Images via National Climatic Data Center and guardian.co.uk

Certainly, it behooves Fox News, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe (or other members of his family), and the many other conservative pundits, politicians, and institutions to acknowledge that the record heat wave is evidence of global warming, because conservatives have asserted that record snowstorms are evidence negating the existence of global warming (though record precipitation is cited as evidence of climate change).

These individuals promote anti-scientific disinformation in order to purposely distort the debate on climate change (or they participate in the strategy of sowing doubt). However, those of us who embrace objective thought and voraciously pursue knowledge understand that climate and weather are two different phenomena. Nonetheless, the sum of record heat illustrates that the climate is changing, due to the continued release of greenhouse gases, over the long term. Via NASA:

The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.

When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather. Today, children always hear stories from their parents and grandparents about how snow was always piled up to their waists as they trudged off to school. Children today in most areas of the country haven’t experienced those kinds of dreadful snow-packed winters, except for the Northeastern U.S. in January 2005. The change in recent winter snows indicate that the climate has changed since their parents were young.

If summers seem hotter lately, then the recent climate may have changed. In various parts of the world, some people have even noticed that springtime comes earlier now than it did 30 years ago. An earlier springtime is indicative of a possible change in the climate.

Currently, it’s so hot in some areas of the northeast that trains are being ordered to slow down, because the record heat is warping train tracks. The record heat is also resulting in blackouts and stressing the Northeast Power Grid. Also, people are dying and being hospitalized for heat-related illnesses, and crops are being damaged by the heat. For me, this record heatwave and other record-breaking warm weather, during other times of the year, are alarming. Certainly, the climate change debate should’ve been settled long before, but this summer heat wave is undoubtably reigniting the climate change debate. More from Christian Science Monitor:

Beijing hits a near-record 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia break 100 degrees and set new daily highs. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and Riyadh, on July 6 it was 113 and 111 degrees, warmer than average but still cooler than in Kuwait, which set the day’s world temperature high at 122 degrees.

The heat has been so intense in China that a plague of locusts is ravaging grasslands and farmlands from Inner Mongolia, and security officials are warning of outbreaks of violence.

Yes, we’re suffering a global heat wave. No, it’s not the apocalypse. But it may be a further sign of climate change.

“You can’t say any one heat wave is caused by global warming. But you can say that what global warming does is it makes events just like this more likely,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change.

Indeed, 2010 is set to be one of the world’s hottest years on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the first five months of the year was the warmest on record, and 1.22 degrees F warmer than the 20th century average, the NOAA states in its May 2010 State of the Climate Global Analysis.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the Arctic sea ice extent retreated at a rapid pace in May – 50 percent faster than the average May melting rate. Africa’s Lake Tanganyika, the second deepest freshwater lake in the world, is now at its warmest in 1,500 years, according to the journal Nature Geoscience.

Read more at the Christian Science Monitor.

On the Net:

1. NOAA: May Global Temperature is Warmest on Record
2. NOAA: Warmest April Global Temperature on Record
3. NOAA: Sixth Warmest February in Combined Global Surface Temperature, Fifth Warmest December-February
4. NOAA: December Global Ocean Temperature Second Warmest on Record