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After a month of investigation on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. government reported that this winter was the warmest worldwide on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the combined land and ocean temperatures for December through February were 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Accoring to NASA, global aerosols had dropped as much as 20 percent from the relatively stable level between 1986 and 1991 last 2005.
BEIJING, March 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Just more than a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions, the U.S. government Thursday said this winter was the warmest worldwide on record.
And if that report isn't enough, another also reported Thursday by NASA in the journal Science revealed an important counter-balance to warming -- sunlight blocked by volcanic gases, dust, pollution and other aerosol particles -- seems to have become weaker.
In its study, NASA described the aerosol effect as a "sunscreen" for Earth.
"When more sunlight can get through the atmosphere and warm Earth's surface, you're going to have an effect on climate and temperature," lead author Michael Mishchenko of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a statement. "Knowing what aerosols are doing globally gives us an important missing piece of the big picture of the forces at work on climate."
Scientists extracted an aerosol signal from satellite measurements originally designed to observe clouds and weather systems that date back to 1978.
"The resulting data show large, short-lived spikes in global aerosols caused by major volcanic eruptions in 1982 and 1991, but a gradual decline since about 1990," NASA said in a statement. "By 2005, global aerosols had dropped as much as 20 percent from the relatively stable level between 1986 and 1991."
Regarding this winter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the combined land and ocean temperatures for December through February were 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit above a
(shoutwire)
References: shoutwire
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