Year 2012 Hottest on Record for USA

B. McPherson

Climate change is happening. What are we going to do to survive?
NOAA has released temperature figures for the contiguous US for 2012. It is the warmest on record and records go back to 1895. The average temperature beat any previous year by one degree Fahrenheit. One degree doesn’t seem like much, but previous high years were only fractions of a degree warmer.

People may debate the causes of a warming Earth, but the evidence is mounting that we are headed into a climate crisis. Prudent people would take steps to minimize the amount and speed of the changes if they can.

 “The heat we saw in the U.S. is consistent with what we expect in a warming world,” Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NOAA's center, said on a conference call. “It’s a huge exclamation point on the end of several decades.” Bloomberg News

Drought, fires, extinctions, climate refugees – those are a few of the consequences of a changing world. 2012 saw massive droughts in the US, huge fires ate up billions of dollars in wealth and today we are watching the largest river in N. America shrivel to the point where shipping may have to be suspended.

Extreme weather is to be expected when more energy(heat) is present in the atmosphere. While some areas experience drought, others get torrential rains. Yesterday’s  Pacific storm that hit the British Columbia coast set record rainfall numbers. And those numbers go back more than 100 years. More category 4 hurricanes are to be expected as are stronger cyclones and tornados.

Hurricane Sandy has cost the beleaguered US economy over a trillion dollars. The largely failed corn crop last year has meant “price creep” at the grocery stores. It has meant more hungry days to the poor of the world who can barely afford enough food to stay alive.

There are a myriad of changes happening right now. Look around with open eyes and you will see flowers blooming earlier, migratory birds flying north sooner. Here in the Great White North, hummingbirds now overwinter successfully in some areas.

Humans are in for an interesting century as Mother Nature throws some interesting challenges our way. To fail the challenges courts extinction.

NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration) has detailed and objective information on past and present weather.

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