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Further to my previous post I would like to add some facts which are interesting and relevant to the discourse of whether one year’s growth in ice on the North Pole is of any interest unless it establishes a pattern.
Those who track the news will probably have heard the phrase “The hottest X on record” a lot. It’s becoming one of the things which defines modern news broadcasting. This is represented in some facts and figures (‘on record’ means ‘in the last 125 years, since good records began being kept’):
- 2005 was the hottest year on record.
- 2007 was the second hottest year on record, tied with 1998.
- The top 14 hottest years on record occurred since 1990 (18 years).
- The top 24 hottest years on record occurred since 1980 (28 years).
This is a pattern which needs to be acknowledged.
A few people suggest that the cause of recent warming is down to activity on the sun. However, unless the models (which have been able to accurately model historic climate variations and so must have at least some accuracy) are insanely, massively inaccurate then the influence of the variations in the sun are about 1/30th of the influence of greenhouse gas emissions by humans. In other words, quite small and not significant enough to generate 24 of the top 25 hottest days on record.
If you want a more professional version of the information above, along with graphs and much more data, then watch this presentation by John Holdren (can take a few minutes to load).
