Care to Take Your Own Temperature?

Ever wonder what global warming has done to temperatures where you live?  The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has developed an interactive layer for Google Earth that lets you see your local situation based on weather data collected over the past century and a half.

It's an eye-opener, especially if you head up to the Arctic and check out warming there.

For those who like their data depicted in graphs, the U.S.  National Ocreanic Data Centre and NOAA have released a series of charts showing oceanic warming.   Here's one:

The orange bar is representative of those years in which climate change denialists contend our planet's warming stopped.  And, in case you think that ocean warming is a good thing, it's not.  Among other things, it is being accompanied by acidification which triggered all but one of Earth's major extinctions.  It also weakens the oceans' conveyors that circulate heat throughout the planet and upon which our species rely for our survival.