperatures higher than the 20th Century average, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"In the contiguous United States, 2010 was the 14th consecutive year with an annual temperature above the long term average," NOAA said in a report released Tuesday.
David Easterling, scientific services chief at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, indicated the record may not stand. "These results show that the climate is continuing to show the influence of greenhouse gases. It's showing the evidence of warming," he told during a teleconference with reporters.
According to figures compiled by Accuweather, above-normal temperatures predominated in most major American cities, despite a year that began with extremely cold temperatures and record snowfalls in the East.
Atlanta recorded 216 days of above-normal temperatures, compared to 142 days below normal.
Boston was above normal 217 days of the year, and below normal 140 days during 2010. Houston was above normal 215 days, below normal just 144 days. Phoenix was hotter still, 219 days above normal and only 132 days below.
Despite its big snowfall early last year, Washington, D.C., was above normal 225 days and below normal only 130 days.
Seattle was more even-up: The Emerald City was above normal 179 days, and below normal 172 days.
At a press briefing Tuesday, NOAA officials noted extremes of weather across the globe, marked by such events as multiple 100-degree plus days in Moscow -- with huge forest fires - and the massive flooding of the Indus River in Pakistan.

The new NOAA figures track with similar findings north of the border.
The past year was the hottest ever recorded in Canada, according to an Environment Canada climate report.
The new climate data comes just as global warming skeptics have become chairmen of key committees in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has begun a process of rule-making to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. But legislation to delay EPA's regulatory authority is expected to pass the House, and faces a close vote in the Senate.
"How many times do we have to be smacked in the face with factual evidence before we address global climate change?" Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a leading advocate of curbs on greenhouse gases, said in a statement Thursday.
"Report after report keep confirming it's getting worse every year. Will we find common ground and adult leadership or keep piling the science on a shelf to collect dust."