Climate Crisis is The New Normal

NOAA's climate report for 2012, issued Tuesday, adds more substance if no real surprises to the climate crisis as--in its words--the new normal.

This report involves 384 climate scientists from 52 countries, and tons of data.  Climate crisis deniers like to point to the slowing of the rate of global heating, which scientists believe is a temporary effect of the latest La Nina.  But there's the ongoing long term trend, and the specific data that supports the dour idea that heating is going to continue and probably accelerate.

The ongoing trend is for more climate records to be broken.  For instance: • Record ice loss from melting glaciers. 2012 will be the 22nd year in a row of ice loss.
• Near-record ocean heat content, a measure of heat stored in the oceans. When the ocean holds more heat than it releases, its heat content increases.
• Record sea level rise of 1.4 inches above average.
• Record-low June snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere. The June snow cover has declined 17 percent per decade since 1979, outpacing the shrinking summer Arctic sea ice extent by 4 percent.
• Record-low summer Arctic sea ice extent. Sea ice shrank to its smallest summer minimum since record-keeping began 34 years ago.
• Record-high winter Antarctic sea ice extent of 7.51 million square miles (19.44 million square kilometers) in September.
• Record-high man-made greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. In 2012, for the first time, global average carbon dioxide concentrations hit 392 parts per million and exceeded 400 ppm at some observation sites. The number means there were 400 carbon dioxide molecules per 1 million air molecules.

It's the Arctic melting that forecasts trouble ahead, including sea level rise, but also triggering more heating.  And the consistency of data led one of the report's co-authors to conclude "The near records being reported from year to year are no longer anomalies or exceptions," Richter-Menge said. "They have become the norm for us and what we expect to see in the near future."

NOAA compiles this report for the use of policymakers who are responsible for making policy for the future.  That's where the New Normal comes in.

The report's data indicate "new normal" conditions that can inform planning decisions, instead of relying on models that "count on the future being statistically a lot like the past," Sullivan said at a news briefing.

It  cuts no ice, Arctic or otherwise, with certain irresponsible policymakers.  The U.S. House for example just passed a bill that declared carbon pollution isn't a problem.  (They say you can't legislate morality--but apparently you can legislate reality.)  A GOPer controlled House committee voted to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and then cut its budget by a third to make sure.

None of that is likely to pass the Senate, and at the other end of PA Ave., the Secretary of Interior declared to her employees that she wants no climate crisis deniers among them.  But in terms of the effect on actual policy, this conflict creates what I called in a different context, a "furious stasis."  

This is the U.S.--even though in 2012 the global temp only got into the top ten, while it was the hottest year on record for the U.S.  Meanwhile an unequivocal statement from 60,000 scientists of the American Geophysical Union, just the latest scientific organization to say something similar:

This week the group issued a two-page statement with the headline: "Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years." It added, "Human-induced climate change requires urgent action."