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The La Nina pattern, which generally cools the ocean globally, happens every few years and was in play for much of 2011 and the early part of 2012. Yet both years were the hottest La Nina years on record and that shows the underlying global warming at work, said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The last time the world had a cooler than average year was 1976, according to NOAA. That means more than half the people on Earth haven't lived during a cooler than normal year for the globe. Three groups keep track of global surface temperatures with records that go back more than a century: NOAA, NASA and the British meteorology office. The British records for 2012 aren't finished yet, but are hovering around ninth warmest on record, said monitoring chief David Parker. NASA and NOAA calculations differ mostly in the polar areas, where there are far less measurements. AÂ fourth group out of the University of Alabama at Huntsville looks at temperatures measured by satellites and only goes back to 1979, but is preferred by climate skeptics. That measurement ranked 2012 as the ninth warmest on record and notes that 11 of the 12 hottest years in their dataset have occurred since 2001. ___ Online: NOAA: NASA:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/13
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features
2012-temps.html
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