Welcome to Tuesday! If we keep getting more of this springlike weather I might start getting used to it. Let’s start our open thread.
Who knew, Wilmington is not the whole entire world:
“January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we’ve ever seen,” said Nicholls of Monash University’s School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne.
“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen,” he said of the satellite data record since 1979.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.
…
Scientists say global warming is not uniform in all areas and that climate models predict there will likely be greater extremes of cold and heat, floods and droughts.
“Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming,” said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.
I’m surprised you have to explain this to people but with the Faux Newses, Sen. Inhofes and sockpuppet posters of the world trying to spread misinformation – apparently you do have to explain this. Of course, no one is holding the deniers feet to the fire to explain why Vancouver was so warm and barely had snow or the site of the next winter Olympics was in the 70s.
Wilmington does not equal world
U.S. east coast does not equal world
U.S. does not equal world
Weather does not equal climate
The Chilean earthquake affected the entire globe:
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
Does this change the calculation of leap year?