The Great Global Warming Plateau: A Remembrance

Here’s a trip down memory lane. Remember this?

George Will was all over this. It was proof that global warming was just a big hoax. The denier sites trumpeted it constantly. The folks who styled themselves “scientists” explained why this was no mere anomaly, but the way things were going to be forever thanks to . . . um, sunspot cycles and satellite errors and “tricks” from the climate shysters. What they didn’t tell you was that this was no big deal. It was just the latest cycle that was typical of global temperature increases over the past century:

And here’s the complete data series over the past hundred years:

Things are even worse here in North America:

On average, it’s now nearly 4°F hotter than it was when your grandmother was born. At the rate things are going, by 2060 it will be 7°F hotter.

A decade ago, the con artists were all trying to pretend that global warming had stopped forever. But now that we’re a decade close to planetary suicide, maybe it doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Then again, IBGYBG, amirite?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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