NOAA: Global Warming is Real

by Janet Ritz

Cross-posted on HuffingtonPost

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory issued a report today verifying that 2006 was one of the warmest years on record and that last year's El Niño event was unlikely to have been the cause for the increase in temperature. As such, this report contradicts the assertion that the increase in temperature is primarily due to natural phenomena and states in writing that global warming's primary cause is an increase in greenhouse gases:

"Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year, according to a new study by four scientists at NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. [snip] The NOAA team also found that the probability of U.S. temperatures breaking a record in 2006 had increased 15-fold compared to pre-industrial times because of greenhouse gas increases in Earth’s atmosphere."

The report states that 2006's average temperature was "2.1 degrees F above the 20th Century average and marked the ninth consecutive year of above-normal U.S. temperatures." It also confirmed that every state in the continental United States had reported higher than normal temperatures and that 2006 was among the ten hottest years since 1895 (which was when they began to keep the records). The report went on to say that the: "authors also estimate that there is a 16 percent chance that 2007 will bring record-breaking warmth."

This is not new information. Not to the farmers going out of business in Southern California (1.93 inches of rainfall in 2006), or those forests dying in the high Sierras, or the Greek citizens fleeing for their lives from arson and negligence as their cradle of civilization burns, or the drought-stricken Turks converging on mosques in Ankara to pray for rain as the city cuts off their water supply for days at a time -- at the same time as their new, former Islamic party, albeit western leaning, President Abdullah Gul is sworn in against the wishes of their secular military who raised a ruckus at first, but then paused when they saw all those Gul supporters in mosques praying for rain had voted in his party as the majority and decided to wait and see whether Gul’s administration would live up to its secular promise.

It's also not news to the millions displaced by floods in South Asia and in the heartland of the United States, the nonstop rain in Oxfordshire earlier this summer, the imbalance between record heat and floods in Europe, the unexpected snowfall in South Africa... and then there's that whole lake that disappeared in Chile...

What is news? Four scientists from the established U.S. government agency responsible for reporting on the weather have put it in writing: Global warming is real, it is caused primarily by greenhouse gases and it's very likely to cause record-breaking temperatures yet again this year.

Here's a link to the NOAA report.