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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.
Accepted dogma says this cannot be climate change. Or if it is, it cannot be human made. Rationality is irrelevant.
Well, fuckers, it is going to kill you or at least your children just the same, no matter how much you deny it.
And here I am, freezing by arse off down here in New Zealand where it's cold, went and windy and I've had a cold for over a month now.
Throw some of that heat down this way guys!
Sometimes I seriously wonder whether those dumb comments are: a. misspelled intentionally, or b. from somebody without a decent education, or c. from a non-native troll.
The interesting statistics is the ratio of cold and hot records. If the trend in your noisy data is absent, you'd expect cold and hot records to be set at roughtly 1:1, regardless of your history of measurements. In reality, it currently looks like this.
Ezekiel 23:20
He should do what obongo did.
Let BP ruin the gulf, then several years later let them lease areas to drill for oil like nothing happened.
Thanks obongo.
Actually he is quoting Ralph Wiggum. The original quote was "me fail English. That's unpossible."
There are lots of studies estimating just how bad climate change may get if global temperatures go up by X degrees, or Y degrees, or Z degrees by the year 2050, or 2100 or beyond. One problem with these predictive studies, however, is that nobody actually KNOWS with any certainty how climate will behave once you cross a certain temperature treshold that may exist and that we may not be aware of at all. Some experts say "As long as we can keep warming below 2 degrees C by the year 2100, the worst effects should be mitigated". Except that a climate system this huge and this complex and potentially this poorly understood cannot be accurately simulated on any existing supercomputer we have anywhere in the world today. We may find that in just a few years - maybe 2025, maybe 2030, maybe 2035 - we cross an "invisible temperature line" after which seriously catastrophic weather events start to occur all over the world with a severity and ferocity that nobody thought was possible, and that nobody can do anything whatsoever to mitigate, unless someone invents an actually working "weather control" technology in the next 10 years or so. Meteorologists can usually predict large scale weather events/problems a few days ahead of time today. But if the behavior of the entire system shifts and destabilizes in idiosyncratic ways, you may find that really scary weather events materialize in places where they have never happened before, and without anyone being able to foresee where and when the event will occur. Imagine a world where on a perfectly normal day, a Superstorm suddenly builds, and you have maybe 30 minutes of warning time before it hits where you are.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I'm Scottish and my father was, until recently retiring, a farmer. In the last decade of his farming he struggled to make any hay in the summer.
It had previously been tricky but do-able in the 4 decades prior to that. If you farm you notice climate change.
Now it's like it's "flipped" completely. Making hay this year should be easy if it hasn't dried out too much and the grass has grown.
The bit that's missing in this post is that the UK, and Scotland in particular, had one of the coldest winters on record. More snow than they've seen in decades.
It's as if the weather that north eastern Europe normally gets has shifted over west.
The gulf stream that normally warms N.Europe in winters and keeps it wet in summer is in flux.
I fully expect the UK will get a freezing winter in return for this recording setting summer if this continues.
Take a look at the rain and flooding in France and Spain that's also going on right now. Very unusual and abnormal.
Of course it's all "fake news" to those who feel this is an Inconvenient Truth.
I've heard of single incidents such as the ones you mentioned, but to say that they represent most of the record measurements seems hyperbole. What is your source?
Actually he is quoting Ralph Wiggum. The original quote was "me fail English. That's unpossible."
Actually, Unpossible is the sanctioned word in Newspeak.
Rogue ice cream truck engines next to measurement stations doesn't convincingly explain the sudden two weeks of consistently higher-than-average temperature all across the UK, nor the deluge of heat records specifically during May in Fennoscandia (in Swedish, but you can still get the gist from the pretty pictures).
You can't dismiss all ground weather stations' data because of a few anomalies when that data is still corroborated by other sources, such as satellite measurements -- It's not intellectually honest. Find an alternative theory that can explain all the previous data and predict future trends better than anthropogenic climate change.
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!
You realize forty rods per hogsheads is 0.0362 leagues per 9684 pony or roughly 3.7 microleagues/pony. You must have a ton of ponies to get mileage that bad, sounds like my kind of car.
The only people I have seen deny climate change are the AGW idiots who think the climate has ever been stable, and who demand global action to try to put it into some sort of climatic stasis.
The rest of us have always accepted the SCIENTIFIC FACTS that:
(a) The Earth's climate has always changed and always will.
(b) The Earth's climate is EXTREMELY COMPLEX and cannot currently be accurately modeled in a computer.
(c) While humans, like EVERYTHING ELSE, have SOME effects on climate, there are plenty of other causes of change including many we probably do not know/understand. Some of these other sources, like the sun, have a far greater impact than humans.
(d) The Earth has been both significantly hotter and extremely cold many times in the past before there were enough humans to have had ANY effect on any of those previously very extreme changes.
We ALSO embrace things like the laws of economics, the record of human history, and accept basic human nature - so we:
(a) Believe humans will continue to advance technologically and thus we as a species become better able to deal with climate change with every passing decade, making it retrograde to go nuts trying to offset it now - even if we could, and if we could afford it, and if its happening.
(b) Know that far more people are dying today from other sources than from climate, and that reducing some of the deaths and suffering of people TODAY is achieved using some of those fossil fuels people like you want eliminated or made too expensive because YOU claim it will save some future persons from some imagined future horror.
(c) WE actually believe a pet theory should be PROVEN before we implement policies that have a negative impact on the lives of millions of people in the name of "solving" the supposed problem. In fact, we'd like to not only see the problem PROVEN to exist, but we also want to see that the proposed solution will actually work, will be the most cost-effective option, and will have the least impact upon the lives and liberty of the people who are alive today.
So... who are the REAL "deniers"? You guys need to drop the quasi-religious fervor-driven propaganda and start persuading with REAL SCIENCE and not with slogans, bitter accusations, suppression of persons with opposed opinions, rigging of the peer review and paper publishing business, data hiding, data manipulation, etc. Your side could make a tiny start by dropping the "denier" and "paid for by big oil" accusations and not hurling expletives like ornery pubescent teenagers.
This is actually part of a cycle: As temperature heats up, more people use their air conditioners which heat up the air even more, power central has to burn more fuel. It's one of many feedback loops that ensure climate change inevitable. The only thing you can do is prepare for it.
It's a nerd site, if you're not going to use Celcius then at least use fucking Kelvin.
...you're going to do about this so-called climate change?
The answer is, "Not a damned thing." Why? Because you can't. That is, not without widespread death from the methods you would use to combat it.
Raise the price of fuels to astronomical levels? It'd just plunge the almost-poor into abject poverty, which is deadly. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but living in poverty will take about 10. Wanna kill a lotta people? Make 'em poor. That's what the normal, environmentalist-approach is to every question, "Money is no object" and then we get cars that cost twice as much as they should while chasing the goal of eliminating 0.0002% of the remainder of some imagined deadly pollutant. Eliminate the pollutant and save 27 people this year, and kill 100,000 from poverty. (F U!)
The bottom line is that there's nothing you can do about this that will come out of a Congress or a Parliament. The answer for this is going to come out of a physics lab. Walking up and down in front of some legislature with your hand-lettered sign in your father-Christmas beard and sandals isn't going to do a damned thing because all they can do is create poor people by passing some expensive law, which will kill a good percentage of those newly-minted poor people.
No, the fix for this is going to come from scientists that invent the magic battery or the magic supercapacitor that will store grid electricity or electric car electricity so that we can stop using fossil fuels. Oh, BTW, wind is not gonna be the savior, since the foundation of each of these massive wind turbines takes about 250 cubic yards of concrete, which is a huge CO2 emitter during its manufacture. While a nuke plant uses maybe 400,000 cubic yards of concrete in its containment structure, our >52,000 wind turbines amount to 13,000,000 cubic yards of concrete, minimum, for their foundations. And our 52,000 wind turbines have a combined capacity of slightly less than 8 gigawatts. That compares to the largest nuclear power station in the world that has slightly more than 8 gigawatts output. Composed of multiple nuclear reactors, I believe it is 7, that would be 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete. How many such plants does it take to run the entire USA? 302,229 megawatt-hours was the April generation, so with 24 hours in a day and 30 days in April, that is about 420 megawatts continuously. 420 megawatts / 8 megawatts per 52,000 wind turbines, assuming the wind blows 24/7/365, would be 52.5 times the 52,000 or so wind turbines we have now, which would be 2,730,0000 total wind turbines, or 2,679,500 _additional_ wind turbines to be built, except the wind doesn't blow continuously so double that for backup, so we want and additional 5.4 million wind turbines. And again, at 250 cubic yards of concrete for foundation per wind turbine, that's 5.4 X 250 = 1,350 million cubic yards of CO2 producing concrete manufacturing.
And of course there's still PV, with solar farms as far as the eye can see. No big need for CO2 producing concrete with those, but the sun doesn't shine 24/7/365 either. Solar photovoltaic energy is only available for a fraction of the day, since there's that night bugaboo plus the occasional cloud, so we're going to need billions of them and we're going to need energy storage.
So... really... what's the answer? A wind turbine in the frame of absolutely every outdoor photograph anyone takes within the borders of the USA, and a country probably devoid of birds that would all be killed by the whirling blades? Or solar photovoltaic "farms" in said outdoor photographs no matter where in the USA one points the camera?
Solve those PHYSICS problems and MAYBE we could stem the production of CO2 if we can find out how to use electricity to replace a jet engine, but if we turn propellers with electric motors, we'll get propeller speeds again, back to the 1950's air travel model.
But nobody's going to solve this by whining at legislators.
Which old record, where? In some places in Europe, it's breaking the record set less than half a decade previously.
Or it's more likely it was complete garbage and the guy was standing over a sinkhole. Seriously, the grade of asphalt they use there is the same they use in southern ontario, which goes through 60C temperature swings between winter and summer. Up next, you'll believe the story where the road is melting as kids show pictures of it oozing up between their toes. It will later come out that they were standing on tar and gravel roads.
Om, nomnomnom...