Graph via Paul Krugman, who points us to this important story:
It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record [click on figure to enlarge].
The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.
Most significantly, NASA’s March prediction has come true: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.″
Software engineer (and former machinist mate in the US Navy) Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (click here). In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March — and then easily set in April.
Actually, NASA first made its prediction back in January 2009:
Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.”
Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”
In fact, the 12-month record we just beat was set in … 2007!
Now that it is hard to deny that the world is getting warmer, the deniers’ argument has become:
Well yeah, the world is getting warmer, but it is not our fault! (Similar to BP’s argument about their undersea oil gusher.)
Oh please, Global warming, fair enough it was a hot summer , but we are in a deep freeze, not only in the US but also in Europe as well…Mankind can handle Global warming, but I do not think that we as human beings could handle a little ice age…..Is that what is really going on with our weather……