Posted by Sweden had its hottest ever July on Tue, 31 Jul 2018 20:23 | #

Voice of Europe, “Sweden had its hottest ever July”, 31 July 2018:

July 2018 has been the warmest ever recorded in Sweden, with records smashed in several areas.

The average temperature across the entire country was 3-4C hotter than usual, making it the warmest July since records began over 260 years ago — something which weather agency SMHI was able to predict earlier in the month.

The highest ever average July temperature measured at a single weather station was recorded in Stockholm at 22.4C.

“The highest temperatures are usually measured in city centres. You usually talk about so-called urban heat islands,” SMHI climatologist Sverker Hellström told TT

Posted by mancinblack on Wed, 01 Aug 2018 11:36 | #

On Monday (30th July) a temperature of 32.4C was recorded in Banak, northern Norway (in the Arctic circle) against an average maximum temperature in the area of 16.9 for the time of year.
Spain and Portugal anticipate record breaking temperatures on Thursday ( 2nd August)

https://www.9news.com.au/world/2018/08/01/12/10/arctic-circle-hits-32c-as-europe-heatwave-nears-record-temperatures

Posted by Extreme weather exploding around the world on Thu, 02 Aug 2018 21:45 | #

Extreme Weather Is Exploding Around the World. Why Isn’t the Media Talking About Climate Change?

...the Right’s dissemination of anti-science.

Posted by Simon Clark on Sat, 04 Aug 2018 13:51 | #

Why has it been so hot?

Heatwave 2018 explained - BBC Newsnight

Posted by Katrin Meisner on Sat, 04 Aug 2018 23:38 | #

Climate scientists reveal their fears for the future.

Katrin Meisner, UNSW Director of Climate Change Research Center:

Many people do not understand how big a threat climate change is to humanity.

The changes we see right now are much faster than anything we’ve seen in the climate history;

and that concerns me because it means that ecosystems might not have a chance to adapt.

It’s going to be dramatic

.

Posted by Summer of extremes on Thu, 09 Aug 2018 05:01 | #

For weeks the sun has been beating down on Germany…

....pushing the mercury up into the 30’s sometimes close to 40 degrees Celsius.

The nation-wide heatwave has left its mark.

Rivers have dried up, swathes of land are bone dry. In many places crops have all but been destroyed.

“I’m a farmer and I’ve never seen drought like this”....

Posted by Sixth mass extinction event on Mon, 13 Aug 2018 14:54 | #

Earth’s sixth mass extinction event under way, scientists warn

Researchers talk of ‘biological annihilation’ as study reveals billions of populations of animals have been lost in recent decades

Nearly half of the 177 mammal species surveyed lost more than 80% of their distribution between 1900 and 2015

The scientists conclude: “The resulting biological annihilation obviously will have serious ecological, economic and social consequences. Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.”

They say, while action to halt the decline remains possible, the prospects do not look good: “All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.”
The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Read more

Wildlife is dying out due to habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change. But the ultimate cause of all of these factors is “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich”, say the scientists, who include Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford University in the US, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb is a seminal, if controversial, work.

“The serious warning in our paper needs to be heeded because civilisation depends utterly on the plants, animals, and microorganisms of Earth that supply it with essential ecosystem services ranging from crop pollination and protection to supplying food from the sea and maintaining a livable climate,” Ehrlich told the Guardian. Other ecosystem services include clean air and water.

“The time to act is very short,” he said. “It will, sadly, take a long time to humanely begin the population shrinkage required if civilisation is to long survive, but much could be done on the consumption front and with ‘band aids’ – wildlife reserves, diversity protection laws – in the meantime.” Ceballos said an international institution was needed to fund global wildlife conservation.

Earth’s five previous mass extinctions

End-Ordovician, 443 million years ago

A severe ice age led to sea level falling by 100m, wiping out 60-70% of all species which were prominently ocean dwellers at the time. Then soon after the ice melted leaving the oceans starved of oxygen.

Late Devonian, c 360 million years ago

A messy prolonged climate change event, again hitting life in shallow seas very hard, killing 70% of species including almost all corals.

Permian-Triassic, c 250 million years ago

The big one – more than 95% of species perished, including trilobites and giant insects – strongly linked to massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia that caused a savage episode of global warming.

Triassic-Jurassic, c 200 million years ago

Three-quarters of species were lost, again most likely due to another huge outburst of volcanism. It left the Earth clear for dinosaurs to flourish.

Cretaceous-Tertiary, 65 million years ago

An giant asteroid impact on Mexico, just after large volcanic eruptions in what is now India, saw the end of the dinosaurs and ammonites. Mammals, and eventually humans, took advantage.

Posted by 2018 reveals us ill-prepared for climate change on Thu, 16 Aug 2018 15:33 | #

”NPR, Fresh Air, “2018 Revealed Just How Ill-Prepared We Are For Climate Change”, 15 Aug 2018:

Terry Gross:

Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for The New York Times, discusses the dire consequences of rising temperatures, such as drought, famine, disease, war and increased migration.

Read Sengupta’s Article:

‘2018 Is Shaping Up To Be The Fourth-Hottest Year. Yet We’re Still Not Prepared For Global Warming.’

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. This summer of fire and swelter looks a lot like the future that scientists have been warning about in the era of climate change, and it’s revealing in real time how unprepared much of the world remains for life on a hotter planet. That’s what my guest Somini Sengupta wrote last week in her front-page New York Times article. Sengupta is the Times’ international climate reporter, covering communities and landscapes most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and that includes places in Africa, South Asia and Europe.

One of the places she recently wrote about is the city of her birth, Kolkata, formerly called Calcutta, which she says is becoming a climate casualty. She left India with her family when she was 8 and emigrated first to Canada, then to the U.S. She returned to India to serve as The New York Times New Delhi bureau chief from 2005 to 2009. She’s also been the Times bureau chief in West Africa and covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the war in Syria. In 2016, Sengupta wrote a book called “The End Of Karma” about the exploding youth population in India and what that might mean for the future of India and the world.

Somini Sengupta, welcome to FRESH AIR. Can we start some examples of the record-breaking temperatures around the world this summer?

SOMINI SENGUPTA: Yes. It’s been in really unusual places such as - Norway has had an unusually hot - record hot May and June. It’s resulted in wildfires everywhere in Norway and in Sweden next door. In Algeria, in one of the hottest places in the world, they hit a record in early July. In Los Angeles - even on the west side of Los Angeles, where it’s usually quite cool, the ocean breeze blows, and they hit a record in early July, too. So in hot places and cold places, this has been quite an exceptional year.

GROSS: And it’s on the heels of other exceptional years, too.

SENGUPTA: Well, that’s right. I mean, it’s not just a matter of whether it’s hot this year or not. The thing about climate change is that what we’re seeing is a steady trend line that’s going up. So since the industrial era, the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius. The - 17 of the 18 warmest years have been since 2001. And in more recent years - the last three years, we’ve had record hot years. That includes years that we’ve had a pattern called El Nino, and those are kind of always hot years. But we’ve also had really hot years in a non-El Nino years. And this is shaping up - 2018 is shaping up to be the fourth-warmest year on record.

GROSS: You know, scientists often say you can’t attribute any, like, big storm or any intensively hot summer to climate change. You can’t say any one event is caused by it. But do the scientists you’ve been talking to think there’s enough of an established pattern to say this pattern is the result of climate change?

SENGUPTA: Scientists disagree about a lot of things, but they agree on this. There is no question that the world as a whole - the planet is warming. It’s warming very fast, and that is due to humans changing the climate. But the science has also gotten much, much better - much more refined at identifying specific events and what their climate change connection might be. So, for example, scientists did a very fast - what they call an attribution study and found that the heat wave that’s sweeping across Northern Europe this summer from Britain to Norway to Sweden - that is made twice as likely by human-made climate change.

So there have been similar attribution studies for other events - the 2015 heat wave in Australia, for example. So while you’re absolutely right it’s difficult, but not impossible, to attribute specific events - but more importantly, the overall trend line that we see - the warming, the steady warming over the last century across the world - is indisputably because of human-made climate change.

GROSS: And that means carbon emissions, right?

SENGUPTA: Yes. It means greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And since the start of the industrial age, we have seen the effect on the atmosphere. The planet is warming.

GROSS: People like to say this is the new normal, but scientists are saying to you, no, this is not the new normal. What do they mean by that?

SENGUPTA: That’s one of the things that really stuck with me. What they mean is that this trend line that we’re talking about - the trend line is going up. It’s going up very fast, and we are hurtling towards the future on that upward trend line. So the record-breaking temperatures that we have seen in very different parts of the world may not be record breaking in the years to come. It may very well become the average temperature.

GROSS: So in other words, this isn’t the new normal because things are going to get worse (laughter).

SENGUPTA: This is not - this is not the new normal because the trend line is still going up. We have not reached a plateau. And perhaps most importantly, greenhouse gas emissions - greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere continue to go up.

[....]

GROSS: So the U.S. pulled out of the Paris climate agreement..

SENGUPTA: The U.S. is the only country that is not part of the Paris Agreement today.

GROSS: What impact is that having on the agreement and on global warming?

SENGUPTA: Right. So without the U.S., can every other country in the world carry on doing what they promised under the Paris Agreement? Absolutely. Is the U.S., in some ways, still bringing down emissions? Yes, because, you know, that train has kind of already left the station. There are lots of - wind energy, for example, right? If you look in states like Texas and Oklahoma, there’s lots of renewable energy going on. What is the impact of the U.S. leaving? Well, it depends on the kinds of policies that the U.S. takes.

So the most far-reaching policy change, arguably, is the Trump administration’s announcement that it would roll back fuel efficiency rules that were put in place a few years ago, in 2012. And those fuel efficiency rules said that carmakers would have to double fuel efficiency in their new cars, which, by the way, would save you and me money at the gas station because we would have to fill our tanks less often. But that reversal - that announced reversal by the Trump administration does, you know, a couple of things. Not least, it sets up a legal fight with a state like California. You’re already seeing that. And it makes it really difficult for the car industry. You know, it’s like, there are two rules - some tailpipe rules in California, in Europe, and then other rules in the rest of the country. So the implications of this are quite far-reaching.

GROSS: So you’ve described a picture where the United States has pulled out of the agreement and therefore doesn’t feel it needs to comply with it. At the same time, the countries that are committed to complying with it aren’t.

SENGUPTA: Yes. They are certainly not doing enough to meet the goals that they set for themselves. And even as the U.S. has pulled out - has said it would pull out of the Paris Agreement, pretty much every country - like, every big emitter country is not meeting its targets. So while the Paris Agreement was touted as a great example of - you know, as a great diplomatic victory, pretty much no major country is really going to meet its targets. And the reason why the Paris Agreement passed - every country got to set its own goals. Some of them were pretty modest. Some of them were pretty ambitious. But, you know, at the moment, we’re, like, two years down the road, and no major country is doing what it said it was going to do.

GROSS: So China is committed to reducing carbon emissions. It’s cut down on coal. But at the same time, it may be providing Kenya’s first coal plant. That seems like a contradiction - cutting down on coal in China, but then China exporting coal plants to other countries or exporting the technology for it. So what’s China up to on that front?

SENGUPTA: China has said and is showing that it is rolling back coal to some extent. Critics say it’s not doing it fast enough. But China has a really big coal sector. And what you’re seeing, not least on what China calls its Belt and Road initiative, which is this huge, worldwide infrastructure project - you’re seeing many, many coal-fired power plants that China is financing and helping to build all over the world. So I went to Kenya earlier this year, and there’s an island off the Kenyan coast called Lamu, and right there kind of next to a mangrove swamp, Kenya’s first coal-powered - coal-fired power plant is slated to come up. No construction is going on now because of lawsuits by local communities who say that this will pollute the air and pollute the water and they don’t think that Kenya needs a coal-fired power plant.

So China has also started building in other places coal-fired power plants - in Pakistan, in Indonesia. There’s - others are in the works in Bangladesh and also very ecologically sensitive areas. So China is really one to watch very, very closely. How quickly can it ratchet down on coal? I have to say, China is not alone. Germany faces the same question. How quickly will Germany ratchet down on its coal-fired power plants?

Countries like Poland remain very committed to coal. Countries like India - while it is promoting a lot of renewables, still depends heavily on coal. So certainly even though - you know, you’ll often hear people say, oh, the price of solar is coming down, and solar and wind are just, you know, expanding like gangbusters - that is true. But it’s definitely not sunset for the coal industry - for the global coal industry.

Posted by Oct. 14th like summer in Poland this year on Sun, 14 Oct 2018 11:30 | #

October 14th and it’s like a summer day in Poznan, Poland.

Must be unprecedented.

Posted by mancinblack on Fri, 26 Oct 2018 23:30 | #

The disappearing glaciers of the Pyrenees.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/10/24/inenglish/1540379684_709673.html

“Ignacio Lopez-Moreno of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (IPE) says that “The average temperature has risen by 1.5C. That might not seem like much to a lot of people but the increase from climate change on a global scale has been 0.7 degrees, so the Pyrenees are warming at twice the rate of the planet as a whole”.

Most of the remaining glaciers will be gone in 20-30 years.

“Human activity is evident in the Marboré sediments. It offers us a glimpse of the amount of heavy metal, lead and mercury that comes from local mining and also from global activity. “There is a massive spike relating to the first globalization of the northern hemisphere during the Roman times.” according to Blas Valero of the IPE team “This peak from Roman mining can be seen in the huge increase in lead across the Pyrenees, transported there by the atmosphere. After that it falls, then rises a little during the medieval period and then rises again after the nineteenth century and the industrial revolution.”.

“It begins to drop after the 1980’s when we started to use unleaded petrol but it never goes down to the level of Roman times. The impact of what we are doing is evident in a place as pristine and remote as this”.

Posted by mancinblack on Fri, 02 Nov 2018 21:01 | #

The oceans have absorbed 60% more heat than scientists previously thought, after calculating the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide released from them instead of taking the temperature directly from the water.

Oceanographer Joellen Russell of the University of Arizona told reporters “I feel like this is a triumph of Earth-system science. That we could get confirmation from atmospheric gases of ocean heat content is extraordinary. You’ve got the A-team here on this paper.”

More,

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-oceans-are-heating-up-faster-than-expected/

Posted by mancinblack on Fri, 02 Nov 2018 21:29 | #

“The UK has experienced more weather extremes over the last 10 years when compared with previous decades, a Met office report says. The hottest days have become almost 1C hotter, warm spells have increased, whilst the coldest days are not as cold. The number of so-called tropical nights is increasing. The Met office says these changes are consistent with warming driven by human activities. The new study compares UK weather data from the period 1961-1990 with the ten years between 2008 and 2017..”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46064266

Posted by California fires on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 18:51 | #

California fires said to stem from climate change

Posted by mancinblack on Tue, 22 Jan 2019 19:35 | #

Australia experiences record breaking January temperatures….

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/australian-temperature-record-broken-twice-in-one-night-20190118-p50s69.html

Posted by Center For BioDiversity on Wed, 06 Feb 2019 16:42 | #

Center for Bio Div@CenterForBioDiv
17m17 minutes ago
NASA says rising global temperatures are driven largely by growing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

2018 was the hottest year on record, NOAA and NASA report. The US suffered 14 weather and climate disasters…

Posted by Summers predicted to get warmer every year on Tue, 18 Jun 2019 11:13 | #

Future summers will ‘smash’ temperature records every year

CNN, 17 June 2019:

(CNN) If you think it’s hot now, you haven’t seen anything yet. A new study predicts that parts of the world will “smash” temperature records every year in the coming century due to climate change, “pushing ecosystems and communities beyond their ability to cope.”

The scientists who authored the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday, used 22 climate models to game out exactly how hot these summer temperatures would be. They determined that by the end of the 21st century, future temperature events “will be so extreme that they will not have been experienced previously.”

Related Article: Alaska hit 70 degrees the earliest ever, and more record highs are expected

Researchers conclude that high monthly mean temperature records will be set in 58% of the world every year. Developing countries and small islands will experience the greatest impact.

They predict 67% of the least developed countries and 68% of small island developing states will see the highest monthly mean temperature records.

The temperature increase is directly tied to rising global greenhouse gas emissions, the authors say.

The world is already seeing record setting temperatures and while warming hasn’t been uniform, earlier studies have shown that the planet has been in a warming trend, generally.

Since 1901, the Earth’s surface temperature has gone up by 1.3-1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0.7-0.9 degrees Celsius, per century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The surface temperature nearly doubled 2.7-3.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5-1.8 degrees Celsius, since 1975, with the 10 warmest years on record occurring after 1998.

Heat waves will be deadly. Heat stroke, breathing issues, heart attacks, asthma attacks, kidney problems are all a big concern for people when the temperatures increase, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Higher temperatures can also make air pollution worse, make water scarce and cause crops to fail, leading to malnutrition and starvation.

In 2014, the World Health Organization predicted 250,000 more people will die annually between 2030 and 2050 due to climate change. More recent studies predict that this is a “conservative estimate.”

If, however, countries meet goals of limiting global temperature rise less than 2 degrees Celsius, as set out in the Paris agreement, that scenario would be much less likely.

Related Article: 250,000 deaths a year from climate change is a ‘conservative estimate,’ research says.

Posted by Energy: Hunger, Guzzlers, Providers on Wed, 26 Jun 2019 04:18 | #

Energy hunger, energy guzzlers and energy providers (1/2) | DW Documentary

Posted by mancinblack on Sat, 06 Jul 2019 23:31 | #

David Attenborough, Climate Change - The Facts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuFsUQuWXio&t=218s

Posted by mancinblack on Mon, 08 Jul 2019 12:24 | #

An all time high temperature record has been set in the US state of Alaska, despite much of the country siting in the Arctic circle.

Temperatures peaked at 32.22 Celsius (90F) on 4 July at an airport in Anchorage, the state’s largest city…..

...Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska said these exceptionally warm weather events will only become more frequent because of the loss of sea ice and warming in the Arctic Ocean.

“These kind of extreme weather events become much more likely in a warming world” Thoman said. “Surface temperatures are above normal, everywhere around Alaska. The entire Gulf of Alaska, in the Bering Sea, in the Chukchi Sea south of the ice edge, exceptionally warm waters, warmest on record ; and of course, record low sea ice extent for this time of year off the north and northwest coasts of the state”.  ( The Independent Online)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/alaska-weather-heatwave-record-anchorage-airport-global-warming-climate-change-a8991096.html

Posted by Mulattoes of Cape Town on Thu, 11 Jul 2019 12:04 | #

South Africa: cities without water | DW Documentary

This documentary was perhaps not intending to call attention to his, but take note of how surprisingly mixed - White/black - the people of Cape Town, South Africa are, at least among those interviewed.

Posted by Marine heatwaves kill coral instantly on Fri, 09 Aug 2019 07:06 | #

Climate change: Marine heatwaves kill coral instantly

BBC, 9 Aug 2019:

Increasingly frequent marine heatwaves can lead to the almost instant death of corals, scientists working on the Great Barrier Reef have found.

These episodes of unusually high water temperatures are - like heatwaves on land - associated with climate change.

Scientists studying coral after a heat event discovered that extreme temperature rises decayed reefs much more rapidly than previously thought.

They published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

Heatwaves ‘cook’ Barrier Reef corals

Coral reefs head for ‘knock-out punch’

10 amazing facts about coral reefs

The study revealed that corals became up to 15% weaker after an extreme heat event, causing some fragments to actually break off from the reef.

Posted by The Oil Prize on Sun, 11 Aug 2019 18:12 | #

The Oil Prize

Posted by Britain: record heat on Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:04 | #

Britain’s weather records have continued to tumble amid the hottest August Bank Holiday weekend ever, with temperatures reaching 91.94F (33.3C) at Heathrow Daily Telegraph, 25 Aug 2019.

Posted by mancinblack on Tue, 27 Aug 2019 21:34 | #

Yep. 2019 was on odd days the hottest in the UK. Yet for much of the the year, it was, as   I remarked to my eldest daughter, A Blade Runner Summer, by which I meant that it rained most of the time. Poured down in fact.Indeed an almost two hundred year old dam in Derbyshire almost broke but thanks to the extraordinary civil engineering of our Victorian ancestors not a drop was spilled. Why a “Blade Runner Summer”? because the famous (and perhaps best) sci-fi movie ever made in 1982, was in fact set in November 2019. Shame about the flying cars. I’d really like one of those. The end music to “Blade Runner” which will forever be set in my mind as this summer’s theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgz6jFxMpyk

Posted by Flash Flooding in SW Japan on Tue, 07 Jul 2020 09:41 | #

At least 50 dead in Japan flash floods | DW News
:( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jMOS_0UCP4

Posted by 130 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley on Wed, 19 Aug 2020 23:49 | #

Climate Change May Lead To More Record Heat And Fires In California, Experts Warn

California is facing a searing heat wave and a growing number of wildfires — challenges only projected to get worse with climate change.

Posted by Fires rage across northern California on Fri, 21 Aug 2020 12:44 | #

Bloomberg QuickTake@QuickTake

“I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole sky was red and orange.”

More than 50,000 people have been evacuated as fires rage across California, reports
@CALFIRE_PIO

More @business: https://trib.al/mP3H71z #CaliforniaFires