For those who continue to doubt climate change: It's here to stay

Excuse me, folks, but the weather is trying to tell us something.

Listen carefully, and you can almost hear a parched, raspy voice whispering,“What part of ‘hottest month ever’ do you people not understand?”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmo-spheric Admin-istration, July was indeed the hottest month in the contiguous United States since record-keeping began more than a century ago. That distinction was previously held by July 1936, which came at the height of the Dust Bowl calamity that devastated the American heartland.

The average temperature last month was 77.6 degrees – a full 3.3 degrees warmer than the 20th-century norm for July. This follows the warmest 12-month period ever recorded in the United States, and it continues a long-term trend that is obvious to all except those who stubbornly close their eyes: Of the 10 hottest years on record, nine have occurred since 2000.

James E. Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, summed it up in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post last week:“The future is now. And it is hot.”

Hansen wrote that when he testified before Congress in 1988 and painted a “grim picture” of the consequences of climate change, he was actually being too optimistic. His projections of how rapidly temperatures would rise were accurate, he wrote, but he “failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.”

Yes, scientists are finally asserting a direct connection between long-term climate trends and short-term weather events. This was always a convenient dodge for climate change deniers. There might be a warming trend over decades or centuries, they would say, but no specific heat wave, hurricane or hailstorm could definitively be attributed to climate change.

“To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change,” Hansen wrote.“The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change.”

Hansen went on,“The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.”

If you won the lottery yesterday, feel free to stop reading. If you didn’t, stick with me a bit longer.

The other escape hatch for deniers is the question of why the Earth’s atmosphere is warming. Yes, there may be climate change, this argument goes, but we know there have been Ice Ages in the past and other big temperature variations. What we’re witnessing is due to natural processes – perhaps some long-term cycle we are too feeble to comprehend. You can’t prove that human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, is to blame.

A Gallup poll last year found that this view – essentially,“You can’t pin it on our SUVs”– has been gaining traction in this country, even as it has become discredited elsewhere. Between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of U.S. adults who believed human activity contributed to warming declined from 60 percent to 48 percent.

I wrote a column last fall when University of California at Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, one of the leading skeptics on climate change, reversed field and announced that his own careful research indicated the atmosphere is, indeed, warming rapidly. Last week, Muller announced in The New York Times that “I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

Muller, who heads the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, wrote that he and his team tried correlating the observed warming with phenomena such as solar activity

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/08/10/2249...

A Simple Proof That The 1930s Were Hotter

SEE CHART

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/10...

he graph below shows the number of all time record daily US maximums which were set or tied per year, for all USHCN stations with contiguous records going back to the year 1900 and extending through 2011

The top five years for setting record maximums were all during the 1930s. No year this century even shows up in the top fifteen. Last year didn’t even make the top sixty.

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/10...

Heres the thing...
this jives with what my old friends / relatives remember...

"climate change" is hogwash driven by an agenda

Yeah.....'cept that those were record highs. The measurements being used are average temperature of the earth. Not highs.

That's like saying Usain Bolt ran faster a couple of days at the olympics, instead of measuring his average speed over time.

Remember NIMBY?

Of course not. Doesn't fit your narrative anymore....

Jr isn't old enough to remember..
but then Bonds believes healthcare is going to be "free" too

Amazing how you can tell the entire earth's surface temperature based on current temperatures in the USA....now or in 1935....

NOTHING is free. That's why it's time to realize what it will take to close the deficit. Obviously YOU are not without healthcare, "Pass"- probably living off government "provided" medicare...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-12/cold-sn...
Cold snap sets new record low temperatures

http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Vancouver+...
Vancouver's stormy summer on pace for record cold

http://juneauempire.com/local/2012-07-31/fore...
Forecaster: Summer so far at record cold levels

http://iceagenow.info/2012/06/netherlands-%E2...
Netherlands –“Today coldest summer since 1975”
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.
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THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!! THE SKY IS FALLING!!

Sometimes you really are dumb, you know that? I hate to say it, but it's just THAT true sometimes.

Global.Earth.Temperature.

Ah, who cares, won't affect you, right? Yes, it will...

"climate change" is all about controlling the masses
and taxes

and more taxes

Why is global WARMING picking on JUST the USA?
Why oh why?

It goes up and down Bonds. Its called a cycle. It happens. Its ALWAYS happened... and believe it or not, there's not a darned thing anyone can do about it.

Well, I guess we have the definitive answer on climate change. Thanks bdwg. Case closed.