Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Timing of Seasons Is Changing

Image from Businessweek

From Live Science:

The Earth's seasons have shifted back in the calendar year, with the hottest and coldest days of the years now occurring almost two days earlier, a new study finds.

This shift could be the work of global warming, the researchers say.

To figure this out, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard studied temperature data from 1850 to 2007 compiled by the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom.

They found that temperatures over land in the 100-year period between 1850 and 1950 showed a simple, natural pattern of variability, with the hottest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere landing around July 21. But from the mid-1950s onward (the period when global average temperatures began to rise), the hottest day came 1.7 days earlier.

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