Describing how off the charts our weather has become gets harder and harder. Fortunately, we have wunderground historian Christopher Burton to put things in perspective.

He tallies the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in his recap of “the warmest calendar year on record for the continental U.S. according to NCDC data going back to 1895″:

A chart of the total number of NCDC sites that measured daily and/or monthly record high and low temperatures. There are about 5,500 of these sites in the NCDC database all together and it is important to note that the first two columns of this table are not all-time record highs or all-time record lows but daily and monthly records. So, for instance, a single site may have broken dozens of daily records over the course of the year. The 5th and 6th columns are for all-time record highs and lows: a total of 362 such heat records and 0 such cold records occurred. The ratio of daily record highs to daily record lows (about 5 to 1) were the greatest for any year in NCDC records.

This was the year where winter was like spring (see L.A. Times Explains U.S. ‘Seems to Have Largely Escaped Winter’ and ABC News Explains Warm Winter, ‘Wild Swings In Weather’, Driven by Global Warming, Only Going to Get Worse).

Then spring was like summer (see March Heat Records Crush Cold Records by Over 35 To 1, Scientists Say Global Warming Loaded The Dice and March Madness: ‘This May Be An Unprecedented Event Since Modern U.S. Weather Records Began In The Late 19th Century’).

Finally summer was something from the Dust Bowl era (see “July Heat Records Crush Cold Records By 17 To 1, ‘Historic Heat Wave And Drought’ Fuels Oklahoma Fires).

Imagine what our weather will be like if we are foolish enough to ignore all scientific warnings, If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming.

h/t Forecast the Facts

Okay, NOAA’s State of the Climate Report for November isn’t the Mayan meteorological forecast. And the Apocalypse isn’t quite “now.” But this part of the NOAA report is kind of ominous:

Including this November, the 10 warmest Novembers have occurred in the past 12 years. The 10 coolest Novembers on record all occurred prior to 1920. November 2012 also marks the 36^th consecutive November and 333^rd consecutive month with global temperature higher than the long-term average. The last month with a below average temperature was February 1985, nearly 28 years ago.

As Grist noted last month, “If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month.” In Minnesota’s fictional Lake Wobegon, “all the children are above average.” But with warming, it’s more like Wobegun, because it’s only going to get hotter and hotter — at an accelerating pace if we don’t reverse carbon pollution trends ASAP (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

This is the temperature map for the first 11 months of the year:

Record warmth — easy to find (see “Record-Smashing Early December Assures 2012 Will Be Hottest In U.S. History“). Record cold, not so much.

As Grist dryly noted (and noting things dryly is how Grist made its bones):

August 2040 will (possibly) be the 666th straight month with higher-than-average global temperatures (somewhat undermining the concept of average). The map for that month will likely be a pure splotch of red, as Earth will have been consumed by hellfire. Please prepare appropriately.

So we are halfway to Hell (and High Water). Can’t say we weren’t warned.

H/t Scott Brophy

We’ve had spring weather in early December — and that guarantees 2012 will be the hottest year on record for the United States.

I had reported on Monday that 2012 was virtually certain to be the hottest on record thanks to the warm November and blistering early December. Now Climate Central has done the math:

There is a 99.99999999 percent chance that 2012 will be the hottest year ever recorded in the continental 48 states, based on our analysis of 118 years of temperature records through Dec. 10, 2012.

The chart above is Climate Central’s projection of the 2012 temperature using observations through December 10 and an estimate of typical temperatures for the final 21 days of the month. If this holds true, then 2012 will blow out the previous record (1998) by more than 1°F.

How warm was early December? As Capital Climate calculates using National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) figures:

For the first 10 days of December, new daily record high temperatures have outnumbered record lows by a ratio of 92 to 1. For the 48 contiguous states, the ratio was an incredible 132 to 1, since 3 out of the 10 low records were in Alaska and Hawaii. During the entire week of December 2-8, not a single low temperature record was tied or broken in any of the 50 states, according to NCDC reports. With 3 weeks remaining in the year, the cumulative ratio of heat records to cold records for 2012 has reached 6.0 to 1, more than double the ratio in 2011.

If you want to know how to judge whether these ratios are a big deal, consider that a 2009 National Center for Atmospheric Research study found that the ratio for the entire decade of the 2000s — the hottest decade on record globally — averaged to 2.04, which is roughly double what it was a few decades before (see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“). NCAR noted, “The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.” Seriously.

This year has rewritten the record books — a winter with spring-like temperatures, a spring with summer-like temperatures, and an all-time hottest July.

You may remember that March Came In Like A Lamb and Went Out Like A Globally Warmed Lion On Steroids Who Smashed 15,000 Heat Records. As NOAA reported, in March, “There were  21 instances of the nighttime temperatures being as warm, or warmer, than the existing record daytime temperature for a given date”!

At the time, Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters said, “this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.” He published a detailed statistical analysis concluding, “It is highly unlikely the warmth of the current ‘Summer in March’ heat wave could have occurred unless the climate was warming.”

The science of attributing extreme events to global warming is still emerging, scientists still disagree to what extent a specific event like this heat wave is driven by global warming. But two of the leading experts explain at RealClimate why even small shifts in average temperature mean “the probability for ‘outlandish’ heat records increases greatly due to global warming.” Furthermore, “the more outlandish a record is, the more would we suspect that non-linear feedbacks are at play – which could increase their likelihood even more.”

And now we know have emerging scientific analysis that connects global warming and what is happening to the Arctic to more extreme events like heat waves:

• NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather
• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events “Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves“

And remember, we’ve only warmed about a degree and a half Fahrenheit in the past century.  We are on track to warm five times times that or more this century.

In short, Mother Nature is just getting warmed up!

This brief was originally published at the World Meteorological Organization.

The years 2001–2011 were all among the  warmest on record, and, according to the World Meteorological Organization, the first ten months indicate that 2012 will most likely be no exception despite the cooling influence of La Niña early in the year.

WMO’s provisional annual statement on the state of the global climate also highlighted the unprecedented melt of the Arctic sea ice and multiple weather and climate extremes which affected many parts of the world. It was released today to inform negotiators at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar.

January-October 2012 has been the ninth warmest such period since records began in 1850. The global land and ocean surface temperature for the period was about 0.45°C (0.81°F) above the corresponding 1961–1990 average of 14.2°C, according to the statement.

The year began with a weak-to-moderate strength La Niña, which had developed in October 2011. The presence of a La Niña during the start of a year tends to have a cooling influence on global temperatures, and this year was no different. After the end of the La Niña in April 2012, the global land and ocean temperatures rose increasingly above the long-term average with each consecutive month. The six-month average of May–October 2012 was among the four warmest such periods on record.

“Naturally occurring climate variability due to phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña impact on temperatures and precipitation on a seasonal to annual scale. But they do not alter the underlying long-term trend of rising temperatures due to climate change as a result of human activities,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

“The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new record low. The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere.  Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” added Mr Jarraud.

The Arctic reached its lowest annual sea ice extent since the start of satellite records on 16 September at 3.41 million square kilometers. This was 18% less than the previous record low of 18 September, 2007. The 2012 minimum extent was 49 percent or nearly 3.3 million square kilometers (nearly the size of India) below the 1979–2000 average minimum. Some 11.83 million square kilometers of Arctic ice melted between March and September 2012.

WMO will release a 10-year report on the state of the climate, “2001-2010, A Decade of Extremes” on 4 December 2012. It was produced in partnership with other United Nations and international agencies and highlights the warming trend for the entire planet, its continents and oceans during the past decade, with an indication of its impacts on health, food security and socio-economic development.

Highlights of 2012 provisional statement

Temperatures:

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by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman, and Mackenzie Bronson

The devastating and tragic Hurricane Sandy and its connected storms caused a huge swath of destruction in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States on October 29, before then dumping vast quantities of snow in the Midwest. The storm is responsible for at least 110 fatalities in the United States and preliminary estimates indicate that it caused $30 billion in damages, with only one-quarter to one-half covered by insurance. It may be one of the costliest U.S. hurricanes in history.

Unfortunately, Sandy is only the latest in a line of extreme weather events that severely afflicted Americans over the past two years. This includes destructive wildfires in Colorado, record-breaking temperatures across the nation, and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes across the Midwest. Farmers in the Great Plains are expecting to harvest just a fraction of their corn and other crops this year as the worst drought in 50 years plagues nearly two-thirds of the nation. Vicious heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and severe storms left more than 1,000 people dead. These are the extreme weather events that scientists predict will become more frequent and/or severe if the industrial carbon pollution responsible for climate change remains unchecked.

Scientists and government agencies documented the devastating extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 14 weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damages each in 2011. By our estimates, from January through October 2012, there were at least seven additional extreme weather events with more than $1 billion in damages each, with total damages from the two years combined topping $126 billion. In addition to these events, economists predict that the 2012 drought will cause between $28 billion and $77 billion in damages, potentially bringing the two-year total to $174 billion.

The events during this time affected all but 4 of the lower 48 states. A recent study by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, found that North America is experiencing a tremendous rise in extreme weather disasters-a nearly fivefold increase over the past three decades. The firm concluded that this is due to climate change and that this trend will continue in the future.

One overlooked aspect of these disasters, however, is the rate at which they harm middle-and lower-income households-people who are less able to quickly recover from such disasters. This Center for American Progress analysis finds that on average, counties with middle-and lower-income households were harmed by many of the most expensive extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. (see Table 1)

Most of these extreme weather events typically harmed counties with household incomes below the U.S. median annual household income of $51,914:

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by Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

Our thoughts and prayers are with the millions of Americans harmed by Hurricane Sandy. Its devastating winds, rains, and ocean surges caused a huge swath of destruction in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States before dumping vast quantities of snow in the Midwest. Sandy is responsible for at least 74 fatalities, and preliminary estimates indicate that it could cause $20 billion in property damage with only one-quarter to one-half covered by insurance. It may be one of the costliest U.S. hurricanes ever.

Unfortunately, Sandy is only the latest in a line of recent extreme weather events that have severely afflicted Americans in the past two years. Other disasters include the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, record-breaking temperatures across the nation, and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes across the Midwest. Farmers in the Midwest are expecting to harvest just a fraction of their corn and other crops this year, leading to record federal crop insurance payments due to the worst drought in 50 years that plagued two-thirds of the nation. Vicious heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and severe storms left hundreds of people dead and injured. These are the extreme weather events that scientists predict will become more frequent and/or severe if the industrial carbon pollution responsible for climate change remains unchecked.

Scientists and government agencies have documented the devastating extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that there were a record-high 14 weather events in 2011 that caused at least $1 billion each in damages. By our estimates there were at least seven additional events with more than $1 billion each in damages in 2012, with total combined damages from the two years topping $67 billion. In addition to these events, economists predict that the 2012 drought will cause between $28 billion and $77 billion in damages, potentially bringing the two-year damage total to $95 billion to $144 billion. During this time, all but five of the lower 48 states were affected by one or more of these events. (see table below)

Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurance firm, found that North America is experiencing a tremendous rise in extreme weather disasters—a nearly fivefold increase over the past three decades. It reported that, “There has been a 35 percent increase in the size of storms in the Gulf of Mexico since 1995.” It also concluded that this is due to climate change, and that this trend will continue in the future.

Climate science deniers are eager to claim that no single weather occurrence is definitely caused by climate change. Though that is technically correct, is is very misleading because scientists found that climate change does indeed affect our weather in clearly debilitating ways. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research notes that, “All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

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by Richard Sommerville and Jeff Masters, via Climate Communication

With oppressive heat waves, devastating droughts, ravaging wildfires, and hard-hitting rainstorms, the summer of 2012 has been one for the record books. Thousands of precipitation and temperature records were broken, plaguing almost all of the contiguous United States this season and underscoring the connection between climate change and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather. With climate change, we’ve set the stage for precisely this kind of extreme weather, and unfortunately, our changing climate threatens to alter summers to come.

It is important to note that as the planet continues to warm, new high temperature records and some other types of extremes will increasingly occur, but where they occur in a given year will not be predictable due to natural modes of climate variability. Extreme weather pummeled the United States this summer, but the next few years might see the most dramatic extremes occurring elsewhere around the world. Regardless, record-breaking high temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and heavy downpours are all signs of new extreme weather patterns that we can expect to see more of in a warming world, both domestically and abroad.

Here’s a roundup of weather events during the record-breaking summer of 2012:

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Who ever would’ve guessed that there would be a Labor Day card for global warming?  But that is what SomeEcards are for:

But “The Onion” of e-card companies makes a serious point:  In the not-too-distant future, people are going to be amazed that anybody ever thought Labor Day signified the unofficial end of summer.  As Climate Progress discussed in “Mother Nature is Just Getting Warmed Up” last year:

Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers

The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists….

“According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years,” said the study’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh.

And this could happen even sooner since, “actual GHG emissions over the early 21st century have exceeded those projected in the SRES scenario used here, suggesting that our results could provide a conservative projection of the timing of permanent emergence of an unprecedented heat regime.”

Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has a figure of what staying on the business as usual emissions path (A1FI or 1000 ppm) would mean for the end of this century (derived from the NOAA-led impacts report):

Yes, absent a sharp and deep reduction in national and global emissions, by century’s end, Kansas (!) could well be above 100°F for three full months.  Labor Day will mean a return to those pleasant mid-to-upper 90s!

It truly will be an endless summer over much of Texas and Arizona and the Central Valley of California (see also NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable”).

Not only will it be hot, but if we don’t reverse emissions trends ASAP, it will be very, very dry :

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Warming-driven peatland fires are an amplifying climate feedback. Credit: NASA

News story via NASA

Forests and bog land in far eastern Russia have been burning since the beginning of June 2012. Contributing to the record fires have been the record temperatures of this past summer. This summer in Siberia has been one of hottest on record. The average temperature ranged around 93 degrees Fahrenheit and there doesn’t seem to be any break in the weather coming anytime soon.

The fires in eastern Russia have affected the districts of Krasnoyarsk, Tuva, Irkutsk, Kurgan, and the Republic of Khakassia. Especially hard hit is the city of Tomsk. According to official figures, over 24,000 acres of land had been burnt in Tomsk by early August. The city has been covered by heavy smog for weeks and the airport has been out of operation since the beginning of July.

On August 23rd, the Russian Information and News Agency (RIA Novosti) reported that “firefighters extinguished all six forest fires over the past 24 hours that remained raging in Russia’s Siberia this summer, the regional forestry department said in a statement on Thursday. There are no more registered fires in the region, but the emergencies situation still remain in force in three areas of the Tomsk region due to the high risk of new wildfires outbreak,” the statement added. However, it also reported that “more than 200,000 hectares [494.210 acres] of forest already burned down in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where fires are still raging, since the start of the summer.” On August 28, RIA Novosti reported that: “The majority of wildfires triggered by the summer heat wave in Russia have been put out, but 11 wildfires with a total area of 838 hectares [over 2000 acres] are still raging in Khabarovsk Territory.” These are the fires that still burn in the image taken today by the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite.

Of course wildfires are devastating to any area, but ecologically this is catastrophic for this region with many rare animals living in Siberia’s unique ecosystem.

So too the fires burning in Russia will have worldwide effects as the torched peat bogs whose layers consist of dead plant materials will end up releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air accelerating the greenhouse effect and making the air nearly unbreathable. Record numbers of fires in the summer of 2010 drew attention to this damaging situation (see NY Times article cited below).

In the early 1900′s Soviet engineers drained swamps to supply peat for electrical power stations. It was eventually stopped in the 1950′s but the bogs were never reflooded. Unfortunately, that approach is currently causing some of the wildfire problems and air quality issues that Russia is dealing with today.

Officials and residents are hoping that the upcoming expected harvest rains will help extinguish the wildfires and bring a much needed natural remedy to the affected regions.

NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner with information from The New York Times and RIA Novosti (en.rian.ru)

Related Post:

• Stunning Peatlands Amplifying Feedback: Drying Wetlands and Intensifying Wildfires Boost Carbon Release Ninefold

By Evan Girvetz and Frank Lowenstein

Whether you look globally or locally, the last several months featured heat, heat and more heat. And by looking at weather station records over the past 60 years, researchers led by renowned NASA scientist Jim Hansen show this is part of a new trend toward much warmer summers.

Extremely hot summers — warmer than virtually ever occurred during a base period of 1951-1980 — have occurred across more than 10% of the world’s lands during the past several years. This means that extremely hot temperatures are more than 10 times more likely to occur now than 50 years ago.

And we are simply not prepared for these temperatures!

You have likely felt the intense heat this year, which has broken tens of thousands of heat records across the U.S. Heat like this is deadly: the heat has killed dozens of people across the U.S., including more than 60 heat-related deaths over a two-week period earlier in the summer.

But do you also recall the heat wave in Texas and Oklahoma just last year that killed 100,000 cattle and 500 million trees? The Russian heat wave two years ago that killed 56,000 people? The European heat wave in 2003 that killed an estimated 70,000 people? Hansen’s paper indicates that these events may be climate-change related, and that people throughout the world are now at increased risk from heat-related disasters.

Other impacts of prolonged heat and drought are also a major societal concern. The hot period from March through July contributed to a failed cherry crop in Michigan, and the lowest corn yields in almost two decades, which are likely to cause higher prices and rippling problems for food and energy supplies.

What can we do to protect our health, food and water systems and our economy?

There are things that can be done to prepare, but it takes a combination of good information, local engagement and action, and supportive national policies to help implement innovative solutions that can reduce risks of global warming and climate change to people and communities.

Read more