Year 2, Month 7, Day 15: No News Is Good News

Lots of newspapers are running something about this June 29 report from the National Climate Data Center. Among them is the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel:

WASHINGTON — The world’s climate is not only continuing to warm, it’s adding heat-trapping greenhouse gases faster than in the past, researchers said Tuesday. The global temperature has been warmer than the 20th-century average every month for more than 25 years, they said at a teleconference.

“The indicators show unequivocally that the world continues to warm,” Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in releasing the annual State of the Climate report for 2010.

The evidence keeps accumulating, and by now it’s way deeper than an anomalous blizzard in Washington, DC. But that won’t stop the climate-change denialists in media and politics. By now their positions are fixed in stone; it would be easier to get all that extra atmospheric CO2 back in the ground than to get the GOP’s anti-science zealots to admit error. During the Bush administration, an un-named official derided the “reality-based community,” saying, “We’re an empire. We make our own reality.” And the current Republican party still clings stubbornly to the notion that inconvenient facts can be ignored, forever if necessary. As the NCDC report shows, pretty soon those facts will be too hot to handle. Eventually, of course, climate denialists will admit the reality of climate change — but America and the world cannot afford to wait any longer. It’s time for them to wake up; the coffee’s burning.

Warren Senders