Global Shvitzing

(A certain amount of the following information came from The Huffington Post article titled, “Burning Up.”  All quotes from NOAA, and Ann Coulter are true.  All other quotes have been created by the blogger’s brain synapses, over which she has little control.)

A new report finds that the past 12 months have been the warmest on record for the mainland United States. According to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center’s “State of the Climate: National Overview for June 2012” report released Monday, the 12-month period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest on record (since record keeping began in 1895) for the contiguous United States, with a nationally averaged temperature 3.2 degrees higher than the long-term average.  For a large portion of the contiguous U.S., these first six months were also drier than average.

But not everyone agrees that this is an issue. Ann Coulter, conservative author and owner of the nickname Cukoo, has famously said, “(Al Gore said that) Warm trends prove global warming. Cold trends also prove global warming. This is the philosophy of a madman.”  Jesse Roy Chambers, who hangs out at the Ray, North Dakota 7-Eleven, agreed. “It’s friggin’ cold here, in case you haven’t noticed.  Global warming is bullshit, man.”

More than 170 all-time warm temperature records were broken or tied last month. For 13 consecutive months, temperatures ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time on record. As NOAA points out, “The odds of this occurring randomly is one in 1,594,323.”

Fox News, quick to response to the statistic, said, “The odds of winning the lottery are one in 176,000,000.  Yet people win lotteries all the time. So let’s not get our panties in a twist over a measly one in 1,594,323.  Come back when you have something more significant to say.”

Belva Hitchens of Tuscaloosa, AL, a recent lottery winner featured on the same newscast, elaborated.  “Yeah,” she said.

National Climatic Data Center scientist Jake Crouch told Reuters of the long-term warming trend. “It’s hard to pinpoint climate change as the driving factor, but it appears that it is playing a role. What’s going on for 2012 is exactly what we would expect from climate change.”

In response to Crouch’s statement, Tea party Freshman Dennis Ross of Florida, freshly returned from wild boar-hunting, ranted, “What kind of name is Crouch anyway? People who don’t live in Florida are liberal weenies who should just be sent back to whatever countries they came from, like Vermont.   ‘Ooooh, it’s getting hot outside!  Ooooh, I’m sweating!  Ooooh, the earth must be getting warmer!’”

The wild boar was dead and not available for comment.

In a further possible sign of a warming world, the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of the largest in Greenland, lost a 2.7-square mile chunk of ice and retreated one mile between 6-7 July – one of the largest single losses to a glacier ever recorded.

Recent reports suggest it’s going to get a lot worse. Climate change not only has been tied to weather extremes, but also linked to rising sea levels. A study released in late June by the National Research Council found that much of California can expect a sea level rise of six inches by 2030, while a report by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) government scientists found that rates of sea level rise in a “hotspot” along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are increasing about three to four times more than the global average. A study published in Nature Climate Change last month found that human activities have played a large role in global ocean warming.

Some scientists still insist that the recent warming trend is nothing but a fluke, a weather “outlier.”  “That such outliers are mere freak events, so-called ‘black swans,’ remains a possibility,” Coumou and Rahmstorf wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change about extreme weather events. “However, the recent clustering of outliers makes this highly unlikely.”

An attempt to locate a black swan for comment was unsuccessful, as they had all expired in the heat.