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February 10, 2005
Cheery Thought for the Day
Maybe I should call it "Cheery Thought for the Century":
Last year was the fourth warmest since systematic temperature measurements began around the world in the 19th century, NASA scientists said yesterday.Particularly high temperatures were measured over Alaska, the Caspian Sea region of Europe and the Antarctic Peninsula, while the United States was unusually cool. But the global average continued a 30-year rise that is "due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," said Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan.
The main source of such gases is smokestack and tailpipe emissions from burning coal and oil.
The highest global average was measured in 1998, when temperatures were raised by a strong cycle of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean; 2002 and 2003 were second and third warmest.
Dr. Hansen said a weak Niño pattern was likely to make 2005 at least the second warmest year and could push it beyond 1998 and set a record.
Actually, millenium is a better order of magnitude than a century since this current warming spike does not just pertain to the last century:
The unusual nature of the recent warming was corroborated separately yesterday by a new analysis of 2,000 years of indirect temperature records in tree rings, stalagmites, seabed layers, and other evidence from around the Northern Hemisphere.That study, published in the journal Nature, found that previous peaks of warming, particularly during medieval times about 1,000 years ago, were as warm as the 20th-century average but that no spikes in the last 2,000 years matched the warming since 1990.
More and more this is feeling like watching a not-too-good horror flick. You know what's coming... It's only going to get worse. And it would take a long time for things to start getting better even if we stopped and reversed everything we were doing wrong right now.
"2004 deadliest earthquake year in five centuries," says another deadline. Stop! Don't Check Out the Sound Coming from the Basement! Don't Go Down Those Stairs! Don't Open That Door!
Posted by zeynep at February 10, 2005 09:23 PM
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Comments
This might be appropriate after thinking about the subject matter of the past few days.
http://www.oneworld.net/external/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fresurgence.gn.apc.org%2Fissues%2Fbakshi228.htm
cool!
Posted by: Bob at February 11, 2005 06:55 PM