Hottest 12 Months On Record: NOAA Data ‘Show No Pause In Warming’
NOAA reports, “The past 12 months (10-13 to 9-14) was the warmest 12-month period since records began in 1880.” While some, mainly non-scientists, have said the world hasn’t warmed in 18 years “NOAA records show no pause in warming.”
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Annual temperature anomalies and 2014 projection from NOAA (see below). Click to Enlarge
Global warming is like the Energizer bunny. It just keeps going and going and going. The big difference is that there aren’t any “Energizer bunny” deniers, claiming that the bunny stopped moving 18 years ago!
Not only did NOAA report Monday that last month was the hottest September on record, but they also pointed out, “The past 12 months—October 2013–September 2014—was the warmest 12-month period among all months since records began in 1880.”
NOAA climatologist Jessica Blunden says “It’s pretty likely” that 2014 will break the record for hottest year.” The AP reports:
Some people, mostly non-scientists, have been claiming that the world has not warmed in 18 years, but “no one’s told the globe that,” Blunden said. She said NOAA records show no pause in warming.
To paraphrase Taylor Swift, fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, but we’re just gonna bake, bake, bake, bake, bake.
What’s especially amazing is that 2014 is poised to break the global temperature record despite the fact that it isn’t an El Niño year. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records, as NASA has explained.
But the underlying trend of human-caused warming is simply too strong to be denied, as it were. If we want to slow it down and ultimately stop it before it destroys a livable climate, we need to slash carbon pollution ASAP.
Why does NOAA think 2014 will be a record? They released this chart as a supplement to their September global temperature report (click to enlarge):
NOAA explains:
These graphics compare the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2014 (black line) to what were ultimately the five warmest years on record: 2010, 2005, 1998, 2003, and 2013. Each month along each trace represents the year-to-date average temperature. In other words, the January value is the January average temperature, the February value is the average of both January and February, and so on.
The graph at the top of this post, by Things Break, uses NOAA’s purple projection, which assumes that each of the last three months of 2014 matches its 3rd warmest value on record. As NOAA explains, “Each of the last six months (April through September) have been 3rd warmest or warmer.” In fact, four of the last five months — May, June, August, and September — have been first (or tied for first) warmest, so there’s a good chance 2014 will be warmer than this projection.
I asked Dr. John Abraham, a climate expert who follows global temperature trends closely, what it would mean if this becomes the hottest year on record despite the fact that there’s been no El Niño. He told me:
It is likely we will have the hottest year on record. The surprising fact is this year has not had an El Niño. This year was not supposed to be hot, at least according to those who think climate change had stopped. But the real facts tells us a different story, the Earth is still warming, the “pause” never really was, and once again…. The contrarians were wrong.
When will the media and politicians will stop paying attention to the dangerously wrong deniers and confusionists?
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How Should You Laugh At Renée Zellweger’s Face Today?
You have to look a certain way. You have to look that way forever. But use surgery to do it, and we’ll mock your face off.
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Do it like Buzzfeed, with helpful side-by-sides of photos of Zellweger from a week ago, a month ago, years ago. Do it like Gawker, with the plausible deniability that what you’re doing isn’t cruel at all, where you are just presenting the evidence: “Here Are Some Pictures of Renée Zellweger.” Do it like Fox, as if you’re playing detective, trying to uncover the source of her “mysterious facial changes.” Do it like The Telegraph, get right to the point: “What happened to your face?” Do it like CBS, with laughably awful (and confusing) grammar: I was unaware you could “stir up a buzz” or look “dramatically different than usual.”
CREDIT: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
Is this picture really so strange, so grotesque? Is the sight of a woman over 40 who appears to have had work done such a rarity?
If we’re going to perpetuate an entertainment industry that fetishes female youth and rejects everything else, we don’t get to trash talk women who choose to alter their looks through whatever means are at their disposal. We’re the ones who created a social and professional environment that is inhospitable to any other path.
We built that world, and now we also have to live in it. Over 11 million cosmetic procedures — both surgical and nonsurgical — were performed by board-certified plastic surgeons, dermatologists and otolaryngologists in the United States in 2013. That’s 12 billion dollars worth of nips, tucks and tweaks, the most money spent on these elective procedures since the recession hit in 2008. Women, with 10.3 million out of that 11 million, make up 90.6-percent of the total.
Maybe Zellweger had surgery and maybe she didn’t and maybe she used Botox and maybe she didn’t. If she did either, she is part of an ever-growing segment of the population. If she did, she isn’t some freak show; she’s an average American woman who is older now than she was the last time you looked at her or really gave her any thought. She is older than she was in Jerry Maguire, older than she was in all the Bridget Jones movies, older than she was in Empire Records, she is older than she was when you started reading this story. And soon, at the end of this sentence, she will be older still.
We punish women for aging badly (i.e. just aging on the regular). We punish women who “try too hard” (i.e. resorting to surgery, Botox). “Aging” is only acceptable if (a) you’re a celebrity we only discovered after the age of 30 anyway or (b) you have the magical, admittedly awe-inspiring genetics of someone like Diane Lane.
To be a woman in public is to always be in a bind. You are going to age; this is science. But you can’t take inventory of the pop cultural landscape, realize what lies in wait for you if you don’t live up to impossible standards of agelessness, and do anything about it. You cannot take matters into your own hands. Don’t try too hard; you’re embarrassing yourself. You have to lose the baby weight by “just chasing the kids around.” You have to house spaghetti and meatballs before your Vanity Fair interview. You have to chirp about the benefits of “wearing sunscreen every day and drinking tons of water.”
You have to look a certain way. You have to look that way forever. But if you aren’t born with it, don’t bother. Anything you do that is unnatural — anything cosmetic, be it makeup or surgery or some combination of the two — will be ridiculed. You have to live with your face, exactly as it is. Because if you do anything to change your face, to try to make us like you more, we will mock you.
Of course when you age, as you inevitably will, you’ll be mocked, too. It will be ugly, regardless.
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