May 10, 2011 | 1:58 PM | By

Global warming? See for yourself

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, see for yourself

There are many lines of evidence to support the fact that our climate is changing – temperatures are rising, sea ice is melting, weather is getting more extreme, and oceans are getting more acidic. But these changes can be hard to see, and there’s nothing like being able to see something for yourself. After all, seeing is believing.
NASA’s Earth Observatory group has produced some fabulous sets of images that allow you to do just that. I’ve taken the liberty of pulling the global temperature images into a slideshow so you can watch a century of warming in a matter of seconds.
A quick note before we get started: these maps show temperature anomalies, or changes, not absolute temperature. They show how much warmer (+2°C = dark red) or colder (-2°C = dark blue) a region was during a given decade compared to the norm – the global average air temperature – for that region from 1951-1980.


According to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the global average temperature on Earth has risen by about 1.4°F since 1880. While that might not seem like much, one degree of global warming is significant because it takes a truly vast amount of heat to warm all the land, air, and particularly water on Earth. What’s more, two-thirds of that warming has occurred since 1975, and the past decade was the hottest on record. But, as the maps above clearly demonstrate, global warming doesn’t mean all spots on the globe warm equally.