School of Advanced Nutritional and Medical Research

By The Associated Press
February 15, 2007

It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever for the planet.

The record was fueled by a waning El Niño and a gradually warming world, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which reported the data Thursday. Records have been kept since 1880.

The United States was about normal for January. The nation was 0.94 degrees above normal, ranking only the 49th warmest January since 1895. Last year was the warmest for the USA.

Spurred on by unusually warm Siberia, Canada, northern Asia and Europe, the world's land areas were 3.4 degrees warmer than a normal January, according to the data center. That didn't just nudge past the old record set in 2002, but broke that mark by 0.81 degrees, which meteorologists said is a lot, since records often are broken by hundredths of a degree.

"That's pretty unusual for a record to be broken by that much," said the data center's scientific services chief, David Easterling. "I was very surprised."

The Earth's average temperature in 2006 was the fifth highest, according to scientists from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Only 2005, 1998, 2002 and 2003 were warmer.

"From one standpoint it is not unusual to have a record because we've become accustomed to having records broken," said Jay Lawrimore, climate monitoring branch chief. But January, he said, was a bigger jump than the world has seen in about 10 years.

The temperature of the world's land and water combined — the most effective measurement — was 1.53 degrees warmer than normal, breaking the old record by more than one-quarter of a degree. Ocean temperatures alone didn't set a record.

In the Northern Hemisphere, land areas were 4.1 degrees warmer than normal for January, breaking the old record by about three-quarters of a degree.

Meteorologists aren't blaming the warmer January on global warming alone, but they said the higher temperature was consistent with climate change.