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.

Comments

Cannot be climate change

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Cannot be climate change

[Opportunist]

Research has shown that earth's climate isn't stable.

Correct. But also that human populations react quite drastically to changes, mostly due to whether our food can still grow.

Research can't show us what the proper climate should be.

Actually, it can. Or rather, it can show us what climate we as humans consider optimal.

Research cannot show us how much co2 and other gases affect the climate

Again, we can. We have records of CO2 levels through the ages and we also know what temperatures occurred in those times.

Research cannot even predict next day's weather.

Please, you don't have to be so blatant in your ignorance of the difference between climate and weather, we already pretty much assumed that much.

Earth is a sandbox. Everything will always be in balance. If you have a long period of high temps you'll have a period with low temps.

Now that's a great one. What makes you think that there is anything remotely resembling balance? Furthermore, yes, there have been periods when it was warmer on this planet. Unfortunately for us, those were periods when no humans had to survive on the planet.

Sometimes you get ice ages sometimes you get scorching periods with huge fauna and flora.

Again, I have no idea why you think the climate has to remain in some sort of bracket between X and Y, but you might want to ponder that during the times when it was actually warmer than today were no times when humans wanted to survive on this planet.

Oil, plastic, e.t.c. belong in the same bucket, in several thousands of years they will becone sone other material.

In several million years. Several thousand years is too short a time span to have any relevant effect on it. And oil, plastic etc. are not the problem. Actually, the very last thing you want is to burn that plastic and turn it into a much bigger problem.

The concern of many is whether we kill ourselves faster or not.

We probably will. When places become uninhabitable, we'll have quite a few people trying to survive on our hands. And, well, if my choice is only to kill you for your spot or die trying because I'll be dead anyway if I don't try...

Even if it will become 2 times hotter, the planet will cool down again, eventually and dinosaurs might come back again.

Again, I have no idea why you think that the planet must cool down again eventually, a runaway greenhouse effect is absolutely possible, though we'd probably have to really force it, but ... you might well be right. Humans won't survive in much hotter climate, but there is absolutely no reason that other lifeforms cannot.

Re: Cannot be climate change

[SoftwareArtist]

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.

Re: Cannot be climate change

[Sique]

Apparently, it is hogwash, paid for by the big oil companies. Did you ever consider that?

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.

Re:No way

[atomicalgebra]

Actually he is quoting Ralph Wiggum. The original quote was "me fail English. That's unpossible."

Gulf stream is in trouble

[seoras]

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.

Re: Ouargla, Algeria

[skoskav]

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.