2006: Beginning of the Big Heat Wave?

We will likely remember 2006 as the year scientists discovered that the earth's climate is heating up faster than expected. Check out this excerpt from an article in The Scotsman:

ITS collapse was so violent that it was picked up by earthquake monitors 150 miles away - a thundering warning to the world that the Arctic was heating up faster than scientists had imagined.
A giant ice shelf, covering 41 square miles, had broken off from the Canadian mainland and floated off into the sea.
Yet for 16 months, experts were unaware that the Ayles ice shelf - just one of six remaining in the Canadian Arctic - had drifted off until a scientist began examining old satellite images.
Yesterday, scientists said the dramatic discovery capped a year of new studies, which have revealed that the world is heating up faster than had been thought.
From the slowing Gulf Stream, to the warmest British summer on record, to unusually warm water in the Caribbean, researchers have mapped our rapidly changing climate.
Scientists were yesterday still coming to terms with the im-portance of the Ayles ice shelf collapse.
"This is a dramatic and disturbing event," said Dr Warwick Vincent, an Arctic ice expert at Laval University in Quebec.