Despite all of the comments in (it seems) every blog post out there (except for this lovely community), more data keep coming in showing that the earth is indeed heating up. According to Science Now, NASA will be releasing data tomorrow (Friday) that will show that 2009 was the hottest year ever in the southern hemisphere.
More info below...
Here is the link to the article in Science Now. From the article:
The United States may be experiencing one of the coldest winters in decades, but things continue to heat up in the Southern Hemisphere. Science has obtained exclusive data from NASA that indicates that 2009 was the hottest year on record south of the Equator. The find adds to multiple lines of evidence showing that the 2000s were the warmest decade in the modern instrumental record.
Since the southern hemisphere is mostly water, it reacts more slowly to the effects of changing temperatures than the northern hemisphere does.
Also from the article:
The data come a month after announcements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and by the World Meterological Organization that the decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s. (NOAA estimates that the decade was 0.54°C warmer than the 20th century average. The 1990s, by comparison, was 0.36°C warmer by their measure.)
Joe Romm from Climate Progress has a good take on this, as usual:
This is especially impressive because we’re at "the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century." The point is, notwithstanding the all-too-effective disinformation campaign of the antiscience crowd, it’s getting hotter — thanks primarily to human emissions — much as climate scientists warned it would
And while we're on the subject of warming:
The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989).
Expect Fox News to be all over this! I'm sure they will cover it with the same amount of gusto they reported the stolen emails back in November... yeah, right.