Bright and blustery this afternoon on California’s north coast — the gusty-breeze a bit chilly and sharp, but if you’ve a wind break, the air’s warm and not unpleasant.

Major climate news earlier today, as apparently there’s been no supposed global-warming “hiatus” the last few years, instead the whole scenario might be worse — NOAA scientists in a new study with an emphasis on data collection, and published online today at Science.
Via the study’s abstract: ‘…global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century.’

Hence, although this new development will create a political spin-fest, the planet is still frying along at a record pace.

(Illustration above found here).

A “pause” or whatever, 2014 was still the hottest year since before recording devices, and this year we’re in right now is already forming into maybe being even warmer. An explanation on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new study from today’s Smithsonian:

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an assessment report that found what appeared to be a halt in the pace of warming.
The rate at which surface temperatures rose between 1998 and 2012 was only about a third to a half that seen between 1951 and 2012.
This was termed the “hiatus,” and climate change skeptics jumped on the result as evidence that there was no reason to worry.
…
“We know that the raw temperature records contain various inconsistencies over the long time history,” says co-author Boyin Huang.
“Stations may have been moved, sensors are replaced and improved, observation techniques change, and so on.”
Before World War II, for instance, most researchers took water temperatures by putting a bucket over the side of a ship.
After the war, water temperatures were mostly monitored at engine intakes.
Later, more of the water data was collected at buoys instead of from ships.
…
The new analysis accounts for the changes in data collection on land and sea, and the results show that the rate of global warming between 1998 and 2012 is almost double that reported in the IPCC assessment.
Adding 2013 and 2014 to the dataset increases the rate further, and the pace of warming between 2000 and 2014 — 0.209 degrees Fahrenheit per decade — is nearly the same as that seen in the latter half of the 20th century, the researchers note.
“Science is a cumulative and continuous process, and this is reflected in our continued improvements to the land and ocean surface temperature datasets,” says study co-author Huai-Min Zhang.
“The notion of a warming hiatus in the most recent decades, as defined by the [IPCC report], is no longer valid. The global warming rate has been just as fast over the last 15 years as over the previous 50 years.”

Still shitty even — from The Verge:

But there are still some major gaps that remain to be filled.
Experts say the relative lack of temperature data from the Arctic is most glaring, as the authors acknowledge, since that region has warmed much faster than the rest of the globe.
Others argue that using 1950 as a baseline year is misleading, since global warming didn’t accelerate until the 1970s.
But for those who never bought into the hiatus to begin with, today’s findings are a welcomed affirmation.
“I hope that this study helps to put this false idea of a hiatus to rest,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in the study.
“It didn’t have any merit in the first place.”

A lot of news stories already out here about the report; a good one from environmental writer Chris Mooney at the Washington Post, decent details from the Guardian, and some science at Climate Central, which reminds the bottom line: ‘NCEI is a member of the Fab Four global temperature analysts — the other three being NASA, the U.K. Met Office and the Japan Meteorological Agency — and each uses slightly different techniques to analyze the data but they’re all in general agreement that the planet is warming.’

In real-time reality, the brainiacs can only know just so fucking much…they react, too: “Hold onto your butts.”