I gave a lesson, Temperature 101, about a year ago. It garnered a lot of comments – for this blog anyway. It is truly astonishing, I thought then, how obtuse the Denialists are, and how marvelously blithely indifferent they are to the sources of their Flat Earth thinking: the paid shills of the fossil fuel interests. I have since read a fabulous book, Merchants of Doubt, which lays out how various special interests and scientists with reactionary views have, over the course of the second half of the 20th Century and well into this one, worked very hard to undermine the hard-won, well-established science relative to pesticides, smoking and environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), stratospheric ozone depletion, the Star Wars program, acid rain, and, of course, global climate change. (I need to review this superb book here, and so I will at some not-too-distant date.)
In any event, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that hotbed of radical, left-wing, anti-American science, has issued its preliminary report on the past year. Conclusion? 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. For the lower 48 states of the US, the past year was the 14th consecutive year with an annual temperature above the long-term average. Since 1895, the temperature across the nation has increased at an average rate of approximately 0.12° F per decade.
This tracks with what the UK’s Met Office noted last month and NOAA’s 2009 State of the Climate Report. (For a cornucopia of useful information on climate science, beautifully illustrated and explained, go to NOAA’s Climate Services website.)
So why, you may wonder, is it so cold and snowy this winter in parts of North America and Europe? The Denialists are going to hate this: According to Climate Central here, “Recent scientific studies have shown that the dramatic warming that has been occurring in the Arctic during the past few decades, along with the associated loss of sea ice cover, may be changing atmospheric circulation patterns throughout the northern hemisphere.” It’s being called the Arctic Paradox.
