Friday, July 30, 2010

This week: Warmest decade on record, record heat waves worldwide, crashing plankton from GW, video on evidence - and you don't know the consensus

(New NCFocus feature - rather than giving you (or sending you to) my daily firehose or H.E. Taylor's weekly one, I'll be doing a weekly post linking to some of the news on global climate destabilization.)


NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) releases report: "Past Decade Warmest on Record According to Scientists in 48 Countries; Earth has been growing warmer for more than fifty years."
"...human society has developed for thousands of years under one climatic state, and now a new set of climatic conditions are taking shape. These conditions are consistently warmer, and some areas are likely to see more extreme events like severe drought, torrential rain and violent storms."

"A remarkable year for extreme heat...Fourteen extreme national high temperature records have been set in 2010" - and extreme wildfires in Russia.

Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton” - "Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic."

If all goes well, this video on the evidence for global warming will soon be showing here on NCTV (as a corrective):


So, you "accept the science" on climate change; do you know what that means?
"Hardly anyone who is not a professional in [climate science] has any idea what the consensus position ACTUALLY AMOUNTS TO..." - Do you?
(recall Stephen Schneider's words (link) - "How do we deploy scarce resources in society to deal with climate vs. health, vs. housing, vs. global development? ...that's not a science judgment. That's a value judgment. And that value judgment can only be made well if you understand the what-can-happen, what-are-the-odds part." )

Firehose: H.E. Taylor's excellent, info-dense Another Week of Climate Instability News

2 comments:

keith said...

Cheer up! The worst is yet to come!

Anna Haynes said...

Then we should encourage the National Research Council (of the National Academy of Science) to cheer up too, for the same reason.
NRC: emissions choices today have implications for global climate on the scale of millennia