1 Boring Old Man

Like I said, my new hobby is keeping up with stories that get dropped in the drama of the day:

NASA: Easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — in temperature record
Plus a new record 12-month global temperature, as predicted
Climate Progress
May 16, 2010

It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset.  More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record [click on figure to enlarge]. The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is. Most significantly, NASA’s March prediction has come true:  “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.″

Software engineer Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies [click here].  In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March — and then easily set in April… Moreover, the overwhelming majority of recent warming went right where scientists had predicted — into the oceans [see “How we know global warming is happening”]:

Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”

Another 2009 article [draft here] details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth.”

Figure 2: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 10⁸ Jm^-2.

Still warming, after all these years!  And just where you’d expect it.  This study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.  And the surface temperature is even more variable. NASA’s recent draft paper reported:  “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s”…

^{WORLD FERTILITY RATES
Click on the map to see the original [which allows you to see the actual numbers for each country].}

^{WORLD POPULATION DENSITY}

Global Warming is very real. Man-made Global Warming is very real. Without population control, without environmental protection – all the energy cutting plans are a waste of time because the increasing need for energy will neutralize them.