Earth & Sky

Scientist:

This is David Easterling. He’s Chief of the Scientific Services Division at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

David Easterling: One of the things that I’ve been looking at recently are what I call “warm spells.” In the summertime, it would be a heat wave, but in the wintertime, you might think of it as January thaw, or an early spring. This is a period of at least three days or more where temperatures are elevated. If you look at what happens in some of the climate model simulations for the 21st century, what happens is that these warm spells become much, much more common and they increase in length. We’ve seen some of this in the observed record in North America, where we are seeing an increase in the number of unusually warm days, especially in the wintertime and the springtime.

Easterling is one voice among thousands in the scientific community who are now speaking out strongly about the reality of human-caused global warming.

David Easterling: I’d just like to leave the public with the thought that global warming is real. We have certainly seen increases in temperature over the past 100 years, and especially in the last 30 years. The scientific community is at least in large part convinced that it’s mainly due to human activities. And it’s something that I think needs to be taken seriously.

Our thanks today to NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.