The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its State of the Climate in 2010. The report tracks 41 climate indicators during 2010 (four more than in the previous year), and they all show show unequivocally that the world continues to warm.

Air samples collected weekly at NOAA’s Mauna Loa observatory continue to show a rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide.

Global surface temperatures continue to rise; 2010 was one of the two warmest years on record.

And in 2010, Greenland’s ice sheet lost more mass than at any time in the past ten years.

Multiple indicators lead to the same bottom line conclusion: there is a consistent and unmistakable signal of warming from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the oceans.

It’s been more than 300 months – that’s 25 years – since the average annual global temperature has been below the long-term average.

2010 saw a plethora of extreme weather events – a predicted consequence of global warming. Jeff Masters at Wunderblog catalogs the weather-related events that make 2010 the planet’s most extraordinary year for extreme weather, probably since 1816 – the devastating “year without a summer” caused by the massive climate-altering 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora, the largest volcanic eruption since at least 536 A.D. Earth in 2010 experienced a parade of record events: heat, drought, fire;  rains, winds, cold and snow, floods, ice melt.

The Antarctic as well as the Arctic is thawing. A new paper titled Stronger ocean circulation and increased melting under Pine Island Glacier ice shelf published in Nature Geoscience finds that the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica – one of the frozen continent’s largest glaciers – is being undermined by the sea encroaching from below, and is melting more than 50% faster than it had been just 15 years ago.

Melting ice and warming temperatures are causing sea levels to rise. A newly-published reconstruction of sea level for the past 2000 years shows that 20th-Century sea-level rise on the U.S. Atlantic coast is faster than at any time in the past two millennia.

Just a couple of years ago, we could comfort ourselves with the thought we had two or three generations to turn things around – that the serious effects of global warming would not manifest themselves until around 2050. Humanity had time to change its ways before it was too late.

But suddenly, the predictions have started coming true. It’s too late. We’ve passed the environmental tipping point. Everything will change, is already changing.

Skip Wentz reiterates at Peak Oil News that the human economy is a subsystem of the environment. He writes that the human economy is dependent upon and reflects the state of the environment. As the environment deteriorates, so will its dependent economies deteriorate.

Our character has been revealed, and character is fate. Oedipus Rex  solved the famous riddle with his brilliance, rose to power, became a man beyond all power. Who could behold his greatness without envy? Yet confronted with the reality of his crime, he blinded himself.

When he saw her, he cried out fearfully and cut the dangling noose. Then, as she lay, poor woman, on the ground, what happened after, was terrible to see. He tore the brooches – the gold chased brooches fastening her robe – away from her and lifting them up high dashed them on his own eyeballs, shrieking out such things as: they will never see the crime I have committed or had done upon me! Dark eyes, now in the days to come look on forbidden faces, do not recognize those whom you long for – with such imprecations he struck his eyes again and yet again with the brooches. And the bleeding eyeballs gushed and stained his beard – no sluggish oozing drops but a black rain and bloody hail poured down.

It’s not surprising that denial of global warming denial, and human responsibility for it, is so vociferous and emotionally charged. Humans are brilliant, have conquered the Earth and the stars, control power beyond imagination. Yet humans could not bear to recognize what they have wrought. I

In the world of the Greeks, retribution was inexorable. The gods will not be denied their due.