Global Warming Accelerates
The participants at the Paris climate change conference saw themselves produce “an agreement hailed as ‘historic, durable and ambitious’”and “the world’s greatest diplomatic success,” according to the UK Guardian on Dec. 15, 2015.
The president of the Natural Resources Defense Council said, “A great tide has turned. Finally the world stands united against the central environmental challenge of our time.”
The image of the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, a photograph taken by the first U.S. astronauts to orbit the moon.
They were still basking in the glow of their success, when news arrived of a sudden and extreme rise in global temperature, described by climate scientists as “stunning”, “a shocker”, “a bombshell’, “hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2C warming over pre-industrial levels”, “a kind of climate emergency”, an event “using up all our room for manoevre.”
UK Guardian: “February breaks global temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount.” An event, in short, rendering almost obsolete everything done at the Paris conference.
The most significant aspect of the February event is probably the speed with which it happened. Spikes occur in global temperature during major El Ninos, although ordinarily not in arctic regions or the Southern Hemisphere, and this was the largest spike ever. It dwarfs the spike of the last major El Nino, 1998.
Here’s what recent history of global average monthly ocean and land surface temperature looks like.
As you can see, the monthly global average temperature went up in the last two months approximately as much as it had in the prior 35 years. To be sure, El Nino does funny things, but just look for another comparable El Nino.
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