NASA: 2010 Will Be The Hottest Year on Record

by Christopher Mims · 2010-03-29 15:00:00 UTC
Topics:

The talking points of climate disinformers are as invariable as election-year bromides, which makes them all that much easier to swat down. One that gets trotted out again and again is the notion that we "haven't had any global warming since 1998."

Even setting aside the NOAA's data that 2005 was warmer than 1998, we wouldn't expect the global air temperature to grow steadily warmer every year in a complex and chaotic system like the climate — most of the heat is in the oceans, after all — but we would expect that over the course of time, we would continue to intermittently but consistently rack up record-smashing years.

Now it appears that 2010 is going to be one of those record-smashing years. As one wit pointed out, all this means to disinformers is that they'll reset their "we haven't had any global warming since…" clocks and in 2015 we'll be hearing that we haven't had any global warming since 2010.

All that aside, this is what a century's worth of global warming looks like:

Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index

from Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis (pdf) by J. Hansen, R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

As we all know by now, this trend will at some point accelerate as various feedbacks kick in. The only good thing about the global warming merry go round is that we're free to get off any time we like. Solutions abound, after all, and most of them will improve our quality of life and our national security, to boot.

Image of 2000-2010 temperature anomaly relative to 1951-1980 base period credit Hansen et al. (pdf)

Christopher Mims a Florida-based journalist who writes about the environment. His work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Popular Science, Technology Review, Discover magazine and others.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Energy Star Program Vulnerable to Fraud, Abuse
NEXT STORY:
Stopping the Water Grab in Nevada

COMMENTS (132)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.