This winter, there was a meme amongst the talk radio/climate change denier community that the unusually high levels of snowfall in the eastern United States ‘proved’ that climate change was a hoax perpetrated on innocent capitalists by scientists and their Marxist agenda. Hopefully, most people realized that this was a bogus argument. But if there’s any doubt the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has come up with a couple of pretty pictures to illustrate just what’s happening to temperatures at a global level.

Based on records maintained by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that extend back to 1880, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April of 2010 and for the period from January-April of 2010. What this means is that despite a bit of extra snow in a small part of the world, as a whole the first part of 2010 has been the hottest in 130 years.

NOAA’s maps (above and below) illustrate this beautifully. Basically, the red dots represent regions in which the temperature was higher than the average between 1971 and 2000. Blue dots represent regions in which the temperature was lower than normal. The bigger the dot, the larger the deviation from the average. What you can see quite clearly by looking at the April 2010 map (above) is that there are a lot of big red dots, particularly in arctic areas, and not very many blue dots. The map for the first quarter of 2010 (below) isn’t as rosy, so to speak, but the trend towards warmer temperatures holds. Except for the Eastern United States, which was a bit cooler than normal.

Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Levin, Lord Monckton - the world is bigger than the mid-Atlantic states. And NOAA’s data is disturbing. In addition to the record high global temperatures, they found:

• The global ocean surface temperature was 0.57°C above the 20th century average 16.0°C and the warmest on record for April. .
• Warmer-than-normal conditions dominated the globe, most notably in Canada, Alaska, the eastern United States, Australia, South Asia, northern Africa and northern Russia.
• Arctic sea ice was below normal for the 11th consecutive April, covering an average of 14.7 million square kilometers. This is 2.1 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the 15th smallest April extent since records began in 1979. It was, however, the largest April Arctic sea ice extent since 2001.
• Despite the mid-Atlantic winter storms, the North American snow cover extent for April was the smallest on record and snow cover extent was the fourth-lowest on record for the seventh consecutive April. Warmer-than-normal conditions over North America, Europe and parts of Russia contributed to the small snow footprint.
• According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, Victoria and Tasmania had their warmest 12-month period since national records began.
• According to the Beijing Climate Center, China experienced its coolest April since 1961 and its wettest since 1974.

But perhaps the most illustrative figure is this one, which shows the changes from the average temperature over the last 130 years.

Global climate change isn’t real? A figment of corrupt scientists’ imaginations? A scam to keep people from driving Hummers? Really?

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All images from NOAA’s April 2010 State of the Global Climate report. There’s also a pretty nifty animation over there and a deeper discussion of their methodology.