Global Warming Facts

http://www.facebook.com/ScienceReason ... NASA Global Warming Facts: 2009 - Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade

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Global climate change ... NASA's eyes on the Earth: A warming world - global temperature update ... piecing together the temperature puzzle.

Each year, scientists at NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year since global instrumental temperature records began 130 years ago. Worldwide, the mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.03°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. And January 2000 to December 2009 came out as the warmest decade on record.

• http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld

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2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 1998 and 2007 — as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.

"There's always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year's ranking, but usually that misses the point," said James Hansen, the director of GISS. "There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since 1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, though there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.

The near-record temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America. High air pressures in the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while also increasing its tendency to blow from north to south and draw cold air southward from the Arctic. This resulted in an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north.

"Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much,' said Hansen. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880.

"That's the important number to keep in mind," said Gavin Schmidt, another GISS climatologist. "In contrast, the difference between, say, the second and sixth warmest years is trivial since the known uncertainty — or noise — in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years."

Decoding the Temperature Record: Climate scientists agree that rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap incoming heat near the surface of the Earth and are the key factors causing the rise in temperatures since 1880, but these gases are not the only factors that can impact global temperatures.

• http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/new...
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  News & Politics

[bgwaterfilter2]

pls help me promote this song as well as making it recorded for our mother nature :) Thank you!

[tulp35000]

i may be full of shit though cuz 10 years ago the max temps in my area during summer peaks were about 15-25 MAX now it's constantly 20+ and soon to reach 33+ peak, and it's a relatively cold region. Well the good news is, the unbearable temps will only come 20-40 years from now.

[MangosTrippingHaha]

Do it. Please.

[Erika Kügel]

I will stop breathing to reduce 100% CO² emissions!!!!!!!

[puden Tain]

I can get pretty fucking wooly.

Do you consider the “Duh... changed before” attitude to unfucking wooly? Fucking unwooly?

[utubespaamdetector]

''That the climate has changed absent our influence does not mean that our influence cannot change the climate.''

wow how fucking wooly can you get?

[puden Tain]

“So let me see if I got this right...”

no

None of those nonspecific paleoclimate studies you mentioned suggest that global mean temps were higher during the MWP than today. Medieval warming focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the N.Atlantic basin, where some locations were warmer then than today.

That the climate has changed absent our influence does not mean that our influence cannot change the climate.

[ziggan]

So let me see if I got this right...

Planet has been warming a little. Okay, I can buy that, no problem.

"We are seeing the effects..." well yes. It's sligthly warmer. But by far not the warmest we have had in the past 1000 years.

Oh and get this "natural causes .... subtle changes ..." haha what to say... you seem to have missed out on ALL the studies that have shown massive changes in climate prior to human emissions.

[UNQDMBLEG]

Why is this theme so controversial, WHY? Global warming shows us the bad impact and the abuses we have made to mother nature, and aimes us to start taking care of our planet. I cant se something diabolic in there, cant see any terror tactic, or something similar. But why people kill each other saying this is true or false? Global Warming is just real and we have to take care about it, thats all, is that a hard thing, we have to discuss to death every theory?