Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato and Ken Lo

Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects

Our analysis of 2011 global temperature is available on my web site. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120119_Temperature.pdf  This may be my final e-mail.  Last year, in a moment of temporary insanity, I agreed to participate in Chesapeake Climate Action Network's annual polar bear plunge this Saturday.  One of my sisters claims that a padded wagon is on the way.  If I catch pneumonia Anniek may shoot me.  If you want to join the fun (it can't really be all that bad, and it's for a good organization), info can be found by clicking here.  ~Jim Excerpt:   Oklahoma-Texas-Northern Mexico in 2011 and the Moscow region in 2010 provide examples of summer heat anomalies that exceeded 3σ relative to the 1951-1980 climatology.  In the 1951-1980 period of climatology the area with temperature anomaly exceeding +3σ was only a few  tenths of one percent.  However, the area covered by such extreme anomalies has increased with global warming.  +3σ anomalies covered 7% of the area with observations in Jun-Jul-Aug 2009, 13% in 2010, and 9% in 2011 (Hansen et al., 2012).  Increased occurrence of such extreme anomalies as a result of global warming, by more than a factor of 10, implies that we can attribute such recent extreme anomalies, including that in Texas and Oklahoma, to global warming.