World's Hottest and Most Populated Decade in History

Earlier this month the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report suggesting that we have recently been experiencing the hottest several years in recorded history, with the caveat of course that scientific recordings of weather go back only to the mid-19th century and are associated with the scientific advances brought about by the Enlightenment. Reuters picked up the story:

Every year of the decade except 2008 was among the 10 warmest since records began in the 1850s, with 2010 the hottest, according to the study by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The number of daily heat records far outstripped lows.

It said many extremes could be explained by natural variations - freak storms and droughts have happened throughout history - but that rising emissions of man-made greenhouse gases also played a role.

"Rising concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are changing our climate, with far-reaching implications for our environment and our oceans, which are absorbing both carbon dioxide and heat," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement.

You can see the interlinkages here. The very same scientific advances that have allowed us to control death and thus explode from one billion people alive two hundred years to more than seven billion alive now, have allowed us to exploit resources on the planet in ways that pollute the atmosphere (not to mention the lithosphere and hydrosphere). And that same science has brought us technology to monitor these changes. The challenge is whether science can save us from our pollution of the environment before we find that, like the Mayans hundreds of years ago, our way of life is unsustainable.