2010 was second hottest year on record

LONDON/OSLO,19 January 2011(Reuters) : Last year was the world's second hottest behind 1998 in a temperature record dating back to 1850, the director of research at Britain's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Phil Jones said on Wednesday.

Jones' unit, compiling data with the Met Office Hadley Centre, is one of three main groups worldwide tracking global warming. Last week the other two, based in the United States, said 2010 was tied for the hottest on record.

The data showed that all but one year in the past decade were among the 10 hottest on record, underlining a warming trend linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases, Jones told Reuters.

"All the years from 2001 to 2010, except 2008, were in the top ten," he said.

The global fight against climate change suffered a setback in the wake of the financial crisis, slowing finance for renewable energy projects and knocking momentum from efforts to agree a new climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2013.

The new data appeared to bolster evidence for manmade climate change, after leaked e-mails, including from the CRU, showed climate scientists in 2009 sniping at sceptics. Errors made by a U.N. climate panel also exaggerated the pace of melt of glaciers in the Himalayas.

Last year was 0.498 degrees Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) above the 1961-1990 average, the CRU and Hadley data showed, compared with 1998's 0.517 degree. The nearest year to 2010 was 2005, at 0.474 degree warmer than the long-term average.

The US National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) reported similar findings last week. They found that 2010 was tied for the hottest year with 2005.

The three groups use similar observations but in slightly different ways. For example, GISS takes greater account of Arctic weather stations, where warming has been fastest.

All the warmest years are separated by only a few fractions of a degree.