Extreme Weather in 2012 Shattered Records and Showed What Climate Change Looks Like: http://bit.ly/1037IXd

NRDC experts analyzed government weather data and found that at least 3,527 monthly weather records were broken for heat, rain, and snow throughout the United States last year. That is higher than the 3,251 records smashed in 2011.

New Poll: Americans Believe Global Warming is Real and Threatens Their Families

A new national survey reveals that a whopping 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is very real, a substantial surge over the past two and a half years, while those viewing it as a direct threat to themselves or their families are the highest levels ever, according to survey results released yesterday.

Meanwhile, the number of U.S. residents denying the existence of climate change declined almost by half to a relatively few 12 percent since January 2010. Read more.

What Happens in the Arctic Doesn’t Stay in the Arctic
Arctic sea ice extent dropped to the lowest level ever recorded, bottoming out at 3.41 million square kilometers on September 16, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). That’s 49 percent below the average minimum recorded during the 1980s and 1990s.

Scientists are confident that this trend is due to pollution. While there are year-to-year fluctuations in the location and extent of arctic sea ice, driven primarily by wind patterns, the best estimates are that the minimum extent never dropped below 9.8 million square kilometers in the first half of the 20th Century and probably not below 9 million in the last 1000 years.  Since around 1950 there has been a clear trend toward less ice, with the minimum extent dropping below 4 million square kilometers for the first time this year. Read more.

Image: NASA (with 1979 boundary redrawn by NRDC)

NASA’s James Hansen: tar sands is the “dirtiest of fuels” and “game over for the climate”
James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, made another appeal this week to end our reliance on tar sands oil or it will be “game over” for the climate.  If we continue to approve pipelines bringing in the dirtiest of fuels like tar sands he said, “there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.” The production of tar sands oil has three times the global warming emissions as conventional oil production. Hansen rightly cautions that turning to these “dirtiest of fuels” for our gas tanks derails efforts to reduce our dependency on climate-changing fossil fuels.  Read more.