Climate Change: Too cold? Global Warming

Friends -

Cold? Of course, it's winter. When our Northern Hemisphere tilts away from the Sun for several months each year... Duh.

Kinda puts the kibosh on Global Warming doesn't it. Well, not really. Read the recent essay below from Dr. James Hansen who is the world's leading expert on climatology. Dr. Hansen is an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of Columbia University and Columbia's Earth Institute, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Here are several excerpts from his essay:

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Note: Small print and graphics can be enlarged by clicking.

Results.

Figure 3 below shows the measured temperature increase of the planet from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present.

• The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the last130 years.

• Global mean temperature was 0.57ºC (1.0ºF) warmer than the climatologic average.

• The global record warm year was 2005.

Global cooling in the past decade?

Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short‐term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. Yet many lay people do understand the distinction between regional short‐term anomalies and global trends.

Figure 5a illustrates the global map of temperature anomalies in December 2009 . There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ‐8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C. The cold December perhaps reaffirmed an impression gained by Americans from the unusually cool 2009 summer. There was a large region in the United States and Canada in June‐July‐August with a negative temperature anomaly greater than 1°C, the largest negative anomaly on the planet.