So put down the Kool-Aid and turn off the television, because last year was the joint-warmest on record and also the wettest over land, with sea ice levels dropping and drought on the rise.
The year 2010 may have been the most extreme in terms of weather since the explosion of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1816, when much of the world experienced reduced daylight and no summer, says one of the world’s most prominent meteorologists.
A combination of abnormal climatic phenomena resulted in the year being the hottest, wettest, and in many cases also the driest and coldest in recorded history, says Jeff Masters, co-founder of climate tracking website Weather Underground.
According to Masters 2011 is already on track to be exceptional, with a deepening drought in Texas – where 65% of the state is now in “exceptional drought” conditions – and one of the warmest springs experienced in 100 years taking place across much of Europe. It is also the most extreme tornado year recorded in the US, with Arctic sea ice already at its lowest ever for the time of year.
2010: a year of extremes
Heat
Temperatures in Earth’s lower atmosphere tied with the warmest year on record. Unofficially, 19 nations set all-time extreme heat records in 2010.
Snowmageddon
The atmospheric circulation in the Arctic took on its most extreme configuration in 145 years of record-keeping. Canada had its warmest and driest winter on record, but the US its coldest winter in 25 years. A series of remarkable snowstorms pounded the eastern US with the “Snowmageddon” blizzard dumping more than two feet of snow on Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Sea ice
Arctic Sea ice volume in 2010 was the lowest on record, with 60% missing in September 2010 compared to the average from 1979-2010.
Corals
Coral reefs took their second-worst beating on record in 2010, thanks to record or near-record high summer water temperatures over much of the planet’s tropical oceans.
Wettest
Last year set a new record for the wettest term in Earth’s recorded history over land areas. The difference in precipitation from the average in 2010 was about 13% higher than that of the previous record wettest year, 1956. The record wetness over land was counterbalanced by relatively dry conditions over the oceans.
Amazon
The Amazon rainforest experienced its second 100-year drought in five years with the largest northern tributary of the Amazon river – the Rio Negro – dropping to 13 feet (four metres) below its usual dry-season level. This was its lowest level since record-keeping began in 1902.
Cyclones and hurricanes
Each year, the globe has about 92 cyclones – called hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, typhoons in the western Pacific and tropical cyclones in the southern hemisphere. In 2010, we had just 68.
Monsoon
An abnormal summer monsoon helped lead to precipitation 30-80% below normal in northern China and Mongolia, and 30-100% above average across a wide swath of central China. Western China saw summer precipitation of more than double the average.
Heatwaves
A scorching heatwave struck Moscow in late June 2010 and steadily increased in intensity through July, as the jet-stream remained “stuck” in an unusual loop that kept cool air and rain-bearing low-pressure systems far north of the country.
| Storm Warnings: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change |
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“…Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn’t suddenly seemed more common. In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. And this year’s natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia’s crippling heat wave.
These patterns have caught the attention of scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They’ve been following the recent deluges’ stunning radar pictures and growing rainfall totals with concern and intense interest. Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years. But one of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common. “Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with warming world,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt’s group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality?”
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The folks who think anthropomorphic climate change is simply a “Liberal Lie” to kill business are the same people who think the Earth is 6000yrs old… And these people are funded by people who know we are killing the planet but see profit as more important.
