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All-time Heat Records Are Being Set All Over the World (washingtonpost.com)
As the U.K. begins a two-week heat wave, one pedestrian apparently found his leg sinking into tarmac, which had melted, requiring a call to emergency rescue services.
"All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week," reports the Washington Post, in an article titled "Red-Hot Planet," which they've updated throughout the week with new all-time heat records. From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East to Southern California, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.... The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports the heat is to blame for at least 54 deaths in southern Quebec, mostly in and near Montreal, which endured record high temperatures. In Northern Siberia, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean -- where weather observations are scarce -- model analyses showed temperatures soaring 40 degrees above normal on July 5, to over 90 degrees...
On Thursday, Africa likely witnessed its hottest temperature ever reliably measured. Ouargla, Algeria soared to 124.3 degrees (51.3 Celsius). If verified, it would surpass Africa's previous highest reliable temperature measurement of 123.3 degrees (50.7 Celsius) set July 13, 1961, in Morocco. No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.
Nasdaq Inc. even warned customers that high humidity in New Jersey was slowing the radio transmissions needed for high-speed trading, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader narcoossee. And Southern California has also experienced record-setting temperatures "well above 110 degrees across the region," sparking brush fires that burned homes in two counties.
Last July several U.S. cities experienced their hottest month ever, including Reno, Salt Lake City, and Miami. And Death Valley, California maintained an average temperature of 107.4 degrees for an entire month, the hottest month ever recorded on earth. "The temperature didn't fall below 89 degrees at any point in the month of July at Death Valley," reports the Washington Post, adding "On three nights, the 'low' temperature was 102-103 degrees."
And last month the Middle East city Quriyat (in Oman) endured more than two full days in which the temperature never dropped below 108.7 degrees.
"All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week," reports the Washington Post, in an article titled "Red-Hot Planet," which they've updated throughout the week with new all-time heat records. From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East to Southern California, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.... The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports the heat is to blame for at least 54 deaths in southern Quebec, mostly in and near Montreal, which endured record high temperatures. In Northern Siberia, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean -- where weather observations are scarce -- model analyses showed temperatures soaring 40 degrees above normal on July 5, to over 90 degrees...
On Thursday, Africa likely witnessed its hottest temperature ever reliably measured. Ouargla, Algeria soared to 124.3 degrees (51.3 Celsius). If verified, it would surpass Africa's previous highest reliable temperature measurement of 123.3 degrees (50.7 Celsius) set July 13, 1961, in Morocco. No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.
Nasdaq Inc. even warned customers that high humidity in New Jersey was slowing the radio transmissions needed for high-speed trading, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader narcoossee. And Southern California has also experienced record-setting temperatures "well above 110 degrees across the region," sparking brush fires that burned homes in two counties.
Last July several U.S. cities experienced their hottest month ever, including Reno, Salt Lake City, and Miami. And Death Valley, California maintained an average temperature of 107.4 degrees for an entire month, the hottest month ever recorded on earth. "The temperature didn't fall below 89 degrees at any point in the month of July at Death Valley," reports the Washington Post, adding "On three nights, the 'low' temperature was 102-103 degrees."
And last month the Middle East city Quriyat (in Oman) endured more than two full days in which the temperature never dropped below 108.7 degrees.
Actually he is quoting Ralph Wiggum. The original quote was "me fail English. That's unpossible."
I'm reading that as saw 124.3 degrees and though holy fuck, that was on Earth, not some other planet? My browser width was just right (wrong) that real number, 51.3 Celsius, was on the next line. That sounds more real, yea, just that one country on the planet who still donesn't know how to measure temperature yet. Guess I should be glad they bother to put Celsius at all. Wait spoke too soon, only 25% of the temperatures had conversions. I'm going to dig out a conversion tool just to read this, nope, have whinge instead.
Ok, I get it "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." but at least put some F's after those numbers so we know they are USA only numbers, not international standard!
Yea, go on score me down as a troll, my karma score can handle it and after decades of dealing with this rubbish I feel the need to bitch occasionally.
Actually he is quoting Ralph Wiggum. The original quote was "me fail English. That's unpossible."
Actually, Unpossible is the sanctioned word in Newspeak.
Since I believe in the usually futile approach of trying to counter lies with facts...
We know very well that the current warming is caused by greenhouse gases and not by increased solar radiation. We know this because the two would produce different patterns of warming, and what we actually observe agrees in every detail with the predictions for greenhouse gases and disagrees with the predictions for increased solar radiation.
Example: greenhouse gases should cause the lower atmosphere to get warmer (since they hold heat in) but the upper atmosphere to get cooler (because less heat escapes). Increased solar radiation should cause both the lower and the upper atmosphere to get warmer (because both would be getting more radiation). Sure enough, the upper atmosphere has been getting colder at exactly the same time the lower atmosphere has been getting warmer.
With greenhouse gases you expect the poles to warm faster than the tropics and winter temperatures to increase more than summer temperatures. For increased solar radiation, you expect the opposite: the tropics should warm more than the poles and summer temperatures should go up faster than winter temperatures. Here again the evidence strongly agrees with greenhouse gasses being the cause and strongly disagrees with increased solar radiation being the cause.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
First: The greenhouse effect itself and the contributing gasses are long known, at least for 120 years, when Svante Arrhenius first published about it. For astronomers, especially for planetologists, the greenhouse effect on other planets and their moons is an interesting field of research since the 1970ies, when the first probes were sent to Venus and Mars (spoiler: both of them have one, several hundreds of Kelvin on Venus, about 20 Kelvin on Mars). A back-of-the-envelope calculation for the Earth gives a good estimate for the size of the greenhouse effect here: We know, that each square meter on the orbit of the Earth gets about 1.4 kW from the Sun, the so called Solar constant. With the diameter of the Earth given (a little more than 12,700 km), we can calculate that the Sun delivers about 180 Exawatt of thermal power to the Earth. If the Earth would just absorb the whole energy, heat up and then radiate all power to space like a black body, it would be about 255 K warm (Stefan-Boltzmann law), quite close to 0 F. But on average, the earth's surface is about 290 K warm. So we can estimate that the Earth's atmosphere has a greenhouse effect of about 35 K.
Everyone denying the existance of a greenhouse effect on Earth or the idea that carbon dioxide plays a role needs good arguments.
Second: The composition of Earth's atmosphere has interested the scientists since Joseph Priestley at the end of the 18th century discovered that air is not a single element, but a mixture of several gasses. At the end of the 19th century, the composition of Earth's atmosphere contained about 270 ppm of carbon dioxide, as we can find out if we look for instance into Anatole Leduc, Nouvelles Recherches sur les Gaz, published in 1899 or other contemporary sources. Current readings of the carbon dioxide content of the air give about 410 ppm (e.g. The Keeling Curve). We can calculate how much additional carbon dioxide has to be released to increase the carbon dioxide contents of the atmosphere by 140 ppm (700 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide), and how much carbon you have to burn to create that much carbon dioxide (200 billion metric tons). And if we look up how much coal and crude oil was mined and pumped up since 1900, and how much pure carbon they contain, we come up with an estimate of about 350 billion metric tons of oil and coal, containing about 270 billion metric tons of carbon.
Everyone denying that those amounts of coal and oil mined, pumped and for a large part burned have something to do with the increase of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has to come up with really good arguments.