In all honesty, climate models are too badly flawed to form the primary basis of long-term prediction.  Data collection, on the other hand, presents a more logical sound option.  And the data seems to be suggesting that the world is indeed warming.

NASA's annual study of global surface temperatures for 2009 wrapped up and the results have been released and appear very interesting.  Temperatures rebounded greatly in 2009 from a brief cooling in 2008. Globally, the year was the hottest on NASA's record -- which spans back to 1880.  And in the Southern Hemisphere that appears to be experiencing stronger warming, the year was the hottest on record.

With the strong La Nina, which cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean in 2008 fading, things heated back up in 2009.  According to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which compiled the data taken from scores ground and sea temperature stations worldwide, 2009 was in a tie with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 for second hottest year on record.  It failed to break the record heat set in 2005, though.

James Hansen, the GISS director who in the past was heavily criticized when his data was exposed to be skewed by a Y2K bug, commented, "There's always interest in the annual temperature numbers and a given year's ranking, but the ranking often misses the point. There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle. When we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated."

Indeed, graphs of global temperatures show clear warming trends between 1880 and 1940 and 1970 to the present, with a somewhat leveled off period between 1940 and 1970.  The last decade, the hottest on record is part of a three-decade rise in temperatures, which saw global surface temperatures jump 0.36 degrees F (0.2 degrees C) per decade.  Since 1880 temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees F (0.8 degrees C).

Explains GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt, "That's the important number to keep in mind. "The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years."

The increases come despite a very cool December in North America, which perhaps spared 2009 from the dubious distinction of being the hottest year on record.  In December, high air pressures from the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream and increased north to south flow, causing cool air to flood down across North America.

Unlike the Britain's Climate Research Unit, subject to the recent scandal, NASA's Goddard Center uses publicly available data, so scientists and armchair observers alike can analyze the reports and comb them for any possible errors.  The data used comes from over a thousand meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.

While this latest data is unlikely to change the minds of biased parties on either side of the debate much, for legitimate researchers and observers, the new report offers significant insight when combined with the rest of the data from the past decade.

While the Earth's temperature has been much higher in the ancient past, the Earth also would have been far less hospitable to the human population had they existed at the time (for example in the Permian period, 300 million years ago).  Thus it is critical to determine whether man is playing a role in warming, and what steps if any mankind can take to keep temperatures within a hospitable range.  That is a topic that demands legitimate, unbiased research.