NOAA: 9 Months in 2012 Capped Hottest Years On Record

Of the 12 hottest 12 month periods recorded in the the US, 9 spanned between 2011 and 2012. That includes all 8 of the top 8 periods. This is according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

These are the warmest 12-month periods on record for the contiguous United States. The December 2011-November 2012 12-month period was the sixth warmest consecutive 12-months that the contiguous U.S. has experienced and the warmest November-October 12-month period on record.

~ NOAA

For more check:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/11/supplemental/page-2/

 

 

It’s also been pretty dry. For yet more, check: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/

Thanks Climate Progress for the heads up!

~ Nuevaspora

Fact Check: Time to End Climate Silence

The Vigil to End Climate Silence kicked off this evening in Boston’s Government Center. People from all walks of life will be calling for an end to the political silence over climate change. This election year, it was put on the back burner while politicians focused on more pressing matters of the economy and foreign policy. This seems reasonable, so long as one ignores three, apparently inconvenient, things:

1) There is general scientific consensus that the climate is changing right now, that it is affecting us right now, and it will be much easier to deal with now than later.

“However, even with an 80 per cent emissions cut, damages will be large: any impact that occurs below a temperature rise of 1 °C (Figs. 1 and 2) is likely to be unavoidable, even under the most stringent mitigative action. Residual damage will be great unless we invest in adaptation now. Much of the damage could be avoided by adaptation, but again, this would require a much larger effort than is currently planned.”

M Parry, J Palutikof, C Hanson, J Lowe

Nature Reports Climate Change 2008

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0806/full/climate.2008.50.html

“ …we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

– J Hansen, M Sato, R Ruedy

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 2012

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1205276109.abstract

“The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has reaffirmed the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society.”

–  American Association For the Advancement of Science 2009

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1204climate_statement.shtml

2) A neat separation between climate change issues and economic issues is vanishing. [Check out the sources above]

3) The partition between climate change issues and foreign policy issues is predicted to crumble.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/19/1047081/hillary-clinton-on-energy-and-foreign-policy-we-need-to-address-the-very-real-threat-of-climate-change/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/climate-change-national-security_b_1929398.html

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=116192

Gus Speth (who’s many hats have included Vermont Law School Professor of Law, Chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, and Keystone XL protester/arrestee) gave a rousing speech, followed by another fantastic one by Craig Altemose of Better Future Project to a small but dedicated crowd of 40 or so people. The vigil was organized by 350MA,  Students for a Just and Stable Future and several other local organizations. The gathering included organizers from Occupy Boston and Veterans for Peace. There are stalwart folks out there as I write this tonight, keeping vigil and stubbornly working to break the silence. They will be there throughout the week and I am sure they would love company.

Link: 350ma.org/vigil 

Tweet: #climatesilence

Fire, Floods & Fury

Apologies for the long delay while we were getting organized. Some of the regular writers will be quite busy the next couple of months so longer posts will be somewhat disparate. Still, we’re redoubling our efforts to put up more frequent short posts throughout the week. There’s just too much going on not to.

Last Friday, as Colorado continued to burn, a derecho swept past the mid Atlantic coast. It followed a day of record breaking heat. It was 104F in Washington D.C.,our nation’s capitol. The temperature high broke 142 years of records. My family lives in the area, and so I first found out first from them. Trees were down everywhere, over a million in the area were left without electricity, and, I was told, for 45 minutes it was as though there was an electrical storm in the sky. They filled me in while I was visiting Toronto, where the heatwave was only hitting the 90’s. Heat feeds storms, it gives them energy. It also feeds fire. It may be hard to say that the changes in climate are causing any specific weather event, because is very hard to say that a given weather event wouldn’t otherwise occur- even it would be incredibly unlikely. Much of that has to do with cautious nature of “science speak” which is far more conservative than todays “news speak”.

The message that is not debated even in academic circles, but often lost, is this: The climate is getting hotter. We are experiencing an increase in the extreme wether events one would expect with a hotter climate. The way we burn energy plays a key role in adding heat to the atmosphere. We have the technology to change that now.

Again, there is sound and copious research to back each of these statements.
(In fact, I’ll link a reputable reference to each word, in another post, when I have a little more time.)

So, is this a fluke, is it a still rare phenomenon foreshadowing what will someday be common, or is this the new normal?

~ Nuevaspora