Last night we got yet more confirmation of the rapidly growing effects of human-accelerated climate heating. The lead story on ABC News, the New York Times, Washington Post and a host of other media outlets was the finding that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the United States, and also one of the hottest on record world wide. Look at this National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration map of how each state's 2012 average temperature ranked of the 118 years since records have been kept. See their entire bulletin here.
Not only was every state's temperature above normal, but the U.S. average for the entire year was 1.0 full degree above the previous record of 54.3 degrees set in 1998. This is strikingly unusual, since the difference between the hottest and coldest years up to now had only been 4.2 degrees. When the figures are in, the weather service expects 2012 to have been the ninth warmest worldwide. The ten warmest have all come within the past fifteen years, and in fact no year has been cooler than normal since 1985.
The scientists warned that last year's drought, affecting 61% of the nation, and extreme storms (an unprecedented 11 for the year) are but a "foretaste of things to come." Meanwhile, to no one's surprise, Fox News did not mention the story. In the chart below, see the powerful correlation between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the top line and temperature in the bottom line over the past 400,000 years.
To make matters worse, according to to NASA, human activity is putting an additional 8 billion metric tons of carbon into the air every year. We will continue to pay an increasingly steep, and even deadly, cost for this over the next few decades.
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