It is a chilly and windy morning out there, and my face is chapping from walking my kids uphill both ways in the snow to their bus stop. That’s weather, our daily experience of the atmosphere as it swirls about us, variously cooled and heated as the sun and seasons come and go. Despite the perennial surprise of editorial cartoonists, those of us who don’t live on the Equator can expect winter to be colder than the summer, just as those of us who don’t live above the Arctic Circle can expect night-time to be darker than the daytime.
Then there’s climate, the long-term trend in temperature, humidity, and other conditions that transcends the weather of the day or the season. With another year passed and another year’s worth of data collected, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center has released its annual State of the Climate Global Analysis. NOAA finds that for direct temperature measurements over the past 130 years, the following ten years have been the hottest for our globe:
1. 2005
2. 1998
3. 2003
4. 2002
5. 2009
6. 2006
7. 2007
8. 2004
9. 2001
10. 2008
Here is NOAA’s complete plot of global temperature data:
Whatever the weather we experience any given day, that’s a picture of climate change. Global warming is no hoax.
Looking at the graph it seems that global warming has leveld the past 10 years. I wonder if that means anything. What are the thoughts on this?
It means that you don’t have to set a new record every year in the weather to have a profound long-term change in climate.