On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report which Kathryn Sullivan, chief of the agency, names as “checking on the pulse of the planet.”
Written by 384 scientists around the world, the report is an analysis of available data which they consolidated to give them a perspective of what’s happening to Earth.
Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center said to ABC News, "It's critically important to compile a big picture. The signs that we see are of a warming world."
Rising sea levels, melting snows, heat building up in the oceans, and melting Arctic sea and Greenland ice sheets, almost broke records, but change in temperatures only slink into the top 10. These were all described as significant changes in key climate indicators.
Deke Arndt, co-author and climate monitoring chief at the data center, pointed out that the most affected by the climate changes which obviously shows its effects is the Arctic region.
“All the indicators show a climate that is changing over the decades. Individually, however, the story isn't as simple,” says Karl to ABC News.
Karl accounts that surface temperatures haven't escalated in the last decade, but he remarks that is only a blip in time due to natural inconsistency. But when peeking at scientifically significant time frames, like 30 to 100 years, temperatures are rising a bit quick.
According to NOAA records, the warmest years since 1880 were during the last 15 years. 2012 ranked between the 8th and 9th and 2012 was warmer than every year in the last 100 years and 2010 ranked the warmest year, except for 1998 when El Nino raised the temperatures worldwide.
In general, Arndt believes that the climate indicators "are all singing the same song that we live in a warming world. Some indicators take a few years off from their increase. The system is telling us in more than one place we're seeing rapid change."
The study will be printed in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
