We can blame La Niña for January’s wildly inappropriate warmth — breaking heat records from Las Vegas to South Dakota — but NASA has some bad news about the bigger picture: 2011 was the ninth hottest year on record. Which isn’t dumb luck, of course. Of the top ten hottest years since we started keeping track in 1880, nine have been since 2000. 2010 and 2005 are currently tied for first place, which, in a way, makes today’s news kind of letdown. While we’re roasting our planet right proper, and 2011 is but more evidence, we couldn’t quite knock it out of the park and land another number one year. Oh, well. I’ve got a great feeling about 2012.Here’s a neat graph of what a planet heating up looks like:
In any case, what we’re talking about for 2011 is Earth being .92°F above the baseline temperature average for the mid-20th century. Maybe not so much in terms of day-to-day weather, but as a global, yearly figure, that almost-one-degree deviation is significant.“We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting,” says Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James E. Hansen. “So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Nina influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.”As you’ve surely assumed by now, the rise is due to greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide, which trap infrared radiation being emitted from Earth and, instead of letting it go into space, keeps it in the atmosphere. Note that in 1880, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was around 285 parts-per-million — today, it’s nearly 400 parts, and rising quickly. Global warming involves a lot of complicated processes but, at the same time, is hardly the enigma certain people would like you to think.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard or follow @everydayelk.
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