Reporting the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) announcement that 2006 was the “warmest year on record for” the United States, during the January 9 broadcast of KDVR Fox 31's News at Nine O'Clock, co-anchor Ron Zappolo explained that “NOAA says El Niño and a general warming trend is the cause for the warmer conditions.” Zappolo, however, neglected to note -- as many other media outlets have -- that NOAA reversed its previous policy of downplaying the effect of human activities on global climate change and reported that greenhouse gases have contributed to the recent warming trend.

From the January 9 broadcast of KDVR Fox 31's News at Nine O'Clock:

ZAPPOLO: Well, it's hard to tell around here lately, but 2006 was the warmest year on record for the United States. This according to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The average temperature for the year was 55 degrees. This is 2.2 degrees higher than the average for the 20th century, and .7 degrees higher than the previous record high in 1998. NOAA says El Niño and a general warming trend is the cause for the warmer conditions.

A summary of the NOAA report on its website states, “The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record and nearly identical to the record set in 1998, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C." The report also stated that "[t]he past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak which is unprecedented in the historical record." Moreover, according to NOAA's summary, “A contributing factor to the unusually warm temperatures throughout 2006 also is the long-term warming trend, which has been linked to increases in greenhouse gases” -- a fact that Zappolo failed to mention in his report.

In contrast to Zappolo's omission, the Rocky Mountain News reported in a January 10 article by reporter Jim Erickson that "[l]ast year was the warmest on record in the U.S., and the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases was partly to blame, federal climate officials said Tuesday." The News further noted, “The buildup of heat-trapping gases from tailpipes and smokestacks contributed to the 2006 warming, according to NOAA.”

That the agency has acknowledged a tie between climate change and greenhouse gases is notable because, as the News article reported, NOAA was “recently criticized for allegedly trying to prevent its researchers from freely discussing global climate change”:

“It's refreshing to see them actually be able to say that. I applaud it,” Boulder climate researcher Kevin Trenberth said of the NOAA greenhouse-gas acknowledgement, included in a Tuesday news release.

“I think it's an encouraging sign,” said Trenberth, who works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Last January, NOAA issued a news release announcing that 2005 had tied 1998 as the planet's warmest year on record. It made no mention of greenhouse warming.

Similarly, a January 10 New York Times article about the NOAA report stated, "[T]he climate agency's shift in language came as a surprise to several public affairs officials there" because “they had become accustomed in recent years to having any mention of a link between climate trends and human activities played down or trimmed when drafts of documents went to the Commerce Department and the White House for approval.” The Times also reported that “public affairs officials and scientists as recently as last year complained that findings pointing to climate dangers were being suppressed ... ”:

“There's been some sensitivity to the fact that some people have complained that NOAA and other parts of the government haven't been as open as they would like them to have been on this,” said Jay Lawrimore, a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., where the temperature trends are compiled. “Now NOAA is making an effort to be clearer on some of the influences.”

Mr. Lawrimore said there was no way to account for the trends, be they the melting of Arctic sea ice or the warming of winters, without including an influence from heat-trapping gases.

“Year after year as we continue to see warmer temperatures,” he said, “there are more and more converts convinced that it's not just natural variability and not just something that's going to return back to temperatures we saw 40 or 50 years ago -- that in fact we are doing something to the climate.”