Britain may have been hit by a cold snap last week but the world has just had its hottest year yet, according to Nasa.
The global high is partly due to some of the fastest warming on record in the Arctic, adding to fears that the northern ice cap may vanish entirely in summer by the middle of the century. Since the 1970s summer ice coverage has shrunk by 2.4m square km, an area the size of Greenland.
The findings, from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), found that the period from October 2009 to September 2010 was warmer than any other 12 months since records began.
Britain’s Met Office had a different way of analysing the same data from 5,000 points on Earth,…