Warmest June on Record for Contiguous U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Warmest June on Record for Contiguous U.S.

ncei.noaa.gov

70 pointsinfodocket26 comments

Living through a heat dome was terrifying… seeing birds pant and plants die a couple days after the extreme heat.

I hope this spurs everyone to take climate change more seriously but I won’t hold my breath.

I have come to the conclusion that climate change will have to cause enough scarcity and enough chaos to require despotic governmental changes towards environmental preservation. It's going to have to get absolutely terrible, and when it does, we'll snap very far back in the other direction and put people to death for polluting...

The mealy mouth bullshit we do now, where every individual is accountable, but the corporations behind most of the emissions and waste are not, is absurd. We'll never have resealable, recycleable plastic chip bags, for example, because that would cost someone money....

We're basically cornering humanity into some kind of horrible hellscape future where we're all going to be killing each other for electricity or waffles or god knows what...

Half of the US is still in denial that the pandemic was a big deal after 600K+ deaths, and they are even outspoken here. And I imagine climate denialists are in even stronger numbers.

What path do you think it will be taken seriously even after the heat waves, freezes, wildfires, storms we've already been having?

In 6-12 months trend may show up in averages, pointing to escape of temperature and with still more extreme events picking up. The sad part is if this really happens, it may already be too late. If events cool down a bit, the excuses come back on.

Once icecaps melts and sea levels rise there's no known turning back. CO2 can't and won't drop significantly in our lifetime without unconvential means.

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Would like nothing better than to be proven wrong.

You could argue that the chaos is already starting.

My faith in humanity is so low at this point that I expect the solution could just as easily end up being global conflict that significantly decreases the population, rather than actually fixing anything. Poor countries will suffer terribly long before rich countries give a flying fart about it.

End up? It's a circle. The rich will just hang out in their New Zealand bunkers until the chaos subsides, then back to square 1.

> End up? It's a circle. The rich will just hang out in their New Zealand bunkers until the chaos subsides, then back to square 1.

Kinda sorta. If things become so chaotic that they have to flee to those bunkers, there's a decent chance the political situation afterwards won't allow them to return to their previous positions.

So, unless their bunker has enough weapons for a small army and they have the skills and mentality to become a petty warlord in rural post-apocalyptic New Zealand, all they can really count on getting from it is a somewhat higher chance to survive.

Part of the problem is what might seem terrifying to you is everyday for a lot of folks in the South/South West. In Texas there are plenty of nights where it doesn't drop below 100F. In Arizona there are a lot of days where you can be cooked alive.

The pacific northwest doesn't look like Texas though. Our birds, mammals, forests, I don't think any of it could withstand that heat regularly.

What we're talking about is one biome being changed out for another if this becomes regular. Allegedly this heat wave is 1 in 1000 years but who knows what is normal now.

> The pacific northwest doesn't look like Texas though. Our birds, mammals, forests, I don't think any of it could withstand that heat regularly.

Exactly. I'm already seeing deciduous trees dropping leaves here in Western Oregon a good 3 months early due to that heatwave. A lot of conifers not looking great either. Those temps put tremendous stress on our ecosystem. They don't have large amounts of fuel in the form of trees in places like TX, if a large portion of our trees start dying it's going to make fire season even more horrific than it has been in recent years.

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-americ...

it wad made 150 times more likely due to cc so far, hence the 1/1000. so we can expect those odds to get more likely - even if we stopped emitting today, those odds look bad.

That was a bitter read. Most terrifyingly to me is those odds of 1/1000 (which only get worse) aren't even the most terrifying prospect for the region:

"There are two possible sources of this extreme jump in peak temperatures. The first is that this is a very low probability event[...] The second option is that nonlinear interactions in the climate have substantially increased the probability of such extreme heat, much beyond the gradual increase in heat extremes that has been observed up to now"

So something could have changed in the dynamics for the region which greatly increased the chances of this occurrence. Really hope that isn't the case here...

> June sea ice extent was 103% of the 1991-2020 median value.

Greenland has been gaining ice this summer, quite unusual: http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

The planet's climate is a complex system, the state of which cannot be neatly summarized by any one statistic.

I mean, there's a reputable school of thought predicting that global warming will lead to another ice age, because higher temperatures disrupt ocean currents -- particularly the Gulf Stream, which redistributes warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe. As the Gulf Stream makes its deposits of warm water along the coasts of Great Britain and northwest Europe, it keeps the temperatures in northwest Europe warmer than in eastern Canada, even though they both are roughly the same distance from the equator. The prediction is that, if Arctic ice melts as a result of global warming, huge amounts of fresh water will pour into the North Atlantic and slow down the Gulf Stream, cooling Europe, and triggering a feedback loop with colder and longer European winters, and more and more ice on the planet's surface.[a][b]

[a] The book "Ice Age" by Cambridge-trained astrophysicist John Gribbin and his wife Mary has a good high-level overview of this school of thought: https://reanimus.com/store/?item=1420

[b] Recent studies of circulation in the North Atlantic already show a significant reduction in currents flowing north from the Gulf Stream: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/09/new-s...

We're already in an ice age, and we have been for the last 1 million years. We're just in an interglacial period (for the past 12K years). We were always going to revert back to a glacial period.

The belief is that CO2 concentration would prevent that, by causing global warming. Otherwise, if we revert to a glacial period, that is currently status quo for planet earth:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Glacial-Inte...

Yes, we're in an interglacial period. You're absolutely right about that. The counter-intuitive prediction from this school of thought is that global warming would precipitate or accelerate glacial period within this ice age.

Makes sense though, a lot of ice melting, water becoming cooler so the next winter you get more ice area with lower ice volume. Rinse and repeat until the whole ice sheet disappears.

No. You're literally interpreting it as the exact opposite of what is occurring.

Sea ice volume is at 30 year median: http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickn...

And Greenland's ice sheet is expanding over the course of this summer, when it normally goes through a melt season.

Arctic ice is pretty variable, because it floats over the water. Arctic ice is not what causes sea level rise, by the way, since it's already sitting in the ocean. It's Greenland and Antarctica that you have to watch for sea level rise influence.

And Antarctica is above average right now: https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentr...

In other words, melting ice caps, as predicted, are not happening.

Suppose there is an ice cube with volume 1m^3 in a huge freezer, it melts when the freezer is off and then freezes back when the freezer turns on. Now the volume would be the same, the question is about the thickness. The thinner it gets, the faster it will melt/freeze leading to more variability in climate patterns. (speculation mode off)

I'm struggling to interpret the data on that site, is there any analysis links you can share talking about this issue?

That site just tracks Greenland and Arctic ice. They just measure the volume and extent. On the map of Greenland, any red areas you see are areas where ice melted over the past day. Any blue areas are where it snowed. On the chart, the grey area is the 2 standard deviation range that ice gains/losses typically see over the course of the year, and the blue line is the current year's gain/loss. If the blue line goes above or below the grey area, it's anomalous. Greenland typically melts off some in the summer, but the blue line shows that it's currently gaining ice, and has even had some way above average days this summer, for ice gains. This means its ice volume is increasing, which is counter to predictions.

And, in case you haven’t heard, California is set up for (yet another!) historic fire season.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/fuel...

What about May? Coolest spring in mid-Atlantic of my lifetime (55) I'd wager. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/05/30/east-recor...

Was in Germany too.

People wait to pounce on heat,drought, storms any weather patter that fits the narrative bias.

May 2021 was the 437th consecutive month with global surface temperature above the 20th century average [1]. It tied May 2018 as the 6th warmest may in the 142 year record.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/may-20...

warmest June so far

And the coolest for the rest of your life.

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