Next decade to be warmest ever -- polluters try extra hard to distort science

The global rice crop at risk.  Tornadoes in New York City.  A looming mosquito invasion in the United Kingdom.  The earth is warming faster than any other time in the last 100 years, and with it comes changes in weather patterns.  That means advocates of the nation's biggest polluters, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, will have to work even harder to blur the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change.

This morning, there is yet another report out on the climate.  Scientists found that temperature increases, impacted by greenhouse gases, will be offset over the next few years by a cooling trend in the eastern and southern portions of the Pacific Ocean.  But once the weather pattern subsides, the next decade will break temperature records:

The climate projection, published Thursday in thejournal Science, suggests that a cooling trend in eastern and southernPacific ocean waters has kept a lid on warming in recent years.

And it will continue to do so, scientists say, but not for long.

Theprojection spans 2007 to 2017. "At least half of the years after 2009are predicted to be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently onrecord," the researchers say in their report.

Globally,that means a typical year will be about half a degree warmer than inthe previous 10 years, a projection in line with findings this year bythe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel's report alsopredicts steadily rising temperatures.

And about 2014:

Over the 10-year period as a whole, climate continues to warm and 2014 is likely to be 0.3 deg C warmer than 2004.

The effect that just a slight average temperature increase has on poor people is extremely significant because of what it does to crops, particularly in third world countries.

Late this week during a forum in Singapore, former vice president Al Gore exposed the active campaign by polluters to cloud these climate facts:

"There has been an organized campaign,financed to the tune of about $10 million (euro 7.2 million) a yearfrom some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impressionthat there is disagreement in the scientific community," Gore said atforum in Singapore.

This comes even though the disagreement among scientists is almost non-existent.  So where does some of this money go?  Earlier this year, the American Enterprise Institute announced that it would pay scientists $10,000 to publicly deny that humans have had anything to do with the rise in CO2 and temperature.  That is how desperate the other side is getting.

Meanwhile, the facts continue to speak for themselves.