Historic Global Temperature
The elephant has grown so enormous that it is pressing against all four walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the living room.
All summer we have blasted through high temperature records, drought and fire in the Midwest, and heat waves on the East Coast followed by storms so destructive that they tear up the ozone layer. It’s been predicted for decades: rising temperatures, more rainfall on the coasts, less rainfall inland. Now it’s here and getting worse.
Dr. James Hansen, NASA climate scientist, has compared seasonal temperatures over the past three decades with those from the three decades before that. There was not much change in the temperature from the 1950s through 1970s. But in the 1980s, temperature started to creep up. And it increased more and more in the next two decades. Very high temperatures called “hot anomalies” occurred over just 0.1% to 0.2% of the globe from 1951 to 1981, but over the past several years, they
occurred over 10% of the globe. Dr. Hansen concluded that “the area covered by extreme hot anomalies will continue to increase in coming decades and that even more extreme outliers will occur.” Read the rest of this entry »
(27 January 2012 ) The threat of human-made climate change and the urgency of reducing fossil fuel emissions have become increasingly clear to the scientific community during the past few years. Yet, at the same time, the public seems to have become less certain about the situation. Indeed, many people have begun to wonder whether the climate threat has been concocted or exaggerated. (
