Boiling Point
It's Getting Hot in Herre

We haven't even reached the official calendar end of the year, but the BBC is reporting that 2005 will be the hottest year on record so far:

This year has been the warmest on record in the northern hemisphere, say scientists in Britain.

It is the second warmest globally since the 1860s, when reliable records began, they say.

Ocean temperatures recorded in the northern hemisphere Atlantic Ocean have also been the hottest on record.

The researchers, from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia, say this is more evidence for the reality of human-induced global warming.

Their data show that the average temperature during 2005 in the northern hemisphere is 0.65 Celsius above the average for 1961-1990, a conventional baseline against which scientists compare temperatures.
[...]
No measurements of average temperature can be completely accurate, and David Viner believes the team's calculations are subject to an error of about plus or minus 0.1 Celsius.

However, he says, the long-term trend is clearly upwards - rapidly over the last decade - indicating the reality of human-induced global warming.

"We're right, the sceptics are wrong," he told the BBC News website.

"It's simple physics; more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, emissions growing on a global basis, and consequently increasing temperatures."

However, Fred Singer from the Science & Environmental Policy Project in Washington DC, a centre of the "climate sceptics" community, disputed this interpretation.

"If indeed 2005 is the warmest northern hemisphere year since 1860, all this proves is that 2005 is the warmest northern hemisphere year since 1860," he told the BBC News website.

"It doesn't prove anything else, and certainly cannot be used by itself to prove that the cause of warming is the emission of greenhouse gases.