It’s official. 2014 was the warmest year on record.
2014 was Earth’s hottest year since records began in 1880, according to new analyses from both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The global average temperature in 2014 was 0.69°C (1.24°F) hotter than the average during the twentieth century, NOAA found. The two agencies each conducted separate analyses of temperature data, based on both satellite and ground readings.
The second hottest year in NOAA’s records was 2010 — an El Niño year — followed by 2005, 1998, and 2007. All ten hottest years have come since 1998.
“If you are younger than 29 years old, you haven’t lived in a month that was cooler than the 20th-century average,” pointed out Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist at the University of Georgia, in a statement.
But Albert Gore is a corpulent fellow with an aeroplane, so scientists are all lying and it snowed in Florida this year, and we should just let other people deal with it, or something.
Then again, it’s probably because 2014 was the hottest year on record in California, and one of the coolest years on record in Bobby Jindal’s neck of the woods.
Sherparick
Well, so much for that 15 year “warming pause” talking point. I wonder what George Effing Will will bring up next as he argues for Keystone.
Lavocat
For me the freakiest thing about Global Weirding is the increasing absence of amphibians.
When I was a kid, it was quite common to see toads in the garden, salamanders in the streams, & frogs in the big mud puddles.
Same w/ butterflies, esp. Monarchs. They were everywhere.
And now? Not so much. Seriously, it freaks me out.
I can understand this happening over the course of, say, a thousand years, but over the course of the last 40 years!?
That’s messed up – and scary as hell.
Derelict
As any conservative will patiently explain, America can’t and shouldn’t do anything about this so long as any other country on Earth is burning fossil fuels. The only possible way America can lead on global warming is by being the last to do anything about it. That’s why we’re world leaders!
srv
Every problem has a silver lining – fewer people dying of exposure:
gvg
where did it snow in Florida this year? I hadn’t heard.
We have lots of toads, skinks and lizards not to mention snakes and alligators. I can remember when we were worried about alligators but hunting protection brought them back in a big way.
bobbyk
@Lavocat: I’m 53, I can remember throught the late 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, thousands and thousands of birds migrating south for the winter. Not so much anymore and that’s pretty scary also.
askew
So, Obama took on Senator Menendez over his pushing for continuing Iran sanctions and Menendez didn’t handle it well.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/1/16/2427/96535
SatanicPanic
@Sherparick: That was always a bone-headed talking point even for the right, but I think they liked it more for the annoyance factor than anything else. Climate change is just example #1000000 of ways they think they’re sticking it to us
D58826
@gvg: And how have the gators thanked us – they turn Fido into a snack and chase you from your pool. Ungrateful reptiles. :-)
dmbeaster
@Lavocat: we are experiencing a human caused mass extinction event
Eric U.
@gvg: last year the east coast experienced the polar vortex phenomenon many times. It got really cold, very far south. I try to make myself thankful that we had cold weather last winter because it kills off a lot of pests.
Gindy51
@Lavocat: I think pesticides and herbicides have more to do with that than global warming. The increase in farm run off causes lots of that crap to enter the water ways where the frogs and toads breed. Round up alone causes a HUGE die off in tadpoles and there ain’t no frogs or toads without the tadpoles. Monarchs are dying out because their habitats are increasingly destroyed to make way for farms as well as the weather extremes caused by climate change.
On our farm, no chemicals used, we have thousands of butterflies and bees, tadpoles, frogs and toads, as well as their relatives the reptiles from snakes to turtles. We even had a hellbender show up one year, a rarity in SE IN. We also plant and allow to grow, wild flowers that most people consider weeds. If everyone plated some milkweed it sure would help the monarchs.
The Gray Adder
I seem to recall summer in Kentucky not being as f&*(ing hot as it is the last time I experienced it. Summer in upstate NY is kinda getting where summer in KY was when I was a kid. If it weren’t for that large body of water to our west continuing to dump massive amounts of snow on us poor bastards – and it’s probably more than it used to be because the water is warmer now – I could just about tolerate living up here at 44 north latitude.
kbuttle
@Gindy51:
There past 30 or 40 years has also seen the global outbreak of a new fungal pathogen that is lethal to amphibians of all stripes. Shorthand name is the chytrid fungus. Still don’t know where it got started, but with the global amphibian trade and just travel more generally, it’s just about everywhere now.
kbuttle
@Sherparick:
Both are true. ’98 was such a strong El Niño that it gives the last sixteen years the appearance of a plateau, after what had been a strong and consistent upward trajectory since 1974. So the last decade is easily the hottest on record at the same time it’s taken the form of a relative plateau relative to the 50-year window around it.
Doesn’t remotely invalidate the idea of emissions-forced warming, particularly when you factor in heat transfer to the deep ocean, but such is the desperation of the Right on this issue.
Amir Khalid
A tech SOS: my Lenovo laptop running Windows 7 has suddenly lost its ability to see wifi. I think I saw some kind of message about Wireless Network Adapter 2 being disabled. What did I do to mess it up, and how can I fix it?
Tree With Water
@kbuttle: “but such is the desperation of the Right on this issue”.
That happens when you need to sell people on the fact the sun rises in the west, and sets in the east.
C.V. Danes
Well, now that Ted Cruz is taking over NASA, Marco Rubio is taking over the NOAA, and James Inhofe is taking over the EPA, these numbers should be downgraded pretty quick. Problem solved!
kbuttle
@Amir Khalid:
There should be a little mechanical switch; some Lenovos have it on the front, others on the side, and my x301 on the back. It’s just a little black slider that you can toggle back and forth, and in the ‘On’ position it will show a green background.
kbuttle
@C.V. Danes:
Dynamic Scoring of temperature data! (Accepting Republican premises in direct contradiction of evidence and fact)
Buddy H
Does the rise in tick- borne illnesses have anything to do with this? When I was a little boy (many years ago) I spent as much of the summer outside as I could. I wouldn’t come in until it got dark (and after I saw and caught as many “fireflies” as i could (something else I never see anymore – where’d all the fireflies go?).
We’d sit on the ground and play with toy trucks and army men. We’d run around playing “army” and roll around on the dirt pretending to die in battle. We’d roll down hills. Never heard a thing about lyme disease. And now, it seems anyone who sets foot outdoors needs a full body exam with a magnifying glass and tweezers.
Dave C
@Buddy H:
Has there actually been a rise in tick-borne illnesses (honest question – I hadn’t heard of it until now)? I grew up in the Midwest in the 80’s and 90’s and fairly frequently would find wood ticks crawling on my clothes and (thankfully less frequently) burrowing in my skin after wandering around in woods or tall grass.
Buddy H
This comic illustrates what we imagine deniers will say when the s**t hits the fan, versus what they’ll really say:
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2014/05/30
boatboy_srq
@gvg: Tallahassee, IIRC. It’s a ten-year event. But don’t tell wingnuts: FL is the Sunshine State (unless you’re a solar power provider).
Gin & Tonic
@Buddy H: I believe the rise in tick-borne illnesses is largely due to the substantial increase in the white-tailed deer population. In the last century that population has increased more than 30-fold in the US, and by a higher factor in the Northeast.
Culture of Truth
When’s the next El Nino? Is that answerable?
moderateindy
There are no homeless in my gated community, so that problem must not exist either.
I was watching some scientist (you can’t trust those types) talk about just how many bird species are going extinct, and it was truly fracking scary. Of course, I’m sure it’s just all part of God’s plan. Does anyone else suspect that God is kind of a crappy planner?
Where did all the fireflies go?
http://youtu.be/NH9CUMMiC-k
not an answer, just a great tune by a great band
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic: And the deer population has risen probably for two reasons:
1. Killing off predators
2. The “Bambi” effect.
Villago Delenda Est
@moderateindy:
He’s a shitty designer, too, if you believe people who specialize in the treatment of spine and hip disorders.
But they all have doctorates, which means that they are pointy headed liebrals, so that explains that.
srv
‘Merica’s Right To Rise:
Merica for Mericans:
Belafon
@srv:
Can’t wait to hear the howls when a whole lot of Latinos pass and a lot of whites don’t.
Peking Man
@Culture of Truth: According to NOAA 50-60% chance later this year
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html
tbone
Seeing as how this is 2015, that means there’s been no warming for a year, therefore global warming is a hoax, libtardz.
Cervantes
@Derelict:
!
Sherparick
@SatanicPanic: True, so much of motivation of the Conservative Movement is the satisfaction they get screwing with stuff with idea that it makes liberals unhappy because we are “evil commies” at heart.
On a digression that somewhat proves the point, for some strange reason, I developed a fascination with Australian politics these last few years. For the last 10 years for the place has had terrible droughts, unGodly heat waves, and terrible brush fires. Apparently, no place has had more evidence of climate change impact then Australia. But in 2013 they elected Climate Denialist PM who promptly repealed prior Government’s carbon tax. How, I wonder? Two reasons apparently. First, Rupert Murdoch dominates Australian Media to the point of monopoly. It is like if he owned NY Times, WaPo, the LA Times, NPR, CBS, NBC, and ABC along with Fox News in this country. And Rupert, no doubt influenced by his partner Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, has become a huge climate denier and his point view is why Fox is the way it is and all his media properties in Australia and the U.K., as well as the U.S. promote denialism. Rupert’s minions slammed the Labor Party and boosted Tony Abbott from 2010 to the present, and that had an affect on public opinion (there was not much public counter argument). It also helped Abbott that Labor’s factions spent most of the period in the circular firing squad formation. Second, Australia is a big coal exporter to Asia, practically Asia’s West Virginia. So between Rupert and the coal industry you get a Climate Change denying Government while the country burns up. But Conservatives are okay with this because it makes “liberals” sad, which to them is emotionally the whole point of Conservative politics in the English-Speaking world.
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: Channeling Oscar Wilde these days?
Cervantes
@srv:
Smile when you say that.
Prometheus Shrugged
@kbuttle: Their actual talking point is that the global temperature did not rise as fast as the models predicted it might, based strictly on the rise in greenhouse gases. And this is true–it didn’t.
However, it’s pretty clear that this seeming divergence between model projections and actual global average temperature has to do with the mixing of heat in the eastern equatorial Pacific. (Just as El Niño conditions lead to a globally warmer earth, La Niña-like conditions tend to lower global average temperatures, relatively speaking.) Models don’t yet get El Niño type variability correctly. Everyone in the business freely acknowledges this current weakness, so some mismatches between projections and how things actually play out are to be expected.
In the end, this talking point is just yet another example of disingenuous cherry-picking of climate data. The people who use this talking point will happily say that warm years are the result of El Niño, but then ignore the flip side and say that the (relative) cool years prove that carbon dioxide is not a big problem.
Cervantes
@askew:
The President is right. For those who are curious, here is a quick explanation of what’s wrong with the Menendez Bill.
Separately one could sketch out why Menendez is doing what he’s doing — but I think it’s obvious.
Eric U.
@Sherparick: I had a republican tell me his political activity followed Cleek’s law. I probably should have told him about Cleek’s law, because he’s smart enough that knowing about it would slow him down a little.
Hungry Joe
Oh, please. Do you mean to tell me that when the population of one of the largest land animals on a planet (Homo sapiens) balloons from a few tens of millions to more than seven billion, and they develop a technological civilization that belches untold billions of tons of carbon dioxide, deadly chemicals, and just plain crapola into the oceans and the atmosphere of what is essentially a closed system, it’s actually going to affect that system? Does that make any sense? Or is it more likely that climate scientists are a bunch of scammers and moochers?
kbuttle
@Prometheus Shrugged:
A big challenge then, both in the science and in the public relations, is that we’re able to measure land surface temperatures and ocean surface temperatures with pretty high precision, but these are just two of the three major components of global energy balance.
So models projected greater temperature increases than we’ve seen over the past 15 years (and failed to predict the plateau) because they basically assumed equal dispersion of energy among those three main pools. When one pool unexpectedly kicked into higher gear, the models turned out be to wrong.
What’s ‘wrong’ are models of land surface temperatures. But this is just because we can’t talk about climate change or global warming in terms of global energy balance, because this is too esoteric an idea to resonate with the public. But I’d imagine that since we’re pretty good at measuring solar output and the mechanisms of light transmission and heat absorption in the atmosphere, models of global energy balance summed over all three major components of land, surface ocean, and deep ocean, would be pretty damn near spot on, assuming we could measure deep ocean heat content reliably.
Sound about right?
chopper
no warming for zero years!
Villago Delenda Est
@Hungry Joe: Oh, it’s the latter, for sure. Because our ideology demands it be the latter, and our ideology is our lodestar, our reason for being.
Bob In Portland
Where my mother used to live in Central NJ the deer population has gotten out of hand. One of the problems is that with the expansion of human communities you can’t go hunting in people’s backyards. And there are a lot of deer in people’s backyards. There have been ideas about expanding the length of the bow-hunting season, etc.
chopper
@Buddy H:
exactly. deniers are just going to shift gears and blame ‘pushy liberals’ for their reluctance to believe in climate change.
Liberty60
OT, but this made me laugh:
“Ben Carson to the GOP Establishment: I’m Not ‘Crazy’”
I wonder if he is going to start signing his correspondence with the tagline:
P.S. I am not a crank
chopper
@Culture of Truth:
Not with any decent certainty. The models have been shit the last year as to ENSO.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Sherparick:
Well, so much for that 15 year “warming pause” talking point.
As I understand it (and my understanding may be shaky here), it was always bullshit – the “pause”, what there was of it, was in air temperatures with ocean temperatures continuing to rise. There’s a long-term cycle in distribution of heat between the two that worked against the longer term heating trend in the system as a whole solely for air temperatures.
And now that cycle will start reinforcing the heating trend.
I spent Christmas in Sydney suffering from the heat, and I was glad to get back to Wellington. The kids I was visiting there will probably grow up to live in a world where Wellington then is like Sydney now, and Sydney then is like hell itself.
Just One More Canuck
@Liberty60: his mother had him tested
rikyrah
Peggy Noonan sobered up enough to write this about Willard, and it is true:
“There was something known as Reaganism. It was a real movement within the party and then the nation. Reaganism had meaning. You knew what you were voting for. It was a philosophy that people understood. Philosophies are powerful. They carry you, and if they are right and pertinent to the moment they make you inevitable.”
“There is no such thing as Romneyism and there never will be. Mr. Romney has never encompassed a philosophical world. He has never become the symbol of an attitude toward government, or an approach to freedom or fairness. ‘Romneyism’ is just ‘Mitt should be president.’ That is not enough.”
http://politicalwire.com/2015/01/16/explaining-romneyism/
JPL
@Liberty60: Maybe he is a witch.
fyi, does anyone know if Fox is covering the news conference with the President and Prime Minister?
chopper
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
It was also bullshit as 15 years is not a sufficient climatic period when it comes to determining a trend in the data.
It’s like complaining in July that you “haven’t gotten a Christmas bonus in 6 months”.
Cervantes
@rikyrah: Quoting La Noonan:
This entire paragraph, while not quite meaningless, certainly conceals the point. “Reaganism,” to the extent it existed, was a flat-out lie.
Is Romney worse? A fine question.
Mike in NC
@rikyrah: When you’ve lost Peggy Noonan!
“Romneyism” could be defined as being willing to pander to the worst instincts of whoever you happen to be talking to at the moment. Not quite a philosophy.
JPL
@Cervantes: Reagan didn’t always know when he was lying.
Cervantes
@Mike in NC:
I know what you mean but I think this definition gives him too little and too much credit: whoever he happened to be talking to at any moment was always a carefully selected sub-set of America.
Cervantes
@JPL:
La Noonan was referring to his campaign rhetoric, and so was I — the 1980 campaign in particular.
boatboy_srq
@Sherparick:
The childishness – and transparent mean-spiritedness and projection – involved in this is just stunning. It’s one more reason I have zero sympathy for the rubes who drive SUVs and stock up on incandescent bulbs, who then complain about the price of gas and the electric bill. They impoverish themselves to p!ss off lieberals, then complain that they’re “poor” and bash the Left for their poverty. And their insistence that Ahmurrcan Ingeeenyewitee will save the day all boils down to their conviction that we just haven’t done enough drilling and fracking yet.
boatboy_srq
@rikyrah:
Mustn’t forget Ann’s “it’s our turn” comment: it dovetails nicely with that. Does Noonan’s statement mean, though, that we now have Paulism, Rubioism, and Santorumism (blech)? Because there’s precious little difference between their perspectives and Noonan’s line beyond Romneyism being directed solely at the 1%.
Lavocat
@bobbyk: I’m 51. At first, over the last 30 or so years, I thought it was just my perception. Time does weird things to memory after all. But, I once I started to quantify things, I realized that my perception was quite keen. Worse, the few times I DO discover amphibians in the wild, not only are they few in number, but some of them also seem to have horrible genetic mutations. WTF?
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Lavocat: I live in SoCal, so amphibians are not a major presence, but there’s more than most people would think would be. I thought our local frogs, plentiful when I was a kid, had vanished until I found one in 2005. And they’ve exploded since then. Most nights I can hear them at my house. I have a couple who live on the property now. That is quite unusual.
So was the eagle I saw a few weeks back. NEVER seen one of those here, and I was born and lived most of my life here.
However, “horned toads” and roadrunners are gone. Haven’t seen either one since I was a child.
Development is responsible for most of the adverse change here. The main change in climate I’ve seen is the development of a serious, repeated summer monsoon season that actually brings rain. That is so far out of the norm here it blows my mind.
Lavocat
@dmbeaster: And THAT is what scares the hell out of me: how MANY species are to go extinct and how LONG will this process of extinction play out? I’m thinking something truly horrible is going to happen that will result in some Darwinian cascade whereby whole phyla (not just a few species) of living things might be wiped out.
catclub
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Leaders are like eagles… we don’t have many of either around here.
@Demotivators
Bill D.
@CONGRATULATIONS!: But not enough rain (yet) to put a serious dent in the drought caused by lack of winter rain. It’s just enough rain to be notable as being out of place.
rikyrah
@Cervantes:
You and I know that, but it was a lie they could sell themselves.
Willard doesn’t even have that.
the Conster
@rikyrah:
Willard is selling his appearance. He looks the part, he thinks, with his nice straight white family and teeth, perfectly graying temples and the blonde age-appropriate wife. Compared to Christie, Paul and Cruz, he’s right.
Lurking Canadian
@the Conster: And the shoulders. They make sure we never forget about the landing strip shoulders.
RaflW
How amazingly quickly all the conservatives forget that Texas was brutally dry and aflame just in this young decade.
Nothing to see here! Move along now!
Oh, and pray for Texas, y’all (said Governor Perry in response to the climate disaster).
jl
@Cervantes: Phlogiston had a meaning too, a REAL meaning. If only we could go back to those days when every child was above average and all would turn out for the best no matter what happened.
jl
@RaflW: We’ll still see debunkery on the news when a cold snap is defined as not being able to warm up a cup of coffee by putting it on the sidewalk. Well, to most people, those days will seem pretty cold.
Bill D.
@jl: We’ll still see debunkery on the news when a cold snap is defined as not being able to
warm upboil a cup of coffee by putting it on the sidewalk. Well, to most people, those days will seem pretty cold.