UN Picks New Climate Chief: Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican Diplomat, Chosen To Fill Role

EDITH M. LEDERER | 05/17/10 04:52 PM | Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/1 ... 78704.html

UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica as the new U.N. climate chief. She is an expert on climate negotiations and the daughter of the country's former president.
Figueres, who has been a member of Costa Rica's negotiating team on climate change since 1995, will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"I come to the secretariat with great respect for the institution and a deep commitment to (the) UNFCCC process," Figueres said in a statement issued by the U.N. "There is no task that is more urgent, more compelling or more sacred than that of protecting the climate of our planet for our children and grandchildren."

De Boer, who has shephered troubled climate talks for nearly four years, announced his resignation in February, saying he will step down July 1 to work in business and academia.

Ban expressed gratitude to de Boer, who is from the Netherlands, "for his dedicated service and tireless efforts on behalf of the climate change agenda," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

Nesirky said Monday the appointment was made after consultations with parties to the convention.

"(Ms.) Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders, and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, nonprofit sector and private sector," he said.

De Boer announced his departure two months after a disappointing climate summit in Copenhagen that ended with a nonbinding accord brokered by President Barack Obama promising emissions cuts and immediate financing for poor countries – but even that failed to win consensus agreement.

Figueres, 53, will take the helm just five months before 193 nations reconvene in Cancun, Mexico, in December for another attempt to reach a worldwide legal agreement on controlling greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for the gradual heating of the Earth that scientists predict will worsen weather-related disasters.

De Boer, European Union officials and others are cautioning that the Cancun conference probably will yield only a first answer on curbing greenhouse gases, and a legally binding climate change treaty isn't likely until next year at the earliest.
Figueres has a long history with the climate change convention: From 2007 to 2009 she was vice president of its bureau, representing Latin America and the Caribbean, and over the years she has chaired numerous international negotiations.

Her father, Jose Figueres, who led the 1948 revolution and founded modern democracy in Costa Rica, was president of the country three times. Her mother, Karen Olsen Beck, served as Costa Rican ambassador to Israel in 1982 and was elected a member of Congress from 1990-1994.

Figueres graduated from Swarthmore College in 1979 and received a master's degree from the London School of Economics.

In 1994, she became the director of the technical secretariat of the Renewable Energy in the Americas program, today housed at the Organization of the American States. The following year she founded and became executive director of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the participation of Latin American countries in the Climate Change Convention.

She is married, has two daughters and is based in the United States, outside Washington, D.C.

2010 on track to be hottest ever - U.S. climate data
Wed May 19, 2010 4:23pm IST Email | Print | Share | Single Page [-] Text [+]


LONDON (Reuters) - This year is on track to be the hottest ever after data published by America's climate agency this week showed record global temperatures in April and the first four months of 2010.

"The combined April global land and ocean average surface temperature was the warmest on record at 58.1 degrees Fahrenheit (14.5 degrees Celsius), which is 1.37 degrees F (0.76 degrees C) above the 20th century average of 56.7 F (13.7 C)," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a report on its website dated Monday, May 17.

Record heat recorded for Africa's greatest lake
By Daniel Howden in Nairobi
Tuesday, 18 May 201

Africa's deepest lake is warming at an "unprecedented" rate thanks to man-made climate change, scientists have warned. Lake Tanganyika, which stretches from Burundi and DR Congo on its northern shores to southern Tanzania and Zambia, is the second largest lake in the world by volume.

The 420-mile-long finger of water in south-central Africa is now warmer than at any point in the last 1,500 years, according to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience, and the consequences could be dire for the 10 million people who live around it and depend on its fisheries.

"Our records indicate that changes in the temperature of Lake Tanganyika in the past few decades exceed previous natural variability," the paper found. "We conclude that these unprecedented temperatures and a corresponding decrease in productivity can be attributed to anthropogenic global warming."

Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.
February 11, 2010

The Water-Climate Relation

The second study, reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature, addresses how all this water can help scientists track global warming and predict its effects.

Led by John Lyman at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this study involved a team of researchers from the United States, Germany, and Japan. They analyzed several different sets of ocean temperature measurements collected around the world from 1993 through 2008.

These measurements were made by different groups over this 16-year period using different assumptions. Some discrepancies between them arose because of the way the data was processed. Some swaths of ocean were not sampled as widely or as often as others. Changes in instrumentation have confused the issue further.

However, Lyman and colleagues standardized all the measurements and in doing so they found the same general trend for all the data.

"Although you see differences, they are all fairly consistent,” said Lyman.

They also averaged the results from these groups, which gave them the best estimate to date of the extent to which the top layers of the ocean have warmed over the last two decades. Lyman said that information is important because it is a good measure of global warming.

"Ninety percent of the energy [trapped by increased greenhouse gasses] goes into the ocean," said Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, an expert who was not involved in the NOAA study.

"It's important to track this in order to properly understand what is happening in the climate system," Trenberth said. "If you dump heat in the ocean and it gets moved around and reappears somewhere, it has consequences in terms of the weather patterns."

A climatologist at NASA who was not involved in the research said this week that the long-term trends in ocean warming presented in the new study have confirmed other results in the field.

"That's what the climate models were predicting would be happening," said Gavin Schmidt, the NASA climatologist. "It's a great paper."

Provided by Inside Science News Service

Did megafauna extinction cool the planet?
May 23rd, 2010 in Space & Earth / Earth Sciences



Mammoth exhibit at a museum. The rapid decline of mammoths and other megafauna after humans spread across the New World may explain a bone-chilling plunge in global temperatures some 12,800 years ago, researchers reported Sunday.

The rapid decline of mammoths and other megafauna after humans spread across the New World may explain a bone-chilling plunge in global temperatures some 12,800 years ago, researchers reported Sunday.

The 100-odd species of grass-eating giants that once crowded the North American landscape released huge quantities of methane -- from both ends of their digestive tracks.

As a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2).

It was not enough to trigger runaway global warming. But when all that gaseous output suddenly tapered off, it caused or at least contributed to a prolonged freeze known as the Younger Dryas cold event, they argue.

If so, the "Anthropocene epoch" -- the era of major human impacts on Earth's climate system -- began not with the industrial revolution in the 1800s, but the large-scale influx of two-legged predators to the Americas more than 13,000 years earlier.

Calculations by a trio of researchers led by Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico, published in Nature, show how all the pieces of this previously unsolved puzzle might fit together.

Extrapolating from data on cows and other modern-day ruminants, the scientists estimated the total methane output of pre-historic megafauna at nearly 10 trillion grams per year.

At the same time, ice-core samples reveal that an abrupt drop in atmospheric methane levels of 180 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) coincides with both the virtual extinction of these gas-gushing herbivores and the onset of the deep chill that followed.

Greenland ice cores from other periods show that a reduction in methane levels of 20 ppbv corresponds to a reduction in temperature of roughly 1.0 degrees Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

That would add up to a decrease of 9.0 to 12.0 C (16 to 22 F), a near-perfect match with the Younger Dryas cold snap.

"We find that the loss of megafauna could explain 12.5 to 100 percent of the atmospheric decrease in methane observed," the researchers said.

The theory is bolstered by the fact that the plunge in concentration was two-to-four times faster than the five other largest methane drops during the last 500,000 years, suggesting a unique confluence of factors.

"The megafaunal extinction is the earliest catastrophic event attributed to human activity," the study concluded.

"We thus propose that the onset of the 'Anthropocene' [epoch] should be recalibrated to 13,400 years before present, coincident with the first large-scale migrations of humans into the Americas."

Scientists detect huge carbon 'burp' that helped end last ice age
May 27, 2010

Scientists have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.



The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository - something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.

Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern Ocean floor between Antarctica and South Africa, the international team led by Dr Luke Skinner of the University of Cambridge radiocarbon dated shells left behind by tiny marine creatures called foraminifera (forams for short).

Hot Air: Three New Books on Global Warming

By Dale Pendell
Posted: May 28, 2010 01:14 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dale-pend ... l?ir=Green

Bill McKibben: Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, 2010, Times Books. $24.00
James Hansen: Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Bloomsbury USA, 2009. $25.00

James Hoggan, with Richard Littlemore: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, Greystone Books, 2009. $15.00

Reviewed by Dale Pendell

"Denial" is a term used in addiction and recovery: "No, I am not an addict -- I can quit anytime I want." "No, I am not wrecking my home and my family." "No, I'm not destroying my liver." There is no hope for recovery while the addict, or the addict and his family, are in denial. First the addict has to "bottom out." Three new books on global warming are doing what they can to wake us up, hoping to shake us out of our denial before we bottom out. In the case of global warming, if we "bottom out," in spite of the seeming ability of technology to find ever more clever fixes, it will likely be too late for recovery.

The message of Bill McKibben's book Eaarth, and hence the book's title, is that we have already passed the tipping point of global warming and now live on a different planet than the one on which civilization developed and flourished during the last 12,000 years. The issue is not about "our grandchildren," McKibben insists, the changes are already here: "one hundred or two hundred years from now" has become yesterday. The tropics have expanded by two degrees of latitude both north and south, exceptionally hot years are occurring every one or two years instead of once every twenty-five years, Arctic ice is disappearing, droughts are increasing in both frequency and severity, whole mountain ranges are covered by dead trees, fire seasons continually set new records for both frequency and acreage, and the ocean is acidifying. Is this the Wrath of God -- punishment for worshiping the idols of Mammon and money -- or is it just physics? While no single incident proves that the weather is abnormal, a pattern is emerging.

McKibben states that we've gotten ourselves into a problem we can't just buy our way out of. The best we can do, he says, is to "downsize gracefully." I think McKibben is right, but I see no signs of change anywhere -- carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase. We are told that if the economy doesn't grow, it will collapse (and that that would be bad). We are told that cutting back on fossil fuels will cost money, and we are even told, mostly by those corporations with high profits at stake, that global warming is a hoax. Soon we will probably be told that God will once again part the Red Sea and that corporations will drop manna from heaven.

The first step to solve the problem, according those who deny global warming, seems to be to kill the messengers. Sen. James Inhofe, the largest recipient of oil money in the Senate, is calling for the criminal prosecution of climate scientists. Send them to jail, and don't let them talk to the press. And the second step? There is no second step. The corporations will go down fighting for one more quarter of record profits. While growth may indeed be essential for the survival of corporations whose stock prices are ten times their earnings, growth has never been necessary for the human economy. The corporation could care less about the climate, about the environment, or about human life -- yours or your children's. But then, a corporation is not a person.

##

James Hansen, author of Storms of my Grandchildren, is one of the best known climate scientists in the world. He also made news by refusing to be muzzled by Bush administration policy dictates that all press releases and requests for interviews had to be cleared first by political appointees at HQ.

The present book is an occasionally breezy, but more often sobering assessment of the current projections of global warming, Hansen's own role in bringing it to governmental attention (he describes his meetings with Dick Cheney's Task Force), and an overview of the technical components of climatology -- the various climate "forcings" that are expressed in watts per square meter. (Climatology is a quantitative science.) Hansen apologizes to his readers for having to go into the technicalities of climatology, but there is nothing in the chapter that couldn't be understood by an intelligent high schooler -- except perhaps Hansen's need for repeated apologies.

Hansen's estimations are based on paleoclimate studies, not computer models. The principle source of uncertainty in calibrating the paleoclimatic record with the CO2 levels of today is the lack of data on aerosols. Astonishingly, the reflective component of aerosols has never been measured, though Hansen called for such measurement to begin twenty years ago with special satellites. Even with this handicap, Hansen shows that some prognosis is possible, and he has lowered his estimation of a "safe," or at least a non-catastrophic level of CO2 from 450 to 350 parts per million. The current CO2 level is 387 ppm. The last really "hot" earth, when the continents were ice-free and sea levels were 250 feet higher than today, was 50 million years ago. The Paleocene-Eocene warming killed 90 percent of marine life. However, as CO2 levels are rising today about 10,000 times as quickly as they did at the end of the Paleocene, outstripping the ability of the oceans to absorb the heat, the effects could be even more catastrophic.

The dirtiest fuel is coal. There is, so far, no such thing as "clean coal," other than for warm, feel-good advertisements on television and the speeches of politicians. Hansen's conclusions are clear: the coal must be left in the ground. Otherwise, things could get bad for life on earth, perhaps very, very bad.

Alarmist? You bet, though Hansen optimistically thinks we can supply a lot of our energy needs with "fourth-generation" nuclear reactors: LMFBRs, or liquid metal fast breeder reactors. Fast neutron reactors could burn up some of the piles of depleted uranium now lying around from nuclear weapons production. Those of us who opposed the development of the LMFBR in the 1970s must consider Hansen's assessment that plutonium is less dangerous than coal.

Hansen has a "simple' solution to reducing hydrocarbon emissions: the fee-and-dividend plan. The fee-and dividend plan would add a gradually increasing fee on carbon fuels at the source, the fees to be collected in a special fund and distributed once a year equally to every American citizen--say, $3,000.00 per year for starters. If you conserve more than the average American, you have a net gain; if you burn more, you pay more. Simple: no special interests, no loop-holes. "Cap-and trade," another proposal, is by Hansen's analysis a sham that will do little but funnel money to financial traders.

##

There are two clear messages from Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, a well-researched and carefully documented book. First, there is no debate about the reality of human-caused global warming among climate scientists. Second, the seeming debate is a public relations scam heavily funded by coal and oil companies. If you want to know who the players are, where they come from, and what be their modes of operation, all is carefully presented in this book.

Several of the leading "deniers" have also worked for tobacco companies, denying the link between smoking and cancer. Remember the ozone hole "debate" twenty-five years ago? Industry-funded representatives also demanded equal time in that debate. Well, they're back. Equal time is fine on an opinion page, but science requires evidence, not speculation. And evidence requires careful scientific work. Among those engaged in such work, the only debate is about details and timetables. And with ever more refinements to the data, the timetable seems to be shortening.

Hoggan also runs http://www.DeSmogBlog.com, where they maintain a database of global warming deniers and recent press posting by same. One of the most recent is by Donald Trump, who states that record-breaking cold storms prove that Al Gore was wrong and that he should be stripped of his Nobel Prize. Most of the other posts of global warming deniers are hardly any more scientific, and some are outright lies.

Arctic ice at low point compared to recent geologic history
June 2, 2010 by Pam Frost Gorder Arctic ice at low point compared to recent geologic history

Leonid Polyak

Less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history. That's the conclusion of an international group of researchers, who have compiled the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.

For decades, scientists have strived to collect sediment cores from the difficult-to-access Arctic Ocean floor, to discover what the Arctic was like in the past. Their most recent goal: to bring a long-term perspective to the ice loss we see today.

Now, in an upcoming issue of Quarternary Science Reviews, a team led by Ohio State University has re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies -- nearly 300 in all -- and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole's climate history stretching back millions of years.

"The ice loss that we see today -- the ice loss that started in the early 20th Century and sped up during the last 30 years -- appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years,"

A cooler Pacific may have severely affected medieval Europe, North America
June 9, 2010

In the time before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a cooler central Pacific Ocean has been connected with drought conditions in Europe and North America that may be responsible for famines and the disappearance of cliff dwelling people in the American West.

NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record
Plus another record 12-month global temperature
June 10, 2010

NASA 5-10

Lmonth tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record [click on figure to enlarge].

Also, the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly for March-April-May was 0.73°C above the 1951-1980 mean, blowing out the old record of 0.65°C set in 2002.

The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

Most significantly, the 12-month global temperature grew to 0.66°C — easily the highest on record.

Intensive farming 'massively slowed' global warming

* 20:00 14 June 2010 by Andy Coghlan

Fertilisers, pesticides and hybrid high-yielding seeds saved the planet from an extra dose of global warming. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new analysis which finds that the intensification of farming through the green revolution has unjustly been blamed for speeding up global warming.

Arctic Climate May Be More Sensitive to Warming Than Thought, Says New Study

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) — A new study shows the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than previously thought, and that current levels of Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide may be high enough to bring about significant, irreversible shifts in Arctic ecosystems.

ScienceDaily:

Hunting Weapon 10,000 Years Old Found in Melting Ice Patch

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) — To the untrained eye, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Craig Lee's recent discovery of a 10,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon might look like a small branch that blew off a tree in a windstorm.

Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Lee, a research associate with CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who found the atlatl dart, a spear-like hunting weapon, melting out of an ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone National Park.

Lee, a specialist in the emerging field of ice patch archaeology, said the dart had been frozen in the ice patch for 10 millennia and that climate change has increased global temperatures and accelerated melting of permanent ice fields, exposing organic materials that have long been entombed in the ice.

"We didn't realize until the early 2000s that there was a potential to find archaeological materials in association with melting permanent snow and ice in many areas of the globe," Lee said. "We're not talking about massive glaciers, we're talking about the smaller, more kinetically stable snowbanks that you might see if you go to Rocky Mountain National Park."

As glaciers and ice fields continue to melt at an unprecedented rate, increasingly older and significant artifacts -- as well as plant material, animal carcasses and ancient feces -- are being released from the ice that has gripped them for thousands of years, he said.

Over the past decade, Lee has worked with other researchers to develop a geographic information system, or GIS, model to identify glaciers and ice fields in Alaska and elsewhere that are likely to hold artifacts. They pulled together biological and physical data to find ice fields that may have been used by prehistoric hunters to kill animals seeking refuge from heat and insect swarms in the summer months.

"In these instances, what we're finding as archaeologists is stuff that was lost," Lee said. "Maybe you missed a shot and your weapon disappeared into the snowbank. It's like finding your keys when you drop them in snow. You're not going to find them until spring. Well, the spring hasn't come until these things started melting for the first time, in some instances, in many, many thousands of years."

The dart Lee found was from a birch sapling and still has personal markings on it from the ancient hunter, according to Lee. When it was shot, the 3-foot-long dart had a projectile point on one end, and a cup or dimple on the other end that would have attached to a hook on the atlatl. The hunter used the atlatl, a throwing tool about two feet long, for leverage to achieve greater velocity.

Later this summer Lee and CU-Boulder student researchers will travel to Glacier National Park to work with the Salish, Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes and researchers from the University of Wyoming to recover and protect artifacts that may have recently melted out of similar locations.

"We will be conducting an unprecedented collaboration with our Native American partners to develop and implement protocols for culturally appropriate scientific methods to recover and protect artifacts we may discover," he said.

Quick retrieval of any organic artifacts like clothing, wooden tools or weapons is necessary to save them, because once thawed and exposed to the elements they decompose quickly, he said.

An estimated 10 percent of Earth's land surface is covered with perennial snow, glaciers and ice fields, providing plenty of opportunities for exploration, Lee said. However, once organic artifacts melt out of the ice, they could be lost forever.

"Ninety-five percent of the archaeological record that we usually base our interpretations on is comprised of chip stone artifacts, ground stone artifacts, maybe old hearths, which is a fire pit, or rock rings that would have been used to stabilize a house," Lee said. "So we really have to base our understanding about ancient times on these inorganic materials. But ice patches are giving us this window into organic technology that we just don't get in other environments."

Obama announces $2 billion investment in solar PV manufacturing and “the first large-scale solar plant in the U.S. to actually store the energy it generates for later use – even at night.”
"What’s more, over 70 percent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA"
July 4, 2010



In his weekly radio, the President announced he was putting $2 billion into two solar energy projects, including Concentrated solar thermal with storage (aka solar baseload).

More...

Google climate map offers a glimpse of a 4C world

Interactive tool layering climate data over Google Earth maps shows the impact of an average global temperature rise of 4C



A new interactive Google Earth map showing the impacts of a 4°C world A new interactive Google Earth map was developed using peer-reviewed science from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other leading impact scientists. Photograph: earth.google.co.uk

Think it's hot this summer? Wait until you see Google's simulation of a world with an average global temperature rise of 4C.

Using a map that was first launched by the former Labour administration in October 2009, the coalition government has taken temperature data from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other climate research centres and imposed it on to a Google Earth layer.

It's a timely arrival, with warnings this month that current international carbon pledges will lead to a rise of nearly 4C and the Muir Russell report censuring some climate scientists for not being more open with their data (but exonerating them of manipulating the scientific evidence).

Unlike a similar tool using IPCC data that was launched by Google in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference last year, this map will be updated regularly with new data. It also has a series of YouTube videos of experts across the globe, with Met Office staff talking about forest fires in sub-Saharan Africa and researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research explaining sea level rises. To go more in-depth you can follow links to government sites, such as this one on water availability in a warming world.

Playing with the layer is surprisingly addictive, mainly thanks to Google Earth's draggable interface. Unlike the static map of last year, it also has the bonus of showing more obviously how temperature rises will differ drastically around the world. The poles glow a red (a potential rise of around 10C) while most of northern Europe escapes with light orange 2-3C rises. Other hotspots, such as Alaska, the Amazon and central Asia, also stand out.

Neatly, you can turn different climate "impacts" on and off. If you just want to see which regions will be worst affected by sea level rises - such as the UK and Netherlands as well as low-lying island states - you can. One limitation is that you have to zoom out to continental level to see the layer: if you're zoomed on your street, you can't see it.

Climate change minister Greg Barker launched the map today alongside the government's chief scientist, Prof John Beddington. Barker said: "This map reinforces our determination to act against dangerous man-made climate change. We know the stakes are high and that's why we want to help secure an ambitious global climate change deal."

The layer, of course, isn't the only one with an environmental theme to land on Google Earth. The UN's environment programme has one showing deforestation, WWF has a layer highlighting its projects across the globe and Google even has its own climate change "tours" for Google Earth. What other good green Earth layers have you stumbled across? And how do you rate the newest addition from the UK government?

• The KML layer of The impact of a global temperature rise of 4C is available now (you'll need a browser plug-in or the Google Earth app installed to view it)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/b ... imate-data

Macdoc wrote:alarmist

As nation, Russia, and world swelter under record-smashing heat waves, The New York Times sets one-day record for most unilluminating stories
July 26, 2010temp.records


Globally NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace. This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent NASA paper noted.

Globally nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records, “making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records,” as meteorologist Jeff Masters has reported.

“This is a serious abnormality. The Russian weather service has never measured such temperatures in Moscow in July,” said Dmitry Kiktyov, Deputy Director of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia.

Daily highs outpaced daily lows across the United States nearly 5-to-1 in June and over 3-to-1 in July — whereas the ratio for the decade of the 2000s was 2.04-to-1, up from 1.36-to-1 in the 1990s (see below).

25 dead as forest fires rage across Russia

The Associated Press

Friday, July 30, 2010 | 7:54 a.m.

Forest fires raged across Russia on Friday, destroying villages, surrounding one southern city and killing at least 25 people, including three firefighters. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin consoled survivors at one smoldering village and urged officials to redouble their efforts against the blazes.

The fires have spread quickly across more than 200,000 acres (90,000 hectares) in recent days after a record heat wave and severe drought. July has been the hottest month in Moscow in 130 years of recorded history. Fields and forests have dried up, and much of this year's wheat harvest has been ruined.


http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/ju ... ss-russia/