Global Warming: Still Happening
Photo credit: Mixmaster
Sorry to bust in on your party, climate-change deniers. Even though NASA has admitted that its estimates of average temperatures in the United States needed recalibrating, it doesn't change the fact that the planet is heating up at a frenetic, unnatural pace.
The corrected data shows that the hottest year in the United States on record was 1934, not 1998, as previously thought. NASA's recalculation reduced global average temperatures since 2000, however, by a whopping one-thousandth of a degree, which means that a clear warming trend still exists.
In fact, looking at the five-year period from 2002 to 2006 was still the hottest in the last century, warmer than the same period from 1930 to 1934."The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance," said Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change."
He adds: "The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species."
Meanwhile, researchers at Britain's Met Office predict that although the next three or four years would show little warming, the real heat will start after 2009. ::Telegraph, ::Real Climate, ::Climate Progress, and ::Reuters