Hurtling toward 2.0

BRT has waxed "poetic" regarding climate change and global warming and how, if we don't do anything about it, our descendants will reap the whirlwind in terms of how just how much man has soiled this planet over a period of just 500 years. With this in mind, NASA's latest research findings will NOT warm the cockles of your heart. 

And given the increasing concentration of carbon in the global atmosphere, which is driving higher long-term temperature increases as well as other extreme weather events, the string of monthly records is a foreboding sign.

Henson and Masters explain:

The real significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to dealing with at a given time of year. Drawing from NASA’s graph of long-term temperature trends, if we add 0.2°C as a conservative estimate of the amount of human-produced warming that occurred between the late 1800s and 1951-1980, then the February result winds up at 1.55°C above average. If we use 0.4°C as a higher-end estimate, then February sits at 1.75°C above average. Either way, this result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases.

They conclude, "we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0°C warming over pre-industrial levels."

And Rahmstorf also notes, "We are in a kind of climate emergency now."

Click NASA Climate to see just how dire the situation truly is. The temperature simulation depicted below shows how we are cooking the planet.