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INVEST IN COPPERTONE. Happy new year to Tapped readers; I hope 2006 went well and 2007 will be even more joyful and prosperous.Not to be a downer, but one thing 2007 promises to be, if the year gone by is any indication, is hot. According to the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2006 is expected to be judged the sixth hottest year on record. (Based on preliminary analyses; final data analyses and reports won't come out until March.)As for Arctic ice content -- which, as anyone who saw Al Gore's painfully brilliant documentary An Inconvenient Truth knows, is dwindling -- in its "Statement on the Status of the global Climate in 2006," the WMO concludes:
The year 2006 continues the pattern of sharply decreasing Arctic sea ice. The average sea-ice extent for the entire month of September was 5.9 million km�, the second lowest on record missing the 2005 record by 340.000 km�. Including 2006, the September rate of sea ice decline is now approximately -8.59% per decade, or 60,421 km� per year.Not sure how things looked around the rest of the country on new year's day, but here in DC the weather was so mild in the afternoon that folks were jogging in shorts. Welcome to 2007; start stockpiling the suntan lotion.
--Tom Schaller
