Green | December 07, 2009 | 10 comments

Decade of 2000s was warmest ever, scientists say

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/decade_s_end_climate

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SamuraiDave
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.
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.
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10 comments // Decade of 2000s was warmest ever, scientists say

  • Wetdog
    • 0
      Wetdog  

    • So exactly what is it that you two(rosrodamus and robidog) want to happen?

      Why do you want to destroy the US?

      We have to import 75% of all the petroleum we use. Mostly from nations that full of people who hate us and want to do us harm. You are so fanatically against Al Gore and global warming that you are completely on the side of Al Queada. You two are the BEST friend Osama Bin Laden could possibly have. Here you are, insanely defending keeping the US dependent on oil flowing mostly from Moslem countries, EXACTLY where he is the strongest. As long as the US is dependent on foreign oil to power our vehicles, we are weak and vulnerable to Osama Bin Laden and his Al Queada terrorists. And YOU two are his biggest supporters------because if we don't get off of petroeum dependence he has the upper hand. You two are as much a tool of Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen as any suicide bomber.

      If you hate the United States of America so much, why don't you pack up and move to another country, Afgahnistan maybe, the Taliban have been hanging out "Help Wanted" signs lately.

    • 2 years ago
  • robidog
    • 0
      robidog [removed]  

    • It's all about mind control, and its truly sad to see how easy it is to control almost the whole world in this way. Both the IPCC and the US CBO put the direct, as well as the
      peripheral costs of the COP 15 agenda in the tens of trillions of USD. It is surely crazy to impose such large costs on all the world's peoples for such an insignifcant and literally unmeasurable small gain. For even if human CO2 emissions were reduced to zero there would be hardly any effect on the climate. And it will be the developing nations who will suffer the most. These nations do not need reductions in CO2 emissions, or windmills, or solar panels, or other unreliable and expensive useless
      energy systems, or any part of COP 15. They need good infrastructures with quality roads for transport and ubundant
      electrical power which they can afford and which is reliable on demand. They need proper economic development to improve their lives in both human and ecological ways. They should pursue that goal without regard to atmospheric CO2. For the influence of carbon dioxide itself as a greenhouse gas is not that significant. On a normal day the atmosphere contains 20,000 p.p.m. of water vapour and about 300 p.p.m. of carbon dioxide. The government paid scientists tell us that an increase of another 100 p.p.m. of CO2 over the next 50 years would result in a catastrophic global warming. But the thermal
      absorbtivity of water vapour is four times larger than that of carbon dioxide. It therefore follows that the CO2 increase will increase the overall thermal absorbtivity of the mixture by about one eighth of one percent. Even the production of methane from livestock flatulence and the rotting swamps (or wetlands in
      environmentaltist jargon) vastly
      surpasses any influence of human
      production of CO2. That is why countless scientists have stated
      that AGW is phoney (Global Warming Petition Project, 31,478 independent US scientists
      of which 9,029 with PhDs. See also the Manhattan Declaration with more such signatories).

      One day, Al Gore et al will be seen for the deceiving, power-hungry people who they are. People who will say and do anything to retain that power. Al Gore even once said that he invented the internet. Isn't it pathetic that the world bought the idea of global warming from this lunatic after he said something like that?

    • 2 years ago
  • rodstradamus
  • SamuraiDave
  • ras_menelik
    • 0
      ras_menelik  

    • what are you saying ??? that we are sacrificing big oil for the wrong reasons ? pollution is pollution.

      every day another cancer's root cause is pined on this petroleum by product or another but the vaporizing of fossil fuel will not stop....

    • 2 years ago
  • rodstradamus
    • 0
      rodstradamus  

    • I agree about pollution, but it has nothing to do with CO2 and nothing to do with increasing temperatures. Its a con. You don't get it that Exxon, Dutch Royal Shell, BP and every major polluter, plus all the big banks support the carbon tax. Its a trading scheme like mortgage default swaps devised by Ken Lay of Enron with Al Gore (hatchet-man for NAFTA and GATT treaties that destroyed US manufacturing). He sold out this country a long time ago. The UN is compromised by quack bureaucrats and the Inconvenient Truth has been sued by over 30,000 scientists, including the creator of the Weather Channel. I don't need ad homonym; I'm too good of a writer. Want to debate or character assassinate? "LOL-ing" will only get you so far.

    • 2 years ago
  • SamuraiDave
    • 0
      SamuraiDave  
    • rodstradamus:

      Inconvenient Truth has been sued by 30,000 scientists? Really? Where's the litigation? 30,000 vs Al Gore? You're just parroting stuff you yourself cannot prove. Who are these scientists? Are they qualified? Have they sued or are they just a bunch of hot air?

    • 2 years ago
  • rodstradamus
    • 0
      rodstradamus  

    • What scientists say that? UN scientists? IPCC? They are a bunch of frauds, cooking the books, hiding the decline and fear mongering. Its environmental terrorism. The real facts show that 1998 was the hottest year and it has been cooling ever since, therefore making the 2000s not the hottest decade on record. This article actually has a name of a scientist on it. C02 is not a poison, plants breathe it and man does not affect temp on a global scale...on a local scale, yes. Do corporations rape the environment, poison the water and air? Yes. Do they also support carbon tax legislation? Yes. I am more than happy to help people find the truth...that's what I do.
      http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/bbc_global_cooling/2009/10/11/270997.html

    • 2 years ago
  • SamuraiDave
    • 0
      SamuraiDave  
    • rodstradamus:

      "environmental terrorism!" WTF? LoL! Listen, you tinfoil-hat-wearing nutter, pumping out pollutants into the land, sea, and air is environmental terrorism and to do nothing about it is to be an accessory.

    • 2 years ago
  • SamuraiDave
    • 0
      SamuraiDave  

    • 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.

    • 2 years ago
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