2011 was the...

9th warmest year of the recorded period, from 1880 till now. This is according to NASA who have apparently finished calculating their data. It is also the 9th warmest year in the past 10 which has now seen 9 of the top 10 warmest years on record. This is what we should expect to see if the climate was in fact warming, every year won't be the warmest but decades on a whole should be getting warmer. In fact this is true, the 00s were warmer than the 90s the 90s warmer than the 80s, something is clearly happening you have to be openly trying to ignore the data not to see that. The image below is from NASA and shows the yearly temperature average since 1880, I have also included a little blurb from the same article below but I recommend you read the whole thing.

From NASA:

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS Director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record."

The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise. Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.

Why we need NASA!

I have made the case in the past that NASA is important to our understanding of science and how the universe works, oh and that it is just cool as well. Well Neil deGrasse Tyson (Twitter and Facebook), a great popularizer of science in general and space in particular (oh and also an Astrophysicist), has been saying similar things, although much more elegantly than I, and that trend apparently continued this year at TAM. This video was put together by pointmanzero using some amazing images of space and Tyson's speech from TAM and it is quite moving and even without seeing him you can tell how much Dr. Tyson loves this stuff.



H/T lefayad1991

2011 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

So it appears we have reached the sea ice minimum for 2011 and it is depressingly low, close to the record low of 2007. Greenman3610 has a video wrapping up the sea ice minimum for the year.



Below the fold is a video by NASA explaining the importance of Arctic sea ice, I figured 2 videos in one post on my main page would probably slow down the page loading too much

Space: At the Current Rate

So I have explained in the past I feel that NASA and space exploration are important to our future. With the Space Shuttle program coming to an end, the last flight of Endeavour will occur once they fix whatever the problem is, xkcd released a comic today showing that by 2035 we will likely have no one alive who has walked on another planet/planetary body/world. Make sure you go to the comic itself and mouse-over the comic, I agree completely with them.

A Single Data Point!

Every winter it seems that the climate denialists bring out the but it's cold argument and while I have covered it before (see here, here, and here) I wanted to point out why it is not a valid argument against global climate change. I was inspired to do this based on a recent post over at Conservapedia which said the following [source]:

Global Warming Update: Cooling Trend Continues. March 2011 is on record as the coldest in 15 years. [14]

I saw that post and said, "so?" but I realized that many people who read Conservapedia, then again I doubt many people who read Conservapedia read my blog, might not realize that one month being colder isn't important.

The problem with one cold month is that it is only one data point. Global climate change is based on a build up of data that spans decades of research. One or two colder than normal months out of decades do not influence the data to a great degree nor should they be considered proof of the end of climate change, these are what are typically referred to as weather. What Conservapedia and the climate change denialists are doing are cherry picking data. I can do the same thing, as a resident of Lubbock, TX I know last month was hot in fact there was a least one day that we set a new record high. What is more is that the National Weather Service agrees with me and therefore that link that conservapedia posted is completely wrong March was one of the top 15 warmest months on record for the area and therefore their view that global warming is not happening is wrong, and the fact that Texas is in a severe drought means that the whole state is going to run out of water forever (sorry I wanted to find a way to get that link in a post somewhere).

It doesn't work that way, in fact even 2010 being tied for the warmest on record isn't, by itself, important. What is important is the long term trends like the graph to the left which shows over the long term the temperatures have been increasing globally, from Wikipedia. If you go to NASA's climate change website you can see all of the data accumulated thus far showing that climate change is in fact happening. Climate scientists might even actually expect 2011 to be much cooler than 2010 (I don't know that they do this was more just an example), but this will not pronounce climate change dead but will in fact just say that temperatures will vary year to year in the same way that temperature varies day to day. These individual variations are not important again it will always be colder in January than in July in the northern hemisphere and some places will always see snow. What is important is the long term trend, this is what scientists are interested in and this is what they look at. As summarized here, yes I know it is Wikipedia but the summary is good, you can see that of the 20 warmest years the vast majority in the upper half are in the last decade, and here you can see that the last 3 decades have been the warmest decades with each being warmer than the last. That sort of information is important and how climate change is decided not, well it was cold today we should stop worrying.

2010 was the Warmest Year on Record

Well it was at least tied with 2005 that is according to studies released by NASA (their study released for the Meteorological Year which ended November 30th says the same thing) and NOAA. According to the USA Today article covering the news:

The Earth's average temperature in 2010, as in 2005, was 58.12 degrees, which is 1.12 degrees above the 20th-century average of 57 degrees.

It was the 34th consecutive year that the global temperature was above average, according to the data center. The last below-average year was 1976

Greenman3610 at the climate crock blog does a better job breaking this down than I could have so head over there to read up on it.

NASA and the future of Science

So I should have blogged about this about a week and a half ago when President Obama first unveiled his budget. Anything dealing with the President and the budget will be perceived as political so I am going to have to flirt a fine line here I know.

So when the President unveiled his budget for this upcoming year one of the major programs taking a hit was NASA's attempt to return to the moon and then their eventual plan to go to Mars. Now while I understand that this is a trying economic time, I am a grad student after all, these programs risk doing damage to the number of young kids who we are drawing to science.

Let me explain my reasoning. In the 1960s the US had one enemy who was in one place, the USSR for those of you who don't know/remember/really should go take another history class. Well in the early '60s President Kennedy challenged the American people to get safely to the moon and return to the Earth. This challenge was not taken lightly by the American people and the scientists of the US and in 1969 we DID land on the moon, no matter what some people might have you believe. This inspired many of the people growing up at that time, my parent's generation, to have an interest in science and while not always a complete understanding they were at least interested and respected it.

In the '70s NASA's budget was cut we had accomplished our mission why do we need to keep funding this mission. This continued until the 1986 Challenger disaster in which more money was briefly increased in order to increase the safety of the shuttle missions. Finally through the '90s and 2000s anytime that it seemed that some budget needed to be cut it came from NASA and in many ways this is one of the causes of the Columbia disaster in 2003, wow has it really been 7 years.

I mention this because the current leads in science were brought up during the prime of NASA's space exploration. This most likely led to them going into and being interested in science. While many of these scientists are still young enough to do research there has been a fall off in the number of students being interested in science and this will be visible in the number of researches in mine and future generations.

So why did I mention the new NASA budget cuts? Simple these return trips to the moon and eventually to Mars would draw people into science that may not have been interested in science the same way the original trips to the moon brought people into science in the '60s.

Do I understand why the President did what he did? Yes, we need to keep ourselves safe etc. Do I have actual solutions? Make space feel more open to private companies. Privatization will make the technology cheaper to get into space which then NASA and universities etc can use to get themselves into space to open it up to scientific exploration. Cutting the funding to these programs however is not the way to do that and will probably set NASA back more than the year that the actual budget will financially effect. As with the space shuttle disasters cutting money now will cost us more money later! I welcome every one's comments tell me how wrong I am or how right I am or whatever you have to say.

Must see channel on Youtube

Ok so I know that I haven't posted much this month, heck we are approaching the low of June, but this whole run up to getting started again in school has been slowing me down. Anyway I took today off to relax one last day before I actually start school and watched all of the videos on this (http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610) channel. I don't know if it makes me a loser or just a science nerd, heck those two are probably tied together, but I wanted to spread the channel to anyone who reads my blog and might not have seen this channel. I recomend it to people on both sides of the argument because he does a good job of stating where his evidence is coming from. Now while I know most people can't just sit down and watch all of the videos right in a row I recommend to watch them when you get a chance, I learned quite a bit I didn't know and I know that he will be getting a lot more references from me from people who try to deny global warming.

One last thing I have been working on another big refuting post that if I can get my act together will be put out by the end of the month but there is a very good possibility it might not be out till sometime in September it depends on how much time I get to work on it over the next few days.

40 years ago today

While I am sure that most people reading this already know this I figured since I was a science blog I had to say something about it. Well here it is today is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. In my opinion this is probably the greatest scientific achievement ever accomplished by the human race at least as of right now, that is until we put a man another another planet. So to honor those brave men and now women who serve/ed/or will serve in the space program I figured I would post this:



Raise your drink twice tonight one for the past and one for the future.

On a couple of unrelated notes I wanted to post these two videos, the first one because it is very educational and should help anybody who has ever had any long conversation with a creationist debunk much of what they have to say:



This last one because I am a big fan of thinking and it is interesting to see what these famous thinking men, and Homer Simpson, had to say about God:



Final thing I came across this last night but it made me more ready for the football season than before. They are backgrounds for your computer that have the VT football schedule on them so take a look:
http://www.cruhland.com/desktops/downloads.html

As always if you come across anything let me know and remember,