Global warming in 2008 far outpaces climate models, recent rate of warming
In the past year, the Earth warmed as astounding 0.37 degrees Celsius, which, as Joe Romm over at Climate Progress reported, is 20 times the rate of warming predicted by certain climate models and 20 times the annual rate of warming in the past twenty years or so.
Despite dubious claims that the cooler temperatures we’ve recently seen throughout the country are part of a “global cooling,” the National Climatic Data Center says that January 2009 was the seventh-warmest on record for the month of January.
Joe, at Climate Progress, goes on to write:
Now what could really make this a genuinely serious emerging storyline is that in the summer of 2007, the Hadley Center made some interesting near-term predictions in Science (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot“). They pointed out that in addition to the steady increase in anthropogenic warming from greenhouse gases you have to add a smaller variation from climate oscillations linked to the oceans. Those oscillations have been tamping down temperatures a tad, and may keep doing so for the next year or so, but the decade of the 2010s is going to bring a return to record-smashing temperatures…
They further predict the year 2014 will “be 0.30° ± 0.2°C warmer than the observed value for 2004,” which means there is a 50% chance that the warming from 2004 to 2014 will be 3/8 that of the warming of the previous century!
