2010 Hottest Year on Record

Warming Trends Continue

Clearly the warming trend continues worldwide, despite an ultra-normal summer for Southern California, and one only has to piece together the fires in Russia and extreme heat in Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of the US, flooding in New England and the southern midwest, and now, disastrously, Pakistan, to see the warming trend manifesting worldwide.

Temperature departures from average for July 2010, as measured by NASA. Note the warmth (in red) centered over western Russia. Credit: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

See: “Heat Records Broken in 17 Countries so far this Year,” By Andrew Freedman, Climate Central

Meteorologist Jeff Masters of the private weather forecasting firm Weather Underground, posited:

“These nations comprise 19 percent of the total land area of Earth. This is the largest area of Earth’s surface to experience all-time record high temperatures in any single year in the historical record. Looking back at the past decade, which was the hottest decade in the historical record, 75 countries set extreme hottest temperature records (33 percent of all countries.) For comparison, fifteen countries set extreme coldest temperature records over the past ten years (six percent of all countries).”

See: “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming,” By Justin Gillis, from The New York Times.

“The climate is changing,” said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “Extreme events are occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity.”

He described excessive heat, in particular, as “consistent with our understanding of how the climate responds to increasing greenhouse gases.”