Winter is a great time for climate skeptics. They get to throw snowballs at climate change protestors saying, "See, it's still cold dummies!"

 

But NOAA — the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration — just published a helpful chart which shows temperature anomalies for February 2009. The above chart shows combined global land and ocean surface temperatures. The big red dots are +5 degrees C over normal (the average temperature for 1966-2009) and the big blue dots are -5 degrees C below normal.

 

All in all last month was the ninth warmest on record and shows our trajectory toward steadily climbing global temperatures. The chart is helpful for those confused about what "global warming" means. It shows that in fact some areas get colder as a result of overall global warming, as has been predicted by LANL's climate model called COSIM.

 

A few more, somewhat frightening data points ... The global land temperature was overall about 1.6 degrees F above the 20th century mean. The snow cover over Eurasia was 0.4 million square miles less than average (10.7 miles instead of 11.1). China also declared last month its highest state of emergency for eight provinces suffering from drought.

 

Via: Green Car Congress