NAS WEIGHS IN….In news that will surprise no one except the president of the United States, it turns out that global warming is real:
It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since Earth has run such a fever.
The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”
….Other new research Thursday showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor, according to Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a research lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation and universities.
Full details on the NAS report here. I can’t wait for the wingnuts to zero in on the temperate language used by real scientists ? namely that the farther back you go, the less reliable the data. But that’s real science for you.
The various temperature reconstructions for the past millennium are below. Note the unanimous agreement that temperatures have increased at an unprecedented rate since 1900.
