Let Old Temps Not Be Forgot

News that will stay news in 2007:

The year 2006 will be the fifth hottest on record for the planet Earth (according to NASA) or maybe the sixth (according to the World Meteorological Association).

England had its hottest year since their records began in 1659. The U.S. had its third hottest since 1880. "But all of the reports noted that temperatures greatly above normal were recorded in places as varied as Australia and Scandinavia’s Arctic islands, shattering a variety of longstanding records," writes the New York Times. "The records set this year support various studies that “showed links between human behavior and the warming trend,” said David Parker, a climate scientist at Britain’s Met Office."

2006 was the hottest year in the Netherlands since 1706.

Meanwhile, a team of American and German scientists studying the tricky topic of future rises in sea levels have concluded that previous predictions under-estimate their forecasts by 59%. The study, published in Science, also said (according to this BBC report) that "the observed rate of sea level rise through the 20th Century held a strong correlation with the rate of warming."