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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato and Ken Lo

Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120119_Temperature.pdf 

This may be my final e-mail.  Last year, in a moment of temporary insanity, I agreed to participate in Chesapeake Climate Action Network's annual polar bear plunge this Saturday.  One of my sisters claims that a padded wagon is on the way.  If I catch pneumonia Anniek may shoot me.  If you want to join the fun (it can't really be all that bad, and it's for a good organization), info can be found by clicking here


~Jim

Excerpt:  


Oklahoma-Texas-Northern Mexico in 2011 and the Moscow region in 2010 provide examples of summer heat anomalies that exceeded 3σ relative to the 1951-1980 climatology.  In the 1951-1980 period of climatology the area with temperature anomaly exceeding +3σ was only a few 
tenths of one percent.  However, the area covered by such extreme anomalies has increased with global warming.  +3σ anomalies covered 7% of the area with observations in Jun-Jul-Aug 2009, 13% in 2010, and 9% in 2011 (Hansen et al., 2012).  Increased occurrence of such extreme anomalies as a result of global warming, by more than a factor of 10, implies that we can attribute such recent extreme anomalies, including that in Texas and Oklahoma, to global warming.

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