Joe Romm:
NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record: Lmonth tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record.... The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is....
Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”... NASA’s recent draft paper reported: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”
For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite records (UAH and RSS), which are more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) than the land records and have biases of their own (as Hansen discusses here). Although I’m sure it’s just another coincidence, but just as NOAA noted “North American snow cover for April 2010 was the smallest on record,” Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab again reports a record low snow cover in the entire northern hemisphere for the month of May...
