This guest post from chparadise provides some important information about the climate ‘state of play’.
While the focus has (rightfully) been on HCR, climate change news hasn’t been fully dead. In fact, it may have been easy to miss a couple notes:
- 2010 is very likely to be the hottest year on record. This was predicted based on the presence of a modest El Nino and as I’ve shown below the fold, the prediction’s so far been borne out.
- Skeptical Science and other sites are being targeted for hacks.
- NASA has another paper coming out that the last decade was damn hot.
- Stanford study confirming that media coverage of climate change is presenting a false balance that misleads the public.
- (Apologies if this link doesn’t work – my school has an institutional subscription to Science Magazine) New study shows that burning brush may help forests retain more CO2 by promoting larger tree health.
Join me for figures and more below the jump.
The NASA paper (hasn’t fully gone through peer review yet, so some things may get changed, but the main conclusion is valid) notes that warming didn’t go away in the 2000’s (dur), and they predict a high likelihood of 2010 being a record year, due to the moderate El Nino and other factors (note that the 1998 El Nino was significantly stronger – I haven’t been able to find a decent graph comparing the two, so this table will have to suffice)
Figure 1: It’s warming up!
Figure 2: 2010 running satellite average. Circle indicates the latest day. Note how 2010 is almost exclusively higher than any previous year. (Apologies that the figure is for about a month ago – March hasn’t been any different and I can’t make the figures into GIF or JPG myself).
Figure 3: For better or worse, the current solar minimum appears to be ending. This could mean that the current negative forcing by the solar cycle could reverse.
Figure 4: This one’s been posted before, but temperature vs solar cycle. Useful for showing that the solar cycle hasn’t been responsible for the warming.
Figure 5: Another one that’s been posted a lot, but as a reminder, most of the excess heat that’s trapped by CO2 and methane and other GHG’s ends up in the oceans.
More on note 4.
Hopefully the passage of HCR will help grease the skids to get other stuff moving. If dems use the momentum to get meaningful legislation through, then I’ll be the first to applaud them. Or one of the first.