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Decade of 2000s Was Warmest Ever, Scientists Say
It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year's Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts.
'CLIMATE INACTION COSTS LIVES' -- Using fire ladders, firemen and police attempt to arrest Greenpeace protesters who scaled the walls and draped a banner on the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Monday December 7, 2009.
(Photo/The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand) Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead.
Through 10 years of global boom and bust, of breakneck change around the planet, of terrorism, war and division, all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia.
As the decade neared its close, the U.N. gathered presidents and premiers of almost 100 nations for a "climate summit" to take united action, to sharply cut back the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told them they had "a powerful opportunity to get on the right side of history" at a year-ending climate conference in Copenhagen.
Once again, however, disunity might keep the world's nations on this side of making historic decisions.
"Deep down, we know that you are not really listening," the Maldives' Mohamed Nasheed told fellow presidents at September's summit.
Nasheed's tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.
The warming seas were growing more acid, too, from absorbing carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas in an overloaded atmosphere. Together, warmer waters and acidity will kill coral reefs and imperil other marine life - from plankton at the bottom of the food chain, to starfish and crabs, mussels and sea urchins.
Over the decade's first nine years, global temperatures averaged 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, NASA reported. And temperatures rose faster in the far north than anyplace else on Earth.
The decade's final three summers melted Arctic sea ice more than ever before in modern times. Greenland's gargantuan ice cap was pouring 3 percent more meltwater into the sea each year. Every summer's thaw reached deeper into the Arctic permafrost, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a global-warming gas.
Less ice meant less sunlight reflected, more heat absorbed by the Earth. More methane escaping the tundra meant more warming, more thawing, more methane released.
At the bottom of the world, late in the decade, International Polar Year research found that Antarctica, too, was warming. Floating ice shelves fringing its coast weakened, some breaking away, allowing the glaciers behind them to push ice faster into the rising oceans.
On six continents the glaciers retreated through the 2000s, shrinking future water sources for countless millions of Indians, Chinese, South Americans. The great lakes of Africa were shrinking, too, from higher temperatures, evaporation and drought. Across the temperate zones, flowers bloomed earlier, lakes froze later, bark beetles bored their destructive way northward through warmer forests. In the Arctic, surprised Eskimos spotted the red breasts of southern robins.
In the 2000s, all this was happening faster than anticipated, scientists said. So were other things: By late in the decade, global emissions of carbon dioxide matched the worst case among seven scenarios laid down in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. scientific network formed to peer into climate's future. Almost 29 billion tons of the gas poured skyward annually - 23 percent higher than at the decade's start.
By year-end 2008, the 2000s already included eight of the 10 warmest years on record. By 2060, that trajectory could push temperatures a dangerous 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) or more higher than preindustrial levels, British scientists said.
Early in the decade, the president of the United States, the biggest emitter, blamed "incomplete" science for the U.S. stand against rolling back emissions, as other industrial nations were trying to do. As the decade wore on and emissions grew, American reasoning leaned more toward the economic.
By 2009, with a new president and Congress, Washington seemed ready to talk. But in the front ranks of climate research - where they scale the glaciers, drill into ocean sediments, monitor a changing Earth through a web of satellite eyes - scientists feared they were running out of time.
Before the turn of the last century, with slide rule, pencil and months of tedious calculation, Svante Arrhenius was the first to show that carbon dioxide would warm the planet - in 3,000 years. The brilliant Swede hadn't foreseen the 20th-century explosion in use of fossil fuels.
Today their supercomputers tell his scientific heirs a much more urgent story: To halt and reverse that explosion of emissions, to head off a planetary climate crisis, the 10 years that dawn this Jan. 1 will be the fateful years, the final chance, the last decade.
29 Comments so far
Show AllPreliminary assessment based on meteorological years (Dec 1 to Nov 30). Will be finalized next month when final calendar year data is available.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has reported that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation orientation has switched from warm to cool, as it historically has every 20 to 30 years. (http://bit.ly/7jYlIx) Although the Laboratory doesn't, as far as I can tell, interpret this as an indicator that global warming has ceased until the end of the current cool period, Prof. Don J. Easterbrook thinks that's what it means (http://bit.ly/g0iYe).
The exact timing of the change from warm to cool doesn't appear to follow a smooth curve. The latest fluctuations show a change to cooler starting in 1998 and lasting a few years, then warming, then another downturn in 2008 (http://bit.ly/6spnJQ). Prof. Easterbrook concludes:
"Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years. The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."
Prof. Easterbrook adds that the warming predicted by the IPCC in 2007 hasn't turned out to be accurate.
It seems to me that notwithstanding that the decade ending December 31, 2009 is the warmest since humans began keeping records, the PDO evidence raises serious questions regarding the severity and imminence of catastrophic global warming, as well as the role anthropogenic GHG's play in it.
Clutch those straws!
The global warming "deniers" are coming out of the woodwork. They have much in common with the "birthers", the "9/11 truthers" and the "flatearthers".
The serious 9/11 crowd, which includes thousands of structural engineers, wants the facts to be revealed how no steel framed building before or since 9/11/2001 has collapsed due to fire alone. There is far too much documentary evidence that demonstrates the collapse of WTC 1&2 and WTC Building 7 were controlled demolitions.
Absolute nonsense! As a civil engineer and member of a number of professional associations, I can assure you that there are no practicing structural engineers who agree with the controlled demolition theory in any way.
Don't you think there are differences between an ordinary structure fire - burning office and interior trim which the buildings are designed aganist, and the massive impact of a wide-body airliner carrying many tons of fuel? It was a credit to the WTC's designer that the buildings stayed standing as long as they did.
There is no "documentary evidence" of such controlled domolition, only nonsense by people who are absolutely ignorant of the most elementary aspects of structural and materials science.
http://www.debunking911.com/
But I agree, there are similarities betwen the AGW denialist conspiracy theorists and the 9-11 conspiract theorists. Both insist that, as people completely uneducated in the subject, they are to be considered more knowlegable and credible than those who are ediucated in the subject and have spent years studying it. They also insist that every human intellectual endeavor has some sinister political agenda behind it.
The towers *were* designed to withstand impact of the largest airliner at that time.
And certainly significantly more than "no" practicing engineers have absolutely no confidence in the "official explanation."
I don't understand the need to defend the official line here - unless you completely buy their waffle theory where the buildings collapsed at near-free-fall rate, with even the central steel columns shredded to bits. Oh wait, was it the pancake theory? Anyway... over the years, there have been just too many pieces of evidence that clearly point to - at the very least - something other than the official story. The sequence of events from just before the crashes to what followed immediately and over the next few days, weeks and years are enough to raise suspicion of something other than what was said in the 9/11 commission report. I'm not even going to list them here - there's just too many of them, and this story is not about 9/11. I'm just baffled by your use of the words "nonsense" (twice), "absolutely ignorant", "completely uneducated in the subject" and so on, to defend the official line when THERE ARE engineers and architects who clearly doubt the official line. And looking beyond the WTC to the other sites and Building 7, the hasty removal of the debris, almost complete incineration of the "aircraft" at the Pentagon and Shanksville, the coincidental airforce "drill", and so on - I know I'm starting to list, which I said I wouldn't do. And the virtual sidelining of the "hunt" for Bin Laden in favor of grabbing Iraq first...Whichever way you look at it, there is enough to mistrust the official report - at the very least. There's no need to be so vehement in defending something that's so hard to defend.
pjd412 December 8th, 2009 2:20 pm – It's not clear how the "Truthers" got into this discussion. At any rate, I tend to agree with you and disagree with Alcyon (December 8th, 2009 4:02 pm), except that Alcyon has a point about the way you expressed your viewpoint. For example, I doubt there are NO practicing structural engineers who agree with the controlled demolition theory in ANY way, or that there is NO evidence supporting the theory of controlled demolition, only NONSENSE by people who are ABSOLUTELY IGNORANT OF THE MOST ELEMENTARY ASPECTS of structural and materials science. That kind of language causes even me to doubt that you know what you're talking about.
My take on the controversy: if probable cause existed that a controlled demolition caused the collapse, prosecution of this horrendous crime would have been brought, by now, against the people who organized and carried out the demolition. Some prosecutor, grand jury, and court, somewhere, would be naming names and sending out arrest warrants. To believe otherwise you have to believe the entirety of law enforcement and the judicial system acquiesced to, if not actually participated in, the demolition. That's a theory far less credible than the "official" version of what happened. Another thing I've never heard explained by "truthers," going on nine years after 9/11: what happened to the plane that is falsely said to have crashed into the Pentagon, and Flight 93, and why have none of the survivors of those crashes, or indeed of the collapse of buildings in New York, successfully taken up the cudgels against the responsible criminals? Are those survivors also part of the plot?
What do you think of that, pjd412?
Read something from a statistician:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/riddle-me-this/
Brian Brademeyer December 8th, 2009 9:30 am -- I checked out the site you recommend, and have bookmarked it. The site argues that considering longer periods, and the expected variability, the recent downturns in temperature are consistent with increasing global temperature as predicted by the IPCC. While it may be true that the three smooth lines go upward as shown because of the general trend of the particular values at the dots, I never understood the IPCC as saying that we had to expect big drops in global temperature as a part of GW. Is there anything in the IPCC writings to support this?
It seems to me the analysis in the "Open Mind" site contradicts the PDO theory of Easterbrook: that periodic swings in global temperature track the 25-30 year cycles of the PDO's. Does the Open Mind argument mean PDO switches, from warm to cool, mean nothing?
Thanks for looking at the referred site.
First, there has been no "big drop" in global average temperature. None.
Second, PDO is a redistribution of heat between ocean and atmosphere. It says nothing about steady rise of total global temperature due to greenhouse effect.
We focus on where we live, and we live in the atmosphere, not the ocean. If we had more instrumentation monitoring the ocean heat content, the steady rise would be as unquestioned as the Keeling curve (the ocean has 270 times the mass of the atmosphere, and dominates the thermal inertia of the system).
Brian Brademeyer December 8th, 2009 4:58 pm -- Where does the notion that global temperature dropped in 2008 come from -- and that 1998 was a record warm year, implying that later years were cooler -- if there have been no big drops?
Sigh -- annual numbers are not meaningful regarding trends in CLIMATE.
Brian Brademeyer December 8th, 2009 6:35 pm -- Okay, let me ask it this way: what evidence would cause you to doubt that the IPCC has it right?
You seem to have absolutely no understanding of this issue.
For AGW to be wrong, virtually ALL of science would have to be overthrown, from quantum mechanics to biochemistry.
And the IPCC is most likely underestimating the impacts, certainly the timeline, of the coming adverse effects.
Brian Brademeyer December 8th, 2009 10:11 pm -- I don't mean to be disrespectful, but to say "ALL science would have to overthrown" seems to be acknowledging that your view on this subject is religious. I would have thought that a change in the data for the period 2001 to 2010 to show lower global temperatures than the average since 2000 would be enough to disprove the IPCC's projection. Or perhaps a restoration of the arctic sea ice and/or glaciers. How can you say data confirms your theory if you can't say what would disconfirm it?
Your link to a PDO page: http://bit.ly/7jYlIx
also known as http://topex-www.jpl.nasa.gov/science/pdo.html
is from *January 2000*. The "we are entering a cooling phase of the PDO" prediction was true, back then, but *global* temperatures still set new records in 2005 and 2007.
Remember, the PDO is just a regional (northern Pacific) phenomena, and when in the "warm" phase, the west Pacific becomes warm, and the east becomes cool. It just oscillates the thermal energy back and forth. It is not correlated with a warming of the planet - as the Pacific Ocean thermal energy sloshes around, the planet has warmed and warmed.
If you are relying on the PDO to "cool" the planet and absolve you of responsibility for driving an old, hulking SUV and keeping your McMansion at 86 deg F in the winter, you are out of luck:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Pacific-Decadal-Oscillation.htm
Herodotus December 8th, 2009 4:56 pm -- the site referenced contains a note that it was updated December 23, 2008. The graphs I cited to are pretty current.
If the PDO is ineffectual, then why do so many people blame the record warmth of 1998 on a strong El Nino? El Nino is a smaller version of the PDO, but evidently it has large effects.
I agree, however, that a cooling of one part of the ocean seems to be offset by warming elsewhere, whether at the surface or below the surface.
Nonetheless, the correlation of PDO phases with global temperature seems real. Or do you think it's a figment of Easterbrook's imagination?
1998 is a "record warm" year only for the Hadley and satellite datasets (UAH and the corrected RSS) that don't include the poles, like the GISS dataset does. Since the poles are warming faster than anywhere else on earth, the GISS approach shows that 2005 and 2007 were warmer, overall, than in 1998.
But it's true regional fluctuations like El Nino and La Nina can nudge the long term warming trend slightly up, or slightly down. 1998 was the warmest El Nino of the 20th century, so was a bigger nudge than usual. But the underlying warming trend continues - about 0.2 deg C per decade. The PDO could nudge it a bit, as well.
Compare the PDO temperature fluctuations to the global temperature anomaly :
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/pdo_temp.gif
There seems to be some short term correlations, but why would a Pacific *oscillation* of heat cause long term warming ? It should cause only warming, then cooling, then warming, then cooling again - no long term trend. The long term warming observed since 1890 is being caused by the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.
Perhaps Prof. Easterbrook should get someone to check his math:
"The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming"
CO2 has gone from 280 ppm (pre Industrial Revolution) to the current 388 ppm - that's 39% more of a potent, *accumulating* greenhouse gas.
Since CO2 emissions are climbing at an accelerating rate (e.g. Earth's population now 6.7 billion and climbing, China recently has more drivers than the US, India not far behind...) the planet will warm faster than ever.
I'm glad Dr. Easterbrook is keeping busy in his retirement, but perhaps he should not venture so far afield from geology - using your retirement to challenge younger, working Professors in a hot field not your own might get you some speaking and publication fees, but it won't end well:
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~dbunny/
Herodotus December 8th, 2009 10:24 pm -- Thanks for the thoughtful post. I hadn't heard the explanation for 1998 that you state. A lot of people say, flatly, that 1998 was the hottest year on record.
It's stunning to me that I am the 3rd person posting to this article. There should be thousands, no millions of posts regarding this subject and a call to action for immediate change. It's also clear to me that the wars we've been executing over the past several years are for global resources, not just oil. Amazing. We are all still in denial.
Notice how Saudi Arabia, Russia (big oil and gas producers), Canada (oil, gas and Tar Sand producer, big oil and gas consumer), and the US (biggest oil and gas consumer in the world) have already jumped on the whole 'Climate-gate' band wagon, and are now doing their best to scuttle any proposed cuts in hydrocarbon use that would end up costing the Elite their cushy lifestyle?
And we are only on Day One of the Copenhagen Summit.
While the protestors howl and engage in civic dissent, risking a heavy handed police response, those inside the conference engage in endless platitudes and argument, but know deep down that other than a piece of paper proposing further consideration and study, nothing will really be done.
And soon, millions of poor, disenfranchised and displaced will start their migration to higher ground. India has already started constructing a barrier to keep out Bangladeshi refugees.
The politicians and Corporate Elite have already got their lifeboats in order, their hideaways picked out and evacuation plans in place with the Xe/Blackwater subsidiary that specializes in such. And you are not on their list.
It was no coincidence that these e-mails and the Faux News commotion and deliberate confusion about Climate Change/Global Warming has surfaced just in time to scuttle the Copenhagen talks.
We should be able to see the fingerprints of the Corporate elite all over this. The question is: What are we going to do about it?
Sure the 2000s was the warmest ever, but according to the deniers, we started cooling around 2000 and never looked back.
Now, I know that statistical analysis shows that we actually are still warming, but there's no denying that the warming might have paused a bit. Why? Why did atmospheric temperatures pause at 1998 and never really continue their previous slope? Here's my theory: if you look at Figure 2 in
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Why-is-Greenlands-ice-loss-accelerating.html you'll see that the mass of Greenland started falling off a cliff in.... 1998. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that Antartica did the same.
When land ice melts off continents like Greenland or Antarctica, the only place for it to get the heat to do this is from the air. That's cuz these ice shelves are insulated from the ocean by several miles of ROCK (they are continents: duh).
The melting of 600 GIGAtons of ice per year from the Greenland and Antarctic continents, has probably pulled SO MUCH heat out of the atmsophere, that its lowered the sensible heating effect on the air that applied BEFORE it started melting in 1998.
This massive meltoff of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves at least partially explains why the surface temperature record paused in the 2000's, after the rapid growth of the 1960s to 2000s.
All that lost ice will be acting to dilute and therefore cool the North Atlantic Current which is responsible for keeping Northern Europe habitable.
And that lost ice will also act as an increase in albedo, which will lead to more ocean warming and more ice loss. It's a vicious feedback loop, and we are just pumping more heat and climate altering chemicals into the system.
The reason all the old climate change models are out of synch is because we have not done anything to curtail our emissions, so the chemicals keep building, keep driving the feedback faster than we can process the data.
Hmm...interesting. You'd think that this melting of ice slowing down or temporarily halting the warming of the atmosphere would have been incorporated into one of the models. And, as Galenwainwright points out below, it would cause an acceleration of the melting - because now you have more dark ocean and less white ice that can reflect (btw, this is a decrease in albedo, not increase :)
If it's already worked into one of the models, then the scientists should be coming out and explaining that whatever temporary slowing down of warming we see is due to this, and that's not necessarily a good thing - as worse is to follow...Of course, you can't expect the scientists to engage in a shouting match with the denial crowd - but at least some of them should be going on TV and countering the mad hysteria over the leaked emails and other talking points of the denial industry.
>>>"Deep down, we know that you are not really listening," the Maldives' Mohamed Nasheed told fellow presidents at September's summit. Nasheed's tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.
That's the sad story in all this: some of the people who are least responsible for climate change will be the most affected, and those who are most responsible will be sitting pretty - on the northern latitudes, with access to all resources and the nukes to fry anyone who would even dream of laying hands on these resources. I generally believe in karma - you know, you reap what you sow. But where is the law of karma in all this?
I have enjoyed your recent posts...karma...sort of spiritual justice...
I hope justice at the spiritual level is doing better than it is in the physical plane...
around here, it always seems to be shuffling around out back, in the dark, looking for suspects or evidence long gone, trustingly following the pointing fingers of those who would mislead down one rabbit hole after another, until time, and changes in circumstance, negate the freshness of the original offense, and thwart increasingly wilted efforts toward revival into either a reeking morass of dead ends, or a new fascination with an even more recent outrage...
thus ends today, bring on the morrow, and may we all join together in the near future to find a new way...Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...
>>>Before the turn of the last century, with slide rule, pencil and months of tedious calculation, Svante Arrhenius was the first to show that carbon dioxide would warm the planet - in 3,000 years. The brilliant Swede hadn't foreseen the 20th-century explosion in use of fossil fuels.
I have tried to point out that global warming due to the greenhouse gases - specifically CO2 from burning fossil fuels - has been predicted, and rough calculations made, over a 100-years ago (1890's). I have also mentioned the name of Arrhenius on a few occasions, here and elsewhere - to counter the lie that this whole climate change thing is a left-wing conspiracy. Glad to see this appear in an article here on CD :)