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frayadjacentThe National Climatic Data Center just released its 2012 temperature estimates for the United States, and last year was the hottest year on record. By more than a degree Fahrenheit (a bit less than half a degree C). That is a HUGE jump. Incidentally, the previous record holder was 1998, a year of an extreme El Nino event -- which tends to raise temperatures globally.
There's a really nice article about the record in the New York Times, too. That paper posts some fishy stuff about global warming on both sides of the "debate", but this does a great job at explaining that the attribution is both natural, year-to-year variability and also is very likely human-caused global warming.
If you like graphs, here's a plot of the contiguous US temperature record over the past century or so, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. And here's a map of global surface warming -- it shows how much warmer the average surface temperature in the period between 1999 and 2008 was compared to the period between 1940 and 1980. (It's in Celsius; roughly double the numbers for Fahrenheit.)
It wasn't the hottest year on record globally -- the NCDC expects 2012 will rank around 9.
If you're wondering why I call them "temperature estimates", it's because even thermometers have biases and can be affected by things like nearby buildings, and there isn't a thermometer on every square meter of the US. (Though the US has some of the most thorough weather-station coverage anywhere.) So it's not the absolute truth, but every effort has been made -- by many very smart people -- to have as accurate an estimate as possible.
There's a really nice article about the record in the New York Times, too. That paper posts some fishy stuff about global warming on both sides of the "debate", but this does a great job at explaining that the attribution is both natural, year-to-year variability and also is very likely human-caused global warming.
If you like graphs, here's a plot of the contiguous US temperature record over the past century or so, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. And here's a map of global surface warming -- it shows how much warmer the average surface temperature in the period between 1999 and 2008 was compared to the period between 1940 and 1980. (It's in Celsius; roughly double the numbers for Fahrenheit.)
It wasn't the hottest year on record globally -- the NCDC expects 2012 will rank around 9.
If you're wondering why I call them "temperature estimates", it's because even thermometers have biases and can be affected by things like nearby buildings, and there isn't a thermometer on every square meter of the US. (Though the US has some of the most thorough weather-station coverage anywhere.) So it's not the absolute truth, but every effort has been made -- by many very smart people -- to have as accurate an estimate as possible.