Global Surface Temperature Change

New draft paper by James Hansen co-authored with colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has just been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, it tackles head on the unique pressures facing climate science at the moment, namely, calls from a doubting public and media for climatologists to be more transparent about how they arrive at their conclusions.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0601.pdf
'Communication of the status of global warming to the public has always been hampered by weather variability. Lay people's perception tends to be strongly influenced by the latest local fluctuation. This difficulty can be alleviated by stressing the need to focus on the frequency and magnitude of warm and cold anomalies, which change noticeably on decadal time scales as global warming increases.
A greater obstacle to public communication has arisen with the politicization of reporting of global warming, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the economic and social implications of efforts required to alter the course of human-made climate change. We have the impression that the effect of politicization on communication of the science is aggravated by the fact that much of the media is owned by or strongly influenced by special economic interests.'
and
'The 12-month running mean global temperature in the GISS analysis has reached a new record in 2010. The new record temperature in 2010 is particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect. At the time of this writing (May 2010) the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed from El Nino conditions to ENSO-neutral and is likely headed into the cool La Nina phase of the Southern Oscillation. The 12-month running mean global temperature may continue to rise for a few more months before the ENSO change causes the next decline. It is likely that global temperature for calendar year 2010 will exceed the 2005 record, but that is not certain if a deep La Nina develops quickly.'