2008 was the tenth warmest year on a record and CRU emails

In report, on behalf of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the global mean temperature for 2008 is 14.3 °C, making it the tenth warmest year on a record that dates back to 1850.

The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 °C warmer than the average for the decade 1990–1999.

Dr Peter Stott of the Met Office says our actions are making the difference: "Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years. Comparing observations with the expected response to man-made and natural drivers of climate change it is shown that global temperature is now over 0.7 °C warmer than if humans were not altering the climate."

Calculating the changing risk attributable to human influence is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of Oxford. Commenting on the dramatically increased odds of such warm years because of human induced climate change, Dr Myles Allen from Oxford University said: "Globally this year would have been considered warm, even as recently as the 1970s or 1980s, but a scorcher for our Victorian ancestors."

Beneath the underlying warming, temperature continues to fluctuate from year to year as a result of natural variations. Stott added: "As a result of climate change, what would once have been an exceptionally unusual year has now become quite normal. Without human influence on climate change we would be more than 50 times less likely of seeing a year as warm as 2008."

Sceptics have been quick to use the emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia to claim that Climate Change is all one big conspiracy. The data from any number of other organisations however continue to show worrying climate change.

Some other cimate research organisations are the Met Office Hadley Centre, Climate Dynamics at Oxford University, (NCAS) National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) , Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling (University of Reading), Natural Environment Research Council, AMDI Atmospheric Modelling and Data Interpretation Group , Rutherford Appleton Lab, British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC), Atmospheric Chemistry Modelling Support Unit at Cambridge UK (ACMSU) , Atmospheric Dynamics Group Cambridge and thats just a few of the British ones.

More on the CRU emails at Ruperts Read, Monbiot, Realclimate who say that "Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."

"There is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking."

"It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?"