Good news: 2012 won’t likely set a world temperature record, but it still is expected to finish among the top 10 warmest.
Bad news: We recently passed the 333rd consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th century average, what a NYT writer calls an odometer moment.
A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.