MCFly 38- Scary Science

Climate Progress reports
Fast on the heels of the hottest June to September on record*, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that last month was tied for the second hottest September on record (after 2005).

Unlike NOAA, which announced its October global analysis with a major State of the Climate monthly update, NASA just quietly updates its data set . So you have to do a little math to see that for the June through October period, 2009 now tops both 1998 (easily) and 2005 (just barely, hence the asterisk).

For NOAA, it was the sixth warmest October on record, and the fifth-warmest January-through-October period.

Nov 22 The Guardian reports that the world's largest ice sheet has started to melt along its coastal fringes, raising fears that global sea levels will rise faster than scientists expected. The East Antarctic ice sheet, which makes up three-quarters of the continent's 14,000 sq km, is losing around 57bn tonnes of ice a year into surrounding waters, according to a satellite survey of the region. Scientists had thought the ice sheet was reasonably stable, but measurements taken from Nasa's gravity recovery and climate experiment (Grace) show that it started to lose ice steadily from 2006.

The Independent reports, on 25 Nov that
"The planet could warm by seven degrees Celsius (10. 8 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, a figure that lies at the farthest range of expert predictions made only two years ago, scientists said on Tuesday. The study is the biggest overview on global warming since the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report in 2007. Several authors of the new paper were part of that Nobel-winning group.
Entitled the "Copenhagen Diagnosis," the 64-page summary is pitched at the December 7-18 UN conference in Denmark tasked with forging a planet-wide deal to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. "This is a final scientific call for climate negotiators from 192 countries who must embark on the climate protection train in Copenhagen," said Hans Schellnhuber, director of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which oversaw the paper.
"They need to know the stark truth about global warming and the unprecedented risks involved," he said in a statement. The authors say the document "serves as an interim scientific evaluation" of climate change, between the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007 and its next big handbook, due in 2013.