U.S. Sees Warmest March in Recorded History, NOAA Reports

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U.S. Sees Warmest March in Recorded History, NOAA Reports

'Tremendously excessive'

By MichaelJ

Environment • April 2012 • Views: 1,741

edition.cnn.com

March 2012 will go down as the warmest March in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895, NOAA said Monday.

In addition, the three-month period of January, February and March was the warmest first quarter ever recorded in the Lower 48 states. The average was 42 degrees Fahrenheit, a whopping 6 degrees above the long-term average.

A staggering 15,292 warm temperature records were broken, (7,755 record highs and 7,517 record high overnight lows), according to Chris Vaccaro, spokesperson for NOAA. “That’s tremendously excessive. The scope and the scale of warmth was really unprecedented, Vaccaro said.

I’m sure this is just an anomaly…

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7 comments

Shiplord Kirel Mon, Apr 9, 2012 6:06:05pm

If this is really the trend, and not a short term variation, climate change is happening faster than almost anyone but the most hysterical alarmists would have predicted.
The consistent and pervasive nature of the change certainly suggests that this is indeed a genuine change.
If so, it is far too late for even the most extreme measures to mitigate the disaster that is overtaking us.

freetoken Mon, Apr 9, 2012 8:25:01pm

re: #1 Shiplord Kirel

If so, it is far too late for even the most extreme measures to mitigate the disaster that is overtaking us.

Oh, we probably still have the luxury of deciding how severe of consequences we will have to suffer. IOW, changing the atmosphere merely back to a Pliocene-like state would probably not end up being as bad as turning the atmosphere back into a Permian type.

However, my doomer nature still prevails, and I believe that we won’t even make the choice above in our favor.

Interesting Times Mon, Apr 9, 2012 8:36:07pm

re: #2 freetoken

However, my doomer nature still prevails, and I believe that we won’t even make the choice above in our favor.

Then you’d have to agree with my assertion that, barring a magic atmosphere-fixing miracle, humans will drive themselves to extinction within the next few hundred years (if not sooner). Return of Permian-type atmosphere = no air fit to breathe. So long, and thanks for all the fish even though they went extinct in the acidified oceans long before :(

freetoken Mon, Apr 9, 2012 9:03:58pm

re: #3 Interesting Times

I doubt H. sapiens will be extinct in a couple of centuries. We are just too adaptable.

While we could live in the Permian (oxygen levels a little too high but not as high as in the preceding Carboniferous), returning the atmosphere to around 900ppm of CO2 (as in the Permian) will radically change our global climate. While Permian global temps are estimated to have only been a bit warmer than the much more recent Pleistocene (the defined era that ended at then end of the last glaciation a bit over 10000 years ago), over the last 250 million years the amount of sunlight hitting Earth has also increased by a couple of percent, and that would matter a whole lot.

Both the Pliocene (which immediately preceded the Pleistocene) and the Permian had similar global temperatures, but as the Sun continues to accumulate energy from fusion its light output is increasing. Preceding the Pliocene were the Eocene, Oligocene and Miocene, which on the whole were much warmer.

The only question in my mind is if our global economic system will allow us to continue to exploit lower and lower quality of fossil fuels. That is, as it becomes harder to extract a given quantity of energy from some fossil carbon resource will that resource become too expensive for the market?

Even if we are at peak (high quality) petroleum extraction, and are past peak-anthracite extraction and rapidly approaching peak bituminous coal extraction, there exists still vast deposits of low quality carbon deposits around the globe.

So it is possible to change the atmosphere to get to 900ppm of CO2 (say by 2150). Will we do it?

Interesting Times Mon, Apr 9, 2012 9:21:00pm

re: #4 freetoken

While we could live in the Permian (oxygen levels a little too high but not as high as in the preceding Carboniferous), returning the atmosphere to around 900ppm of CO2 (as in the Permian) will radically change our global climate.

Did you mean to type something other than “Permian” here? Having a hard time parsing this.

So it is possible to change the atmosphere to get to 900ppm of CO2 (say by 2150). Will we do it?

Of course it can be done, and much, much sooner, because you don’t seem to be accounting for positive feedbacks from melting permafrost (which is already happening)

It isn’t just any one thing, or how long we use crap fossil fuels, it’s all these horrors happening at the same time and feeding upon one another. Ozone damage to plants + new insect infestation + heat damage (photosynthesis stops at 40°C) + fires + drought = massive, sudden, catastrophic ecosystem collapse (to say nothing of ever-growing ocean deadzones)

How are humans supposed to adapt to poisoned air, lacking enough oxygen, unless they build a domed city in time? (and where will the tech for that come from, if civilization is already in the process of collapse?)

freetoken Mon, Apr 9, 2012 9:39:32pm

re: #5 Interesting Times

There are a very many feedbacks in the Earth surface/atmosphere/ocean system of systems.

Even if melting permafrost releases more methane into the air, because methane is a gas it will in the atmosphere, like other gases, try to reach an equilibrium with the gas partial pressure at the ocean water surface. Indeed, the water on the planet’s surface has been absorbing a great quantity of the gases humans emit (or have caused to be emitted).

This is why it is the temperature rise of the oceans which matters the most when it comes to the surface temperature and climate, for the purposes of projecting the future changes. Liquid water can contain and transport much more kinetic energy than an equivalent volume of the atmosphere, and this means that temperature rises at the Earth surface are strongly controlled by the ocean overturning water from the surface to lower levels. This accounts for a great share of the variability in the temperature changes observed.

So to with gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Remember also there are negative feedbacks in action simultaneously with the positive feeds. That is why the variability is so great in the day to day, month to month, and even year to year changes that we measure.

So, while signficant changes are inevitable, they take longer than a human lifetime to accumulate to a magnitude that we can label them as “era changing”. Thus from year to year the net changes are small enough for most people to keep on living their lives as always, yet from century to century how humanity inhabits the landscape will change significantly as we try to adapt to new agriculture, new water sources (or more likely lack of them), lost sea-food production of our favorite kinds, and so forth.

John Vreeland Mon, Apr 9, 2012 10:26:59pm

It was the warmest March in the USA. It was not the warmest March in the world. Far from it. My Russian friends complained that the winter they have missed for the past few years finally showed up.

But it was pretty frikken warm here in DC. I was calling this the “year without a winter” back in early December, not realizing how true it would turn out. I actually had my air conditioner on one day in early March, but it hasn’t been that warm in April yet.

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