Key Indicators for Climate Change

Here is a link to the NASA Climate website which gives a set of really great plots and illustrations indicating some of the key indicators of Climate Change. Carbon Dioxide concentrations, Sea level and Global Surface Temperature are going up, and Arctic Sea Ice and Land Ice are going down. The data says it all. NASA Climate's Key Climate Change Indicators

Two sets of time series illustrating the rising Carbon Dioxide concentration. From  NASA Climate's Key Climate Change Indicators

2012 - A Year of Broken Records ...

But unfortunately the records being broken are not the good ones. The Guardian has posted an article summarising a recent report by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) on a warming planet. 2012 saw the lowest sea-ice coverage on record and ranked in the top ten warmest years ever recorded - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/06/noaa-report-arctic-ice-climate-change

A Report by NOAA called State of the Climate in 2012 - http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2012.php

Climate Change set to occur over ten times faster than any other natural climate change recorded over the last 65 million years

Here's am ominous article from the Stanford News website explaining some of the work recently published in Science by Climate Scientists Noah Diffenbaugh and Chris Field. It explains how current models predict the average global temperature to increase by 5 - 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The last time the planet had to adjust to this magnitude of temperature increase, ecosystems had thousands of years to adapt. But due to the unprecedented trajectory of climate change happening today, ecosystems are forced to adapt in only decades. If this trajectory continues, by 2046-2065 the average temperature of the Northern land masses will be 2-4 degrees higher. This means that the hottest summer experienced in the last 20 years will now occur at least every second year, if not more frequently.

Map from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-speed-080113.html
Note the colour of South Africa in the Velocity of Climate Change map - much of South Africa, particularly the Northen Cape and central interior are set to experience rapid climate change.