Image courtesy of earthobservatory.nasa.gov

If you thought, between sudden rain showers, this July was insanely hot this year, you’d have something in common with climate scientists.

That chart up top is heatmap of last month’s temperature anomalies compared to the combined average July temps from 1951 through 1980.

The conclusion? Things have been getting pretty toasty lately, which what NASA blames for why the world’s weather has gone wacky.

“‘Climate dice,’ describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more ‘loaded’ in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming,” [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director] James Hansen and colleagues wrote. “The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased….We can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

Interestingly, it appears that temperatures in Southern Arizona didn’t deviate too much from the norm — maybe an average increase of a degree, at most — but the weather continues to be scorching, both here and in Phoenix.

This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2012.

4 replies on “July Was the Hottest Month on Record in the Lower 48. Ever.”

  2. From the article cited above by Harvest…

    “Coal and energy use are still growing rapidly in other countries, particularly China, and CO2 levels globally are rising, not falling. Moreover, changes in the marketplace — a boom in the economy, a fall in coal prices, a rise in natural gas — could stall or even reverse the shift. For example, U.S. emissions fell in 2008 and 2009, then rose in 2010 before falling again last year.”

  3. The alarmists are still at it. When I was in school in the 50’s and 60’s, we were told the ocean would rise and NYC, LA and Frisco would be under water by the end of the century. Wrong again. Yes, there is global warming. No, it is not entirely man-made, we help. And finally, we are still not as warm as it was before the last ice age. Man wasn’t a contributer at that time. If the so-called scientists were not throwing out data that does not fit their hypothesis, the data curves would not be as alarming. I am a retired weather professiona and I say; learn to live with the change, conservation is good, but look at all the data.

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