Is it hot in here?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) is reporting that temperature data collected from over 1,200 monitoring stations in the lower 48 states shows that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Record keeping began in 1895.

The news encouraged media reports that the climate apocalypse was upon us. "If global temperatures continue to rise as projected, melting icecaps could raise the sea level worldwide by up to 3 feet by 2100, swamping coastal communities that are home to millions of people, according to estimates from the United Nations," the LA Times warned. For its part, the New York Times used the NOAA report as the occasion to complain that federal agencies have been downplaying the threat of human-induced global warming. According to the Times, federal officials "had become accustomed in recent years to having any mention of a link between climate trends and human activities played down or trimmed when drafts of documents went to the Commerce Department and the White House for approval."

The NOAA report was indeed a good deal more sober than either the LA Times or the New York Times. Citing a "long-term warming trend, which has been linked to increases in greenhouse gases," NOAA also noted, "The unusually warm start to this winter reflected the rarity of Arctic outbreaks across the country as an El Nino episode continued in the equatorial Pacific."

Though it is tempting (too tempting for some) to point to this year's weather as exceptional, meteorologist Jeff Masters, founder of the weather geek site Weatherunderground.com, points out in his blog that there is precedent for this year's weather. "An El Nino can lead to significantly warmer winters in the U.S.--exceptional December warmth has also occurred in 1877, 1939, and 1957, all of which were moderate or strong El Nino years," Masters, who is not a global-warming skeptic, explains. "I've plotted up a comparison of temperatures in December of 1957 vs 2006 ... and one can see that the unusual warmth of December 2006 does have historical precedent. Taking a look at average U.S. December temperatures for all years in the historical record ... we see that these temperatures do show quite a bit of noise, and there is no evidence of dramatic warming in the past 30 years."