Revised Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies by Dr. James Hansen, With New Graphs and Photos
The Earth has been in a period of rapid global warming for the past three decades. The assertion that the planet has entered a period of cooling in the past decade is without foundation. On the contrary, we find no significant deviation from the warming trend of the past three decades. Weather fluctuations exceed the magnitude of average global warming over the past half century. However, the perceptive person should be able to notice that climate is warming on decadal time scales. The global temperature trend over the past few decades has been strong enough that there is a noticeable “loading” of the climate dice that define the probability of unusually warm or cool seasons.
Where in the World is the Worst Place for Cold Weather?
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world.
Global Climatic Disruption Becoming More Evident
It’s easy for people in Russia, England and on the eastern coast of the US, with the severe winter conditions they’re experiencing, to forget that on other parts of our Planet are feeling the heat of dangerous climate change. What we should remember is that what we’re witnessing is not so much “Global Warming,” or even “Climate Change,” but “Global Climatic Disruption,” the term coined by President Obama’s chief science advisor John Holdren.
Ocean Surface Warming Breaks Record This July – Update
July was the hottest the world’s oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.
Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.
More Evidence of Dangerous Climate Change: Ocean Surface Warming Breaks Record This July
The planet’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for July, breaking the previous high mark established in 1998 according to an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 ranked fifth-warmest since world-wide records began in 1880.
Alert: The Rest of This Year Could Be Much Hotter
NCDC: “Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the second warmest on record for June, and the January-June year-to-date tied with 2004 as the fifth warmest on record.” The ocean temperature was the warmest on record. In fact, it was a full 0.11°F warmer than the 2005 record. This is almost certainly the new El Niño on top of the long-term warming trend, and that means record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record.
Satellite Shows Big Thinning of Winter Arctic Sea Ice, in Just Four Years
The volume of older crucial sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by 57 percent from late 2004 to 2008. That is losing more volume of ice than water in Lake Michigan. Thin seasonal ice has replaced thick older ice as the dominant type for the first time on record.
Shocking Australian Government Report on Dangerous Climate Change
“Climate Change 2009″
Faster Change and More Serious Risks
By Will Steffen
Click here to download the full report
Executive summary: State of the Science 2009
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) is an outstanding source of information on our current scientific understanding of the climate system and how it is responding to the changes in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases [...]
Johann Hari: A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world
In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.
Rapid, Sustained and Effective Mitigation Needed to Avoid “Dangerous Climate Change”
With unabated greenhouse gas emissions, the world faces a growing risk of ”abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts”. This is one of the conclusions in a scientific synthesis report released Thursday, June 18. Weak targets for CO2 reduction 2020 increase the risk of serious impacts, such as tipping points, and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult and costly.
