And the winner is 2005! For Global Warming! The hottest year ever! Yay!

To those who aren't believers in this phenomenon, I can't blame you, it's been overcomplicated unnecessarily by oil-industry funded "scientists" and think tanks to make it sound utterly implausible. However, the issue is very simple. "Global Warming" refers to the change in one variable, one! That variable is Global Mean surface temperature.



The other thing people say is, "big deal, it's only a degree or two."

There's a basic thermodynamic principle here that eludes the simple-minded. If you manage to increase the surface temperature of our entire planet, even by one degree, thats a crapload of heat. If one calorie is the amount of energy it takes to increase the temperature of a gram of water 1 degree (calorie in nutrition by the way actually refers to a kilocalorie), imagine the amount of heat energy it takes to increase the surface temperature of earth by a degree. If you just consider warming up the 1st 10 meters of water that makes up 2/3 our surface 1 degree, that's about 3.6 x 10^15 calories. That's no small amount of energy, about the amount released by a hydrogen bomb except entirely absorbed by the ocean as heat (and maintained year round despite the rate at which the earth loses heat). Then, think about how weather like hurricanes is influenced by surface temperature of large bodies of water, and how one degree increase in temperature over, say, the entire surface of the Gulf of Mexico, might mean, say, a record year for number of hurricanes, and more destructive hurricanes. The full data isn't in yet, but from a thermodynamics perspective it's simple, more heat means more violent weather systems that are generated by warm water.

Starting to get a little scary. On a related note Al Gore has a film at Sundance called, A Matter of Degrees, WaPo profiles it here. Might be interesting, but then, it is Al Gore. Maybe Global Warming should get a more exciting spokesperson. I nominate Michael Jordan.