For climate science, the year 2009 brought significant discoveries and startling controversies.
Warming goes global
The year started out with some sobering, if not altogether surprising, news: overall, the Antarctic continent is warming. Although some of the Antarctic Peninsula had previously shown rapid warming, parts of the continent - especially near the South Pole - seemed to be unaccountably cooling.
In January, climatologist Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues reported (Nature 457, 459 - 462; 2009) that warming was widespread across the continent. Using satellite measurements combined with historical weather station data to interpolate Antarctic temperatures over the last 50 years, they found that the average temperature in West Antarctica had increased 0.1 °C per year. The previous apparent cooling resulted from the fact that prior to the use of satellites, data existed for only a relatively small number of weather stations.
Their findings were backed up by a study published in October. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters (36, L20704; 2009) Liz Thomas and colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey reported that an ice core taken in the southwestern Antarctic Peninsula showed warming of 2.7 °C over the last 50 years.
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Comment: This is a press release about the study, "Constraints on future sea level rise from paleo reconstructions" as published in the journal Nature Geoscience, which has been retracted in February 2010. See "Climate Scientists Withdraw Journal Claims of Rising Sea Levels" for further detail.