Second Warmest February

Tom Yulsman's blog at Discover tells us that NASA has released figures showing that this February and this past winter are the second warmest on record. He also has a great animated graphic of the disparity between a lot of people's perceptions and the reality of global warming in light of recent weather.

Yulsman combines NASA images of temperature anomaly -- departure of monthly average temperature from the long-term mean for the same month -- for the three months of the winter that many in the US just suffered through. His post also has a great explanation of just what the situation was that made the eastern part of the U.S. experience such cold and wintry weather.

Predictably, quite a few people who experienced that cold are yet again calling into question whether there can be any such thing as global warming. They feel cold. How can the earth be warming?

This is a lot like a person going into a coal mine on a bright and sunny day, turning off the lights, and then claiming that the sun has gone out.  "I can't see the sun, so I guess it stopped shining." Or, "I feel cold, so I guess global warming is a myth".

But the whole idea of global warming is that, though it may be unseasonably cold in some places, it's a lot warmer in other places, so that the average temperature of the earth is warmer compared to earlier periods in history.  Look carefully at the animation above. During the period when the eastern part of the U.S. was so much colder than normal, what was happening over all of Siberia and the northwestern half of North America? How much of the southern hemisphere had warmer temperatures than normal?