NOAA: Man-Made Global Warming Is Unmistakable
This week the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration released a new report on global warming. The report notes that the decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record and 2010 is on track to be the warmest year ever.
The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.
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The report emphasizes that human society has developed for thousands of years under one climatic state, and now a new set of climatic conditions are taking shape. These conditions are consistently warmer, and some areas are likely to see more extreme events like severe drought, torrential rain and violent storms.
“Despite the variability caused by short-term changes, the analysis conducted for this report illustrates why we are so confident the world is warming,” said Peter Stott, Ph.D., contributor to the report and head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution of the United Kingdom Met Office Hadley Centre. “When we look at air temperature and other indicators of climate, we see highs and lows in the data from year to year because of natural variability. Understanding climate change requires looking at the longer-term record. When we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”
While year-to-year changes in temperature often reflect natural climatic variations such as El Niño/La Niña events, changes in average temperature from decade-to-decade reveal long-term trends such as global warming. Each of the last three decades has been much warmer than the decade before. At the time, the 1980s was the hottest decade on record. In the 1990s, every year was warmer than the average of the previous decade. The 2000s were warmer still.
Just remember…the difference between an ice age and now is about 2 degrees Farenheidt. But really, 300 scientists don’t know anything. We should really listen to this guy at Free Republic. Global warming is a scam!
Glaciation has prevailed for 90% of the last several million years. Extreme cold. Biting cold. Cold too intense for bikinis and swimming trunks. No matter what scary scenarios global-warming enthusiasts dream up, they pale in comparison with the conditions another ice age would deliver. Look to our past climate. Fifteen thousand years ago, an ice sheet a kilometer and a half thick covered all of North America north of a line stretching from somewhere around Seattle to Cleveland and New York City.
Instead of reducing CO2, we should, perhaps, be increasing it. We should pay the smokestack industries hard dollars for every kilogram of soot they pump into the atmosphere. Instead of urging Chinese to stop using coal and turn instead to nuclear-generated electricity, we should beg them to continue using coal. Rather than bringing us to the edge of global-warming catastrophe, anthropogenic climate change may have spared us descent into what would be the most serious and far-reaching challenge facing humankind in the 21st century – dealing with a rapidly deteriorating climate that wants to plunge us into an ice age. Let’s hope Antarctica and Greenland melt. Let’s hope the sea levels rise. All life glorifies warmth. Only death prefers the icy fingers of endless winter.
He knows what he’s talking about. He’s a software developer teaching English to Chinese students.
Tags: AGW, Environment, Global Warming
But… but… it snowed this winter.
This and the sobering link Steaksauce put in hisher comment yesterday.
Exactly why I prefer to get the opinion from the experts in the field (the links you and steaksauce provided are examples) and not the pundits worried about scoring points (the Free Republic link you provided and the deniers).
Exactly Smitty. I think skepticism is good and healthy. People should exercise more of it. But it can be taken to ridiculous extremes. I mean, you wouldn’t even think of performing your own heart surgery would you? Would you design a skyscraper? Simply put, some people don’t want to believe in AGW, so they just won’t believe it. The funny thing about the Free Republic article is his review of previous climate periods is mostly right, he just completely falls down when he tries to analyze recent data.
About that ocean report. It is super scary. The changes in the ocean are really understudied and not well understood. There’s multiple stresses right now – pollution, warming and overfishing.
I found this video that sums it up for all the deniers out there, provided they’re even remotely open to logic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ&feature=channel
Tell you what, as the theory begins to turn to reality (as it is doing), there is major money waiting to be made by some progressive and aggressive entrepreneur or corporation that is willing to put in place a mechanism that will consume or convert existing pollution into something with little or no impact. Things exist now (how effective they are isn’t known to me), but mainstream capitalism sees it all as too extreme and burdonsome (to profit) to adopt. This is what cracks me up (sarcastically), there will be major rewards to whomever can deal with this, but we collectively have our heads so far up our asses with status quo, no one makes that next, but needed step.
About that ocean report. It is super scary. …
Did you ever catch my post where I linked to two pro-mets that covered one day of ocean temps in July? They showed temps for July 13, but it’s been a trend this year. July 13th just happened to be the day they posted, other than that, it really is one of many this year.
We’re on the proverbial Titanic. We have hit the iceberg. The captain is still running the engines at full speed. The aristocracy is still dancing in the ballrooms. The crew is just starting to understand what has happened.
We have no lifeboats.
I had thought that the rest of the world still had enough rationality left to gang up on us and make us stop doing the incredibly stupid, wasteful and harmful things we do.
They don’t. Tough luck I guess.
Smitty in your thread you have a global cooling guy! No, 1998 is not the hottest year ever. Isn’t it 2008 now? 2010 might end up with the record.
Yes, pandora, the weather = climate people are pretty quiet during this incredibly hot spring and summer.
There’s a pretty solid historical record linking climate to sunspot activity, which was in an 11-year lull until this year. Once you equalize for that, the climate change has been marching right along over the past decade.
Here’s a link: http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
Yes, we’re just coming out of a solar minimum period. So much for that talking point! (Not that it will stop them)
UI – there actually is some (let’s emphasize “some”) validity to the solar activity correlation…only some. I bring that up, because it shouldn’t be completely discounted. In of itself, it is completely valid. In the grand scheme of things, it’s simply a piece in a huge puzzle. That said, to use it as a tool to dismiss all other science in this arena is opportunistically foolish.
Smitty in your thread you have a global cooling guy!
Yeah, I know, but coming out of the solar minimum (as I just noted) is a part of the overall picture, so heshe had some validity. Unfortunately, shouldn’t have stopped there.
Geezer is right, too…which I think we’ve pretty much already agreed with via our responses. Looking at a lot of the charting that goes with solar cycles, you will see sharper increases with solar max and some relief with solar mins. What people need to do is divorce themselves from looking only at the headlines and dig deeper (as I said in my above-linked post). When you get past the obvious, you will see what Geezer noted, that this max-min has really done nothing to mitigate the steady march that is beneath it.
Oh, and on another aspect of going from solar min to solar max, get ready for wailing and gnashing of teeth over the next handful of years as we may very well have to adjust to extended blackouts or brownouts, internet distuptions, cell disruptions, and oh so much more. Curse you, technology!!! Where’s my cave?
I didn’t say solar cycles were invalid but they’re pointing in the wrong direction to explain warming.
Studying the science of natural environments is incredibly difficult because of their complexity. All these variables are related to each other and can’t be studied separately. However, global warming is occurring as predicted by model, and even worse in some cases.
If we don’t have global warming, we will need to invent it to prevent the next ice age. Global warming is good. It gives better crop yields and is helpful to most plants and therefore life on earth. It would be nice if we could claim credit for something good in the ecology. Usually we are messing something up.
David,WTF?