Imagine if the headline said “terrorism” instead of climate change. Most Western democracies would have imposed martial law. The culture of fear would have been ramped up to an unimaginable scale and ordinary people would be fortifying their homes and limiting their forays into public places. But since instead these were deaths caused by our energy-gluttonous lifestyle, then this is news that won’t even make the front pages.

Nature World News reports: The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its decadal climate report Tuesday, which corroborated what many already believe to be true: the world is getting warmer, marked by a decade of unprecedented climate extremes.

The 10-year period between 2001 and 2010 was the warmest decade on record since modern meteorological records began around 1850, the report stated.

Those 10 years accounted for more record-breaking temperatures than any previous decade, and sea levels were said to have risen about twice as fast as the trend in the last 100 years.

Average air temperature on Earth during the study decade was nearly half a degree Celsius warmer than the average temperature from 1961-1990. Nine of the decade’s years were among the 10 warmest on record, with 2010 being the warmest year ever recorded.

The report “gives a snapshot of much longer term behavior of the climate system,” said Omar Baddour, coordinator for WMO climate system monitoring.

Baddour said that over the past four decades global temperatures have shown a “pronounced increase.”

Michel Jarraud, the WMO Secretary General, said that the rate of temperature increase “between 1991-2000 and 2001-2010 was unprecedented.” [Continue reading…]