Climate Change

Dear Friends,

A headline in The New York Times today reads, "2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record, Surpassing 2010" (here).  I have reprinted a few paragraphs from the article below as well as a chart that to me says it all.

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.
Longstanding claims by climate-change skeptics that global warming has stopped, seized on by politicians in Washington to justify inaction on emissions, depend on a particular starting year: 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.
With the continued heating of the atmosphere and the surface of the ocean, 1998 is now being surpassed every four or five years, with 2014 being the first time that has happened in a year featuring no real El Niño pattern. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said the next time a strong El Niño occurs, it is likely to blow away all temperature records.

I am afraid that you cannot see the scale for the chart which shows the yearly global surface temperatures from 1880 through 2014 relative to the 1951-1980 average.  The last month where the surface temperature was below that average was in February 1985.  The sustained annual upward trend started in the late 1970s.  

Of course none of this will matter to the Republicans who deny the existence of climate change and who will, I am sure, continue to argue that climate change does not exist, that we cannot make any difference and that anything that we do will harm the economy.

Bravo, to President Obama who is going to issue new regulations to limit the emissions of methane by the oil and gas industry.  He announced that he will issue new regulations to dramatically reduce the emissions of methane during the exploration and production of oil and gas.  Here is an article from The New York Times.  President Obama is serious about doing everything he can to curb global warming and that is great.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal