Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold and Chaotic

The year's average global hotness was 9 or 10 warmest since reliable record began in 1850 and the coldest since the beginning of the 21st century, according to separate surveys by the UN World Meteorological Organization, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. Each used different methods to rank in 2008 based on worldwide land and sea surface temperatures through November. Currently, no one knows whether this temperature drop heralds a permanent withdrawal from global warming or a temporary dip. Last summer was relatively cool throughout the world, for example, while the global land temperature in October was the warmest for that month in more than a century, government weather records show .

 

Taken together, the result was a year, ran a little less than one degree warmer than the 20-century mark. About the climate, the extraordinary becomes routine, as higher temperatures make weather patterns more unstable. "As a result of climate change, said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK's Hadley Center, which helped to prepare the UN figures," what would once have been a very unusual year has been pretty normal. "Despite the ups and downs annual temperature swings But the planet has grown steadily warmer in recent decades, affecting everything from the New England winter and spring Sibirsk Western drought and tropical sky. The following eight new government and university climate studies presented last month during a meeting in San Francisco of the American Geophysical Union, an international scientific society 50,000 scientists who study Earth and its environment. Moreover, almost all of the warming in North America have taken place since 1970, says a team of government and academic experts in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

 

Since 2003, for example, more than two trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted, add water to the oceans NOK raise global sea levels by one-fifth of an inch, NASA geophysicists reported at the conference. Alaska's is low-lying areas, are to disappear in two to three times the price of a decade ago, according to aerial surveys by researchers at the University of Alaska. Since 2000, Greenland has lost only 355.4 square miles of ice - an area 10 times the size of Manhattan - Ohio State University researchers reported.

Using data from two NASA satellites, they decided that Greenland's 32 largest glaciers lost three times as much as last year as the year before. In another sign of the polar front to, researchers have discovered new leaks methane bubbles up from previously frozen seabed lodes along the Siberian coast. Methane, like carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that helps trap heat in the atmosphere and could accelerate a warming trend. "We have NOK data to worry about," said Igor Semiletov at the University of Alaska Fairbanks reported methane leaks. So many subtle changes in so many different places to build decade after decade, and add up to anything more than the weather natural variation.To an experienced eye weather patterns now seem chaotic. Among Inuit in the eastern Canadian Arctic, University of Colorado researchers reported last month that many older people are no longer willing to rely on their forecasts methods honed skills to a life in the region to help local hunting parties , and travel.

Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold and Chaotic video-