2012 one of 10 warmest on record
By Neela Banerjee, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Last year was one of the 10 hottest since global average temperatures have been recorded, according to an assessment of worldwide climate trends by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“The State of the Climate in 2012,” released Tuesday, paints a sobering portrait of vast swaths of the planet transformed by rising temperatures. Arctic sea ice reached record lows during the summer thaw. In Greenland, about 97% of its ice sheet melted in the summer, far greater than in years past.
Greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise. In early May, the ratio of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, thought to be the highest concentration in millions of years.
The report is a like “an annual check-up for the planet,” said Kathryn Sullivan, undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA’s acting administrator. It documents “remarkable changes” in crucial areas like Arctic ice, sea levels and greenhouse gas emissions, she said.
anyone know how many years we have a record of Greenhouse gas emissions being measured?
also what are the other years in the top ten and what is the scientific analysis for those years being so hot?
100s of thousands of years in ice cores.
Here is a quiz question from 2 years ago for all the young readers out there:
How many ‘weathers’ make a ‘climate’?
Gee dan- I don’t know how long the records go back- maybe they even go as far as 6000 yrs. ago when the earth was first created and man coexisted with the dinosaurs-right?
Dan: here is an abstract from a scientific publication from 1999. More recent evidence from ice-core drilling go even much further back and even more compelling than this study. Yeah, the evidence is wildly overwhelming. Time we quite debating the obvious and act.
Rick
The recent completion of drilling at Vostok station in East Antarctica has allowed the extension of the ice record of atmospheric composition and climate to the past four glacial–interglacial cycles. The succession of changes through each climate cycle and termination was similar, and atmospheric and climate properties oscillated between stable bounds.Interglacial periods differed in temporal evolution and duration. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
Although I am a believer in global warming, I still question the validity of Arctic Ice core samples. We are looking at a millennium of data and comparing it to what has happened since the industrial age started making a change on our environment. I am sure that global warming would of happened regardless. We are just helping to speed it along. Myself, I am with Andy Hampsten with his belief to burn up every drop of oil now, deplete every natural resources you can now and then there will be less for the world to fight over later. Plus the added benefit is that there will be less cars on the road to make your bicycle riding much nicer.
Worldcycle:
I suggest you read the actual scientific articles from the dozens upon dozens of studies regarding ice cores. The evidence from studies is consistent and overwhelming. They are now able to calculate green house gas concentration back to 800,000 years in the Arctic and 123,000 years in Greenland and correlate that quite nicely with changes in climate. And I quote from a British Antarctic Team at the forefront of this type of research.
“Antarctic ice cores show us that the
concentration of CO2 was stable over the
last millennium until the early 19th century.
It then started to rise, and its concentration
is now nearly 40% higher than it was before
the industrial revolution (see Fig. 2 overleaf).
Other measurements (e.g. isotopic data)
confirm that the increase must be due to
emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel usage
and deforestation. Measurements from
older ice cores (discussed below) confirm
that both the magnitude and rate of
the recent increase are almost certainly
unprecedented over the last 800,000 years.
The fastest large natural increase measured
in older ice cores is around 20ppmv (parts
per million by volume) in 1,000 years (a rate
seen during Earth’s emergence from the last ice age around 12,000 years ago). CO2 concentration increased by the same amount, 20ppmv, in the last 11 years! Methane
(CH4), another important greenhouse gas, also shows a huge and unprecedented increase in concentration over the last two centuries. Its concentration is now
much more than double its pre-industrial level. This is mainly due to the increase in emissions from sources such as rice fields, ruminant animals and landfills, that comes on top of natural emissions from wetlands and other sources.”
The evidence is daunting and so far, no one has been able to refute it. Science operates on the Popperian principal of disproof (empirical falsification as proposed by the great science philosopher Karl Popper in the early 1900’s). As evidence mounts and hypotheses are unable to be disproved, they are accepted as the best explanation until such time new research either completely replaces or shifts our understanding.
Enjoy Rick