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New Record High Temperature At South Pole
New submitter Titus Andronicus writes "The South Pole experienced its highest-ever recorded temperature of -12.3C (+9.9F) on December 25, 2011, according to preliminary reporting from the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center at the University of Wisconsin."
Just like snow on Copenhagen is weather, not climate, right?
This is indeed weather, it's come close to that before (in the "global cooling" period of the 1970s) Dec 27, 1978 the high was -13.6 C +7.5 F.
First, it's mid summer there. Second, there is no mention of the previous record so we have nothing to compare this "record" to. I have a friend who works there every year and his comments, from camp, last month was that they were battling storms and cold and hadn't been able to get too much work done. Finally, we have only been keeping track of temperatures there since 1956 so it's hardly worth getting into a tizzy over 60 years worth of record data.
What's hilarious is how these people shriek and cry about how the earth has always experienced climate change, pointing to the research of climatologists to prove this, but then when those same climatologists say there is evidence that this warming trend is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, suddenly they can't be trusted.
Oh, it's like this: global warming cause taxes, taxes are wrong and therefore global warming is wrong. QED.
They don't point to research of climatologists to show the earth has always experienced climate change, they point to the research of geologists. Climatologists mostly work with computer models.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
A First World country wherein thousands of people die simply because it was hot outside? What's wrong with this picture?
Perhaps you should ask the people in the Chicago? The difference is that a lot of Europe rarely (or at least it used to be rarely) gets hot enough to require air conditioning in contrast to parts of the US that trace their population growth to the invention of air conditioning due to the stifling heat (at least that's what Atlanta claimed in some of it tourist literature several years ago).
I would hazard a guess the the main reason for this is that the US is at a lower latitude that much of Europe and lacks the moderating influence of the ocean (no Mediterranean, Rockies block air from Pacific), but I am by no means an expert in such matters. Whatever the cause the US does seem to be, on average, hotter than much of Europe in the summer and colder in the winter. Europe does get hot but not for the prolonged months that the US seems to suffer. This means that not only is air conditioning a lot less common but heat waves occur far less frequently and are typically less severe so, when bad ones do happen, there are far more vulnerable people around because their population has not been reduced by frequent heat waves and there is little/no air conditioning available to help.....of course this does not explain the deaths in Chicago but I'll let you figure out why they happened.