Book
It: 2012, The Hottest U.S. Year on Record
13
November, 2012
Report Summary
Global
warming is directly linked to only a few weather events and climate
trends. One of them, however, is warming itself, which could make
2012 a watershed climate change year in the U.S. More than
superstorms, wildfires, and devastating drought, this year’s
record-smashing spring and summer heat waves, with their melted
airport runways and warped steel rail lines, are more evidence that
climate change is real.
Last
week NOAA announced that 2012 was “likely” to be the warmest year
on record in the 48 states, based on temperatures through November.
At some point, however, likelihood turns into certainty. Does a warm
December push the nation to the point where it is impossible for 2012
to be anything but the warmest year ever recorded in the U.S.?
To
answer that question Climate Central did the math, and the results
are in.
- There is a 99.99999999 percent chance that 2012 will be the hottest year ever recorded in the continental 48 states, based on our analysis of 118 years of temperature records through Dec. 10, 2012.
By
taking the top spot as the hottest year in the U.S., 2012 pushes 1998
into second place, followed by 2006, 1934 and 1999. In line with the
global warming trend spurred by steadily rising carbon emissions,
seven of the top 10 warmest years in the 48 states have occurred in
the past 15 years.
Like
so much recent record-breaking weather, 2012 isn’t just going to
break the previous record, 2012 is looking to smash it, by more than
1°F. Climate Central projects the 2012 average temperature for the
continental U.S. at 55.34°F compared to the previous record set in
1998 of 54.32°F. For perspective, 1°F is one quarter of the
difference between the coldest and warmest years ever recorded in the
continental U.S.
Exactly
how cold would it need to be not to break the record? Temperatures
would have to average 14.76°F across the continent for the rest of
December — a holiday season colder than any ever recorded.
But
that is not going to happen. So far this December the mean
temperature in the contiguous U.S. has been 44.13°F. The average
temperature for 117 years of previous Decembers is 33.08°F.
Things
are a bit different at the state level, where the heat was extreme,
but far from every state will set the record. Fully two-thirds
of the lower 48 states recorded their first-, second- or
third-hottest years through November, and 43 states had one of their
top 10 warmest years ever recorded. Even the coolest state,
Washington, had a far warmer-than average year to date.
But
while 17 states had recorded their warmest year to date, just 12 have
better than a 50-50 chance of continuing this warm weather through
the year and having the warmest year on record. (State odds will
change as we move toward the end of the year.)
Record-shattering
heat has been the norm all year. June-through-August 2012 was just
two-tenths of a degree cooler than the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, and
July of this year was the hottest month ever recorded in U.S.
history.
This
scorching summer followed on the heels of a remarkably warm spring in
most of the country. March 2012 was the warmest March in U.S. history
by a wide margin. In communities across the upper Midwest, daily low
temperatures routinely broke previous high temperature records, and
daily high records were repeatedly smashed by 20 degrees or more.
These
sceptics are dinosaurs who are destined to, symbolically at least,
burn in the fires of hell
Landmark
climate change report leaked online
Draft
of IPCC's fifth assessment, due to be published in September 2013,
leaked online by climate sceptic Alex Rawls
The
BoA coal-burning power plant, which went into operation in August
2012 near Grevenbroich, Germany. Photograph: Juergen Schwarz/Getty
Images
14
December, 2012
The
draft of a major global warming report by the UN's climate science
panel has been leaked online.
The
fifth assessment report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which is not due to be published in full until
September 2013, was uploaded onto a website called Stop Green Suicide
on Thursday and has since been mirrored elsewhere on the internet.
The
IPCC, which confirmed the draft is genuine, said in a statement: "The
IPCC regrets this unauthorized posting which interferes with the
process of assessment and review. We will continue not to comment on
the contents of draft reports, as they are works in progress."
A
little-known US-based climate sceptic called Alex Rawls, who had been
accepted by the IPCC to be one of the report's 800 expert reviewers,
admitted to leaking the document. In a statement posted online, he
sought to justify the leak: "The addition of one single sentence
[discussing the influence of cosmic rays on the earth's climate]
demands the release of the whole. That sentence is an astounding bit
of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main
premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the
fundamental dishonesty of the whole."
Climate
sceptics have heralded the sentence – which they interpret as
meaning that cosmic rays could have a greater warming influence on
the planet than mankind's emissions – as "game-changing".
The
isolation by climate sceptics of one sentence in the 14-chapter draft
report was described as "completely ridiculous" by one of
the report's lead authors. Prof Steve Sherwood, a director of the
Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales,
told ABC Radio in Australia: "You could go and read those
paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we conclude
exactly the opposite, that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph
is discussing appears to be negligible … It's a pretty severe case
of [cherry-picking], because even the sentence doesn't say what
[climate sceptics] say and certainly if you look at the context,
we're really saying the opposite."
The
leaked draft "summary for policymakers" contains a
statement that appears to contradict the climate sceptics'
interpretation.
It
says: "There is consistent evidence from observations of a net
energy uptake of the earth system due to an imbalance in the energy
budget. It is virtually certain that this is caused by human
activities, primarily by the increase in CO2 concentrations. There is
very high confidence that natural forcing contributes only a small
fraction to this imbalance."
By
"virtually certain", the scientists say they mean they are
now 99% sure that man's emissions are responsible. By comparison, in
the IPCC's last report, published in 2007, the scientists said they
had a "very high confidence" – 90% sure – humans were
principally responsible for causing the planet to warm.
Richard
Betts, a climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre and an AR5
lead author, tweeted that the report is still a draft and could well
change: "Worth pointing out that the wording in the leaked IPCC
WG1 [working group 1, which examines the "physical science
basis" of climate change] draft chapters may still change in the
final versions, following review comments."
Bob
Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of
Economics and Political Science, said that Rawls appeared to have
broken the confidentiality agreement signed by reviewers: "As a
registered reviewer of the IPCC report, I condemn the decision by a
climate change sceptic to violate the confidentiality of the review
process. The review of the IPCC report is being carried out in line
with the principles of peer review which operate throughout academic
science, including an expectation of high standards of ethical
behaviour by reviewers. It is disappointing, if not surprising, that
climate change sceptics have been unable to meet these high standards
of ethical behaviour."
The
IPCC, which publishes a detailed synthesis of the latest climate
science every seven years to help guide policy makers, has
experienced leaks before. In 2000, the third assessment report was
leaked to the New York Times, while the fourth assessment report was
published in 2006 by the US government a year ahead of its official
publication.
Prof
Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at
University College London and contributing author on the recent IPCC
report on climate change and extreme events, said that sceptics'
reading of the draft was incorrect: "Alex Rawls' interpretation
of what IPCC5 says is quite simply wrong. In fact, while temperatures
have been ramping up in recent decades, solar activity has been
pretty subdued, so any interaction with cosmic rays is clearly having
minimal – if any – effects. IPCC AR5 reiterates what we can be
absolutely certain of: that contemporary climate change is not a
natural process, but the consequence of human activities."
Prof
Piers Forster, Professor of Climate Change at the University of
Leeds, said: "Although this may seem like a 'leak', the draft
IPCC reports are not kept secret and the review process is open. The
rationale in not disseminating the findings until the final version
is complete, is to try and iron out all the errors and
inconsistencies which might be inadvertently included. Personally, I
would be happy if the whole IPCC process were even more open and
public, and I think we as scientists need to explore how we can best
match the development of measured critical arguments with those of
the Twitter generation."
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