In the history of record keeping, so far 2012 is the hottest year in U.S. history. Spring was 5.2° warmer than the 20th century average, and fully 2° warmer than the prior record, in 1910. (That’s a huge difference. We’re not talking about tenths of a degree here.) Even more alarming is the resulting increase in atmospheric CO2 levels. At the Barrow, Alaska NOAA station, the concentration hit 400 ppm. Compare that to 278 ppm a few hundred years ago, or 336 ppm thirty years ago. That’s a 20% increase over my lifetime. Given that the atmosphere is just 0.03% CO2, and how powerful its effect is on global climate change, a 20% increase is a very big deal. It is not a coincidence that our hottest year coincides with our highest non-urban CO2 measurement. →
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Does this mean that Algore and his groupies will go back to talking about Global
Warming? Because when the data stopped going their way, and temps were going down, the chatter shifted to Climate Change (since talking about global warming made them sound more than a little silly.)
But now that we’ve had a warm 6 months — 6 whole months –I suppose Global Warming will be back in vogue. (Even though this news is only about the U.S., and ignores the brutally cold winter that Europe had. Dang, how those little details can muck up a good crisis, eh?)
We’ve talked about this enough here that there’s clearly no need to go into much detail, but for the benefit of others, climate is complicated. If you fill a bathtub with 32°F water and dump in a bucket of 212° water, the entire bathtub doesn’t gradually, evenly warm up. Instead, the warm water behaves in entirely unpredictable ways, creating very hot areas while concentrating the cold water to create cold areas. Eventually, it will all distribute basically evenly (though warm water will rise and cold will fall), but that takes a while. Our climate is like that, but way more complicated.
The name changed to match reality: that a lot of weird shit is going down between now and when the planet is 3, 5, or 10°C warmer.
Pub, Your arguments are so tired and worn out they aren’t even worth refuting anymore.
Do you ever consider finding things out for yourself? Or do you stick to the piece of paper handed to you by your Republican overlords?
I’ll just say one thing: The volatility of the weather is part of climate change, and the simplistic untrue canard that since it’s hot or that it snowed means different, is ludicrous.
I’ll let someone else argue about climate change. But I will say that we always counted on the wineberries start being ready by July 1. This July 1, they are near their end, probably 10 days ahead of my recollections of most of the past years since 1978 when I first started eating them.