According to data gathered by NASA, 2005 was the warmest year recorded since records started being kept in the late 1800s.
James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies admitted that Arctic temperatures were sometimes estimated by the closest weather station when full data was not available, but added, 'we couldn't say with 100 percent certainty that it's the warmest year, but I'm reasonably confident that it was,' Hansen said.
Unlike 1998, however, there was no El Nino effecting the Pacific which tends to raise temperatures.
While the Bush administration refuses to recognize global warming as a problem, Hansen did blame greenhouse gasses for the one degree rise in worldwide temperatures. Hansen added that 2005 was the warmest the earth has likely been in the past 10,000 years.
Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City told Reuters, 'The rate of warming has been so rapid that this temperature that we only got when we had a real strong El Nino now has become something that we've gotten without any unusual worldwide weather disturbance.'
Shindell predicted that worldwide temperatures would rise by between six and 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century.
'That will really bring us up to the warmest temperatures the world has experienced probably in the last million years,' he said.
