Snowflake Challenge: Day 8

Day 8: In your own space, talk about setting yourself a fannish goal.

I have SO many fannish goals.  Here are the main ones.

1. Go to Vividcon!  This will be my self-reward for finishing my dissertation. 

2. Vid for Vividcon!

3. Make a few vids aimed specifically at developing a new skill.  For instance, I'm starting to clip for my (hopeful) Club Vivid submission, and will be focusing on learning how to use -- and add -- motion more effectively.

4. Learn photoshop well enough to make passable icons.  I'd love to gain this skill as a way to make gifts for people, since I'll never be writing fic and making a vid is a huge endeavor.  Also, as much as I love many of the icons out there, I'd really like to be able to make my own.

(Day 7 was friendslocked due to cat photos.  I'll happily add you if you want; just let me know.)

2012: Hottest Year on Record in US

The 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.