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Report: 2000-10 hottest decade on record


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By K. Kaufmann, Desert Sun

It’s now official. The decade of 2001-2010 was the warmest on record, causing almost a 2,300 percent spike worldwide in heat-related deaths.

That shocking figure is one of many contained in the report, “The Global Climate 2001-2010, A Decade of Climate Extremes,” released last week in Geneva by the World Meteorological Organization. An agency of the United Nations, the WMO has members from 191 countries and territories worldwide and is dedicated to creating networks for collecting and sharing weather and climate data and expertise.

The report is 20 pages of meteorological figures and charts, some rather technical, but what it all boils down to, in the report’s opening sentence, is that:

“The first decade of the 21st century was the warmest decade recorded since modern measurements began around 1850. It saw above-average precipitation, including one year — 2010 — that broke all previous records.

“Many of these events and trends can be explained by the natural variability of the climate system. Rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, however, are also affecting the climate. Detecting the respective roles being played by climate variability and human-induced climate change is one of the key challenges facing researchers today.”

What all this means, according to the WMO summary of the report:

“Every year of the decade except 2008 was among the 10 warmest years on record. … Results from WMO’s survey showed that nearly 94 percent of reporting countries had their warmest decade in 2001-2010 and no country reported a nationwide average decadal temperature anomaly cooler than the long-term average.”

The long-term analysis is important, the report notes, because distinguishing between individual extreme weather events and climate change requires long-term data, precisely because extreme weather events do not occur frequently. A decade is the minimum time frame for detecting temperature changes, the report says.

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Comments (14)
  1. Marlene in Tahoe says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Ahhhh- More illustrious junk science brought to us by the UN, sponsors of Agenda 21 and the one world Gov. crowd. Another attempt at promoting their geo/political scam!!!

  2. whattheheck says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Trust me, I’m from the United Nations.

  3. BijouBill says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Trust me, I’m so smart I completely ignore 98% of the world’s climate scientists. I think that hate radio azzclown geniuses like Rush and Glenn Beck are much more reliable sources for information…. that’s pretty sad.

  4. BijouBill says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Dogula, I’ve read much of the non-science opinions of the lunatic fringe 2% such as that article in the “American Thinker”(oxymoron). Many of these shills with their fancy bogus graphs and pseudo-intellectual nonsense are exactly the same people and organizations that supported the tobacco industry fatcats in their denial of the hazards of smoking.
    The World Meteorological Organization has real scientists from every corner of the globe who represent the true facts of our climate situation and are just part of the overwhelming voice of reality. You have once again been easily duped.

  5. Lisa says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    It is easy to be right and justify your (erroneous) beliefs. All you have do do is simply declare any science that disagrees with you as bogus and lie. Voila! Problem solved. But to quote John Adams, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

  6. tahoedad says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Dogula, Whattheheck – are you serious? Marlene, tongue in cheek? The data cited in this story was gathered by the World Meteorological Organization, which as “members from 191 countries and territories worldwide and is dedicated to creating networks for collecting and sharing weather and climate data and expertise.”

    Are you really saving that you don’t “believe” the temperature data collected by experts from virtually every country on earth? What evidence do you have that the Earth isn’t flat?

    Wake up. Climate change is happening whether you believe in it or not, we’re causing it, and we have a responsibility to our children and grandchildren to be part of the solution.

    If the 98% of climate scientists who concur on these facts are wrong, and we act anyway, I suppose we will have created a cleaner, healthier planet for “nothing.” Heck, we will at least have saved some fossil fuels for future generations to burn. If they are right, and we don’t act, it will be ugly. What’s the logical, cautious, dare I say conservative course to take?

  7. cosa pescado says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Notice how the deniers never get involved in the science. They either have zero understanding of it, or know that the science never supports their position.

  8. cosa pescado says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    I’ve tried using that site before Ice Gal. They won’t read it.
    A lot of them deny geology and biology, subsequently denying most of physics.
    It’s an uphill battle. Just ridicule them, they choose to remain ignorant.

  9. Dogula says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Climate change is caused by humans?? Really? What about all the climactic changes over the course of the earth’s existence? You’re not going to tell us that it’s always been like this. That wouldn’t be scientifically accurate.

  10. Rick says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    Dogula:

    I suggest you read some popular literature written for the lay reader as I suspect you would be unable to follow the 10,000 of thousand peer-reviewed scientific articles published each year on climate science; and particularly stay away from literature pushed by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch Brothers.

    Milankovitch Cycles were identified in the early 1900’s (by the Serbian geophysicist Milankovitch) that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth’s orbit determined climatic patterns on Earth through orbital forcing. These have been well established. According to these cycles, we should be in a continued cooling phase, but since the industrial revolution the opposite is true. The infusion of green house gases created by humans have clearly been identified as the primarily culprit. So yes, climate change has a very strong anthropogenic connection and no matter how much money the Koch Brothers pump into fancy brochures, the scientific evidence every day stacks up against them.

    Enjoy, Rick

  11. cosa pescado says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    You just took what I/we said completely out of context. Attacking an imaginary person in your head.
    Which is what you always do.

    I suggest you read that link posted above.
    One of the first things it will address is what you just said. The ‘but the climate has always been changing’ excuse. It isn’t that simple, and attempting to simplify it like that is lazy.

    You don’t think scientists already considered that?
    Are you familiar with hypothesis testing and statistics? We know the natural variation, and can therefore know about the unexplained variation. The magic of statistics. It involves math, you probably aren’t interested.

    What do you care anyway, the earth is 10,000 years old right according to your reality?
    So those ice cores that go back 100s of thousands of years are something you can’t even acknowledge exist.

  12. nature bats last says - Posted: July 10, 2013

    no matter how much good and sound science is out there ignorant fools like Dogface will always find some way to blame the whole thing on Obama or the liberals. Ignorance is hard to reason with so its just easier to ignore fools like them. Now if it were being spewed by fox noise or rush then dogface would be a believer…