Here’s a fact you might hear repeated quite a bit over the coming months. The past 12 months were the hottest ever.
Data from NASA reportedly confirms the period from May 2009 to April 2010 was the hottest 12-month period in its records. This does rather challenge the view, which has been increasingly fashionable, that climate change is questionable or might not be happening at all.
The embarrassment of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia and evidence of dodgy studies being cited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were hugely damaging to the standing of the scientific arguments that the world is heating up. But the scientists are back in the saddle, publishing a stream of evidence that climate change is still doing quantifiable damage to the planet. This week there have been some doozies.
The first is the temperature data, which confirmed a prediction in March that if April met expectations, the 12 months running up to it would be the hottest year on record.
As it turned out, April smashed the record. So we’ve just had the hottest April, the hottest January-April period, and the hottest 12 months on record. More here (.pdf).
When NASA published their preliminary findings on this they concluded there has been “no reduction in the global warming trend”, which they says is about a fifth of 1 degree Celsius per decade that began in the late 1970s.
Indeed the NASA’s global temperature nerds acknowledge the damage that has been done to the public perceptions of climate change. They have shifted to more frequent releases of data, despite some of the problems that it creates. They wrote: “Communicating the reality of climate change to the public is hampered by the large natural variability of weather and climate. Thus, for the sake of early recognition of ongoing climate change, it is important to strive for ways to bring out the climate signal as clearly as possible.” (Full paper is here in PDF form.)
This is in keeping with a bit of a global fightback by scientists against the growing public perception that climate change is, to borrow a phrase, absolute crap. The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, you may remember, issued an unusual joint statement in March too, saying scientific evidence pointed strongly to human influence in temperature rises and other environmental changes.
On top of these record temperatures there have been some studies which have shown the effects this warming can have on the natural environment.
Now fair enough, nobody outside of the keenest of herpetologists cares too much about the continued survival of all species of lizard. But a study published this week shows one fifth of lizard species could be extinct before the end of the century on current trends.
Basically because lizards sunbake on rocks to warm up and hide in shade to cool down, they’ve been spending more time hiding lately because it has been warmer. More hiding means less eating - and some populations of lizards have simply died out as a result. The authors warn there could be a range of knock-on effects in the food chain. Translation: a possible explosion of insects, and the deaths of other species which prey on the reptiles.
Africa’s largest lake, Tanganika, is now the warmest it has been, at least in the 1500 years that were studied by the team that published this study. The increase in temperature is killing the fish, which might be no big deal except that Lake Tanganyika is hundreds of kilometres long, bordered by four desperately poor countries and its fish are a food source for millions of people who live around it.
The last little story spotted recently was more folksy one about a weather station in upstate New York which, according to this report:
... is the rarest of the rare: a weather station that has never missed a day of temperature recording; never been moved; never seen its surroundings change; and never been tended by anyone but a short, continuous line of family and friends, using the same methods, for 114 years.
A summary of some of the other findings: average annual temperatures went up 2.63 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures were up in all seasons and there are more regular hot days over 89 degrees Fahrenheit.
There aren’t many devastating consequences. “As described in an earlier study in the International Journal of Climatology,” NASA’s the effect has been a sort of an intermittent false spring that may expose some early-flowering plants to frost damage. The earliest flowering native plants like hepatica, bloodroot and red-berried elder are likely to be most affected…”. Again, hardly likely to have people moving away from coastal areas or building heat-repelling domes for their cities.
But there was this paragraph, which is worth quoting at length.
The new study comes at a time when some skeptics have questioned the accuracy of long-term weather records, on the basis that many stations have been moved or that surroundings have changed, occasionally putting instruments nearer to buildings, parking lots or other possible heat sources that could skew readings upward. However, recent studies including one by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found that such year-to-year inconsistencies cut both ways, and that instruments near developed spots actually more often read too cool rather than too hot. Researchers say every effort has been made to adjust for errors, and that errors one way or the other at individual stations basically cancel each other out, leaving the averages correct.
The pattern in all of these, aside from the evidence that the world is heating up regardless of leaked emails or dodgy Himalayan glacier claims, is they all address the obvious questions that sceptics would raise about each study.
The scientists working on issues related to climate change know they have a fight on their hands to re-establish their credibility. And it’s a fight they appear to be ready to have.
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