A stationary jet stream is fueling intense heat worldwide
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
I'm resisting the urge to buy AC because I feel like AC makes the problem worse, not better. Especially as electricity in Italy is 90% gas produced, I just think it's such a nonsense to buy AC and then make global warming worse. But I'm frying since 2 weeks at this point.
I barely remember a week or two of cold weather this year in winter.
The difference in winter temperatures and amount of snow in Poland is just gigantic. I remember every christmas having snow in Poland, I remember up to -30 degrees temperatures in southern poland, lately it's been rainy and warm 7/8 degrees C.
The only thing that can save the planet is a fair carbon tax, because the situation feels more and more desperate every day, we need to slow this thing up.
Heat is not the only problem, both the countries I have more family (Italy/Poland) are short in water and it is getting desperately worse every year. Climate-change driven disasters are getting so common here in Italy, we've had just a disaster flood in northern Italy 2 months ago after such a long draught. I've never ever in my life seen 38 days of rain over a 43 days span from May to June in southern Italy.
I am seriously considering emigration as an answer to climate changes. I seriously cannot even fathom the pain tourists visiting Italy in summer (at least those going to historical cities like Rome or Naples) endure.
It's just a heat pump, and fairly efficient all considered. And not nearly as damaging to the climate as the folks who live in cold places and use fossil fuels to heat their homes. I don't think I'd feel guilty about getting some relief, it's not unreasonable.
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/human-deaths-from-...
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...
> In a 2014 interview in the Washington Post of University of Miami climatologist Larry Kalkstein, who has published numerous research papers on weather-related mortality, weighed in on the matter: “Comparing apples to apples, which would be to evaluate acute or short-term responses to weather, I would always give the nod to heat-related deaths. However, if you are considering the seasonal differences in daily mortality, rather than just the “spikes” that we find with acute deaths, I can see why one can argue that winter (or cold-related) mortality is greater.”
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...
Edit: I see we are citing the same article :)
Note that this article also discusses other factors, such as seasonal changes in death rates due to diseases--but it, unlike the one you referenced, correctly observes that temperature is a factor in such deaths. The fact that flu season is worst in winter is because temperatures are colder than optimal in winter. So the increased flu death rate in winter should at least partly be counted as an increased death rate due to cold. The excess deaths methodology takes these kinds of things into account.
A refrigerator also has a heat pump, but we just call them refrigerators.
Part of the problem is in temperate climates, if you have "A/C" you probably _also_ have a furnace. They might run on different fuels (electric vs. natural gas) so it makes it harder to get a ballpark estimate for the overall efficiency.
In really cold climates (e.g. Minneapolis, Montreal) heat pumps often also need a supplemental furnace or fireplace because the heat differential inside vs. outside exceeds what the pump can handle. Depending on your fuel source, you still come out ahead, but not as much.
I should note that I'm not an expert by any means; my brother in law works in this field and he gave me a crash course a couple weeks ago. So I probably feel like I know it better than I actually do.
Does it though? That seems to be some kind of subcultural jargon that matches neither common (which uses central heating and air conditioning for any central system that cools with a heat pump regardless of how it heats) nor industry usage. (My fairly nee system, marketed as A/C, has both a two-way heat pump and a gas furnace to back up the heat punp for heating.)
Secondarily, many may lack the basic physics knowledge to think about both as heat transfer nor to recognize the most important parameters: temperature differential and isolation.
On the other hand, people may have some awareness of poor deployments of air conditioning into leaky and barely insulated structures in hot climates. These are indeed wasteful, but so would heating that structure if it were transplanted to a cold climate. But, it is the structure that is inefficient, rather than the heating or cooling method...
Buy an AC, get comfortable, and if this is a real issue to you, sit down and think long and hard about how best to affect the problem. You'll find better options than not running your AC.
(Edit: for perpective, most residential dwellings in Canada run heaters from november to march and AC from june to september. This is a big problem - your AC, your whole carbon footprint is less than a fraction of a percent of CO2 per year. This issue is systematic and will not be solved by voluntary simplicity
And about moving - where do you go? I'm happy where I am with hitting -30C to -40C in the winter, but we are having historical forest fires right now, first ever acutal tornado alert in my life and are hitting 30-35C multiple times a week, and trying to go higher North is only mining towns and fishing villages. Southern Hemisphere?)
At the same time I live in New Orleans where house are wooden box without a inch of insulation.
It’s a vaste on a large scale to AC that city ( or the south at large, housing are as shitty in MS, AL and so on.
But I command GP to at least think about it.
I agree with him that paying the real cost of things would help our best friend the free market do it’s only job.
( carbon intensive goods and service should be priced at a large premium IMO )
I would also add : tax incentive to keep lodging energy efficient ( heat pump, insulation, yada yada )
Just to get a single data point from a canadien resident : what do you think of outlaws AC in malls and shop that do not keep the cold air inside?
I really think that "after all I don't have much impact" is what's killing the planet. It's always somebody's else fault and no one takes responsibility or does anything.
So this is a systemic issue, where the people actually impacting the problem are at the top of compagnies, governement and international regulators. That's where any change can happen - any individual change has an effect that is either non perceptible ("setting an example for others" is impossible to measure) or measurably negligible (making your footprint smaller).
So things like recycling or running the AC less have nothing to do with the problem or the solution - we need to affect the system itself, and to do that we have to go through companies, governement and international regulation.
Issue is that virtually no one is trying to do that. Few people try to impact local governement, fewer national or international entities.
I think this is because the "energy" needed to think and find a way to have an impact is drained into all the individual action stuff.
Like a pressure cooker - individual action is the valve letting of enough steam so that nothing happens. Remove the valve - what happens?
Big industry is one of the major root causes of all of this and even if individual choice is a factor I'm pretty sure that if just 500 people would stop lining their pockets for a couple of decades and instead really took our global interests to heart that we might be able to put a dent in this. But as it is I'm not very hopeful that that will ever happen. In fact they'll probably use the crisis to further increase the wealth gap.
It's important to understand where the biggest offenses are and keep things in perspective, but this shouldn't absolve one of all personal responsibility either.
As individuals, pretty much the only ways we can influence the world for the better are going to be small by definition, and it makes sense to be considerate of which levers we do decide to pull.
Tasmania will fare well (probably) and has hydroelectricity (and inbreeding (allegedly)).
New Zealand has geothermal, two islands to choose from, but is getting over run with hollyweird seppo's looking for Middle Earth. At least Sam Neill is a (recent) native New Zealander.
As a Canadian you're welcome in either although you may get tired of explaining your accent isn't from (central northern) America.
To illustrate, we know that a bullet proof way to make a person's carbon footprint zero is for them to die. But no one would ever advocate this for obvious reasons.
So lowering carbon footprint should not be the only goal. One should be reducing the harm done.
There's a study in Japan showing that people avoid using heating due to inflation and more people die from stroke for example because of this. I.e. discomfort is not just a feeling, it can have harmful consequence.
I find it arrogant to talk about saving "the planet." It's usually about saving the comfortable status-quo lifestyle of the developed world.
When in reality it's one of those unusual instances where the developed world is actually seeing a planet full of people, instead of just their little bubble.
The problem is it's a bit late for that.
Balkonkraftwerk = Balcony Power Plant
Thank you Germany for your language.
Does that make the problem worse? Technically I have to say yes. But on any meaningful scale? I think the manufacturing of the unit has had far more impact than any usage, and probably will for the entire time I own it. And it’s a drop in the bucket compared to, say, owning and using a car.
The other obvious solution would be to place a bunch of solar (PV) panels on the roof. These are 50% deducible in your taxes in the next 10 years. You can do that also in condo. The upside is that by design the excess energy is sold to the local network, powering other apartments/houses locally. You can also join a solar community. You can also decide to buy only certified energy that comes from hydroelectric or pv or eolic (see for example Dolomiti's offers) and compensate CO2 produced by energy and/or gas at home with certificates (as well, Dolomiti's offers).
Our solar, since Jan 1st, has produced over 4 MWh of power, of which 1 was used by us and 3 were used by other apartments in the building (and we got paid for it, even if just a little).
Regarding floods, yes, it was bad. But many reasons are linked to anthropic (mis)use of the soil. You can (if you read Italian) read up a bunch of things written by the Wu Ming collective commenting the whole event.
I am considering emigration as well, but for other reasons.
I get the exact figure of my electricity mix generation in my bill, it's 90% in my case (Castelli Romani, Lazio, Servizio Elettrico Nazionale).
What many call AC or air-conditioning, a lot of the world calls "heat pumps", and modern heat pumps are not only incredibly efficient, but they work both ways, and are also one of the most efficient ways to heat homes in the winter. So there's a good chance that by replacing or augmenting your home's heating system with a two-way heat pump (aka AC), you can actually increase your home's energy efficiency.
And some quick research and back of the napkin math makes me think that residential air conditioning accounts for less than 2% of carbon emissions. [0.37 (residential share of total electricity consumption) * 0.17 (air conditioning's share of residential electricity use) * 0.25 (electricity's share of total emissions) = 1.57%]. You are one out of 8 billion people. Your individual contribution to carbon emissions is a drop in the bucket of that 2%, and remember, a heat pump may actually increase your home's energy efficiency. At scale, heat pumps are definitely a potential net-win.
All that to say, don't beat yourself up or suffer too much over this. Individual choices are not the driving factor of climate change. Climate change is driven by industry, specifically oil and gas, and the responsibility needs to fall on those industries to account for negative externalities. You can offset your own carbon emissions for probably under a hundred Euro a year. But what really needs to happen to reduce carbon emissions is that large companies and industries need to be held accountable with carbon taxes.
TL;DR, just get AC to protect yourself and your family, and spend your suffering and energy pushing for industries to be held responsible instead of beating yourself up about it.
Only if you would otherwise heat your home using electricity anyway (or if that electricity is produced using low-emission methods).
If it’s produced using gas plants, co-generation is likely still more efficient, for example – but these will hopefully also be phased out at some point.
Really? Please explain how that will fix anything. Governments can't do anything about climate change. Only a private sector innovation to sequester excess carbon would actually work.
I'm not convinced your using AC contributed to global warming.
Taxes on transport based on the efficiency.
This kind of taxation would have the direct impact of rebalancing consumptions towards a smaller carbon impact globally.
I didn't think Italian weather would follow me here.
Anyway I'm thinking about installing solar panels totalling 800W (maximum allowed without additional permits) on my balcony next season and powering a small AC unit off of that - I suppose it's fair, considering it will be running using renewable energy and only when it's actually needed.
Why on earth would a government put up barriers to energy independence? Is this because the Polish grid is not stable enough to deal with a substantial fraction of power from renewables or to protect commercial interests?
Specific regulations for on-grid systems in Poland are:
-3,68kW limit for single -phase installations - that's actually a technical limitation.
-10kW limit to receive subsidies for purchase of the system.
-50kW limit for net-billing as a private person, but you'll have to first ensure your connection has the capacity to handle that - it's usually 12kW or less, so you'd need to apply for an increase, which will go through depending on the infrastructure in your area.
Overall large PV farms in Poland lately went through series of temporary downtime in situations where the grid went above the safety threshold of 253V, but prosumers were largely unaffected by this.
Everyone is in on it because panels are cheap and electricity has become expensive, so the investment pays itself off in a few years - especially when you go over the subsidised limit of 2600kWh annually per household with children. My sneaky plan with those panels is to remain below that threshold.
And yet I always hear people fret about the energy use of AC but not heating.
I think it's based in our naturalistic fallacy.
Heating all of Chicago to be bearable in the winter is seen as "natural" as humans have been heating our homes for millennia. But Las Vegas cooling it's interior spaces is seen as strange and unnatural. And yet, cooling a warm environment is better from an environmental point of view than warming a cold one.
I think people who need AC in the summer are the same people who overheat their homes in winter.
Is this true? Why would it be better for the enviroment?
Most heating works by directly generating heat, via electric resistance or burning a fuel source. (Heat pumps are the exception.)
More details here if you'd like to jump into more details:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014...
> results indicate that climate control in Minneapolis is about 3.5 times as energy demanding as in Miami
I don't think that comparing the two is fair though. It's very hard to not get sick in a house at 10 degrees Celsius. 40 degrees Celsius is an immense discomfort but won't get me sick.
Also if you deploy a mini-split (heat pump) it’s extremely efficient and it can both cool in the summer and offset heating needs in the winter. Heat pumps are 400% efficient compared to gas heat because they move heat energy.
If you augment gas heat in the winter with a heat pump it can be 4x the efficiency. That’s a huge win for your climate impact.
Your life and comfort are important. Look to those first. Then say, “of the things available to me what can I do to help?” Counterintuitive as it may sound this can lead to both taking good care of yourself AND optimal practices that fight climate change.
For example one of the biggest things I can do to help is use my words. If I convince ten neighbors to deploy solar I 10x my positive impact. If I call my representative and say “make rooftop solar more cost-effective with net metering rules and installation credits” I potentially influence the rules that make tens of thousands of people more likely to go sustainable.
You and quite a few others. I know a doctor and some other people through him in the South of Italy and they're ready to pack it in because it's simply unmanageable. They're the lucky ones, with options and skills that are in high demand elsewhere.
Heat pump heating is the most efficient way to heat a space (well, not counting simply putting a block of highly refined plutonium in your house).
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-merid...
For decades most of us have assumed that the warm zone over the tropics would get wider, driving desertification towards the poles. But what's more likely is that the rain shadow effect will work along the east-west axis with the prevailing winds over each region of the world.
So the US will lose the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas as they acquire the precipitation level of Wyoming. Arguably Oklahoma and Texas are on the cusp now. The Ogallala aquifer will get pumped dry even faster as the breadbasket states reach harder for irrigation in desperation. Basically the drought that states like Nebraska are experiencing now is going to be the new normal on a long enough timescale (a few decades at most).
Now, you could generally assume that all that air eventually has to condense somewhere, but the problem is that we've now raised the potential threshold of what precipitation entails. So we've got drier soil (which is worse at holding moisture when it rains), more potential for precipitation, and a longer buildup time between precipitation threshold events. We've just created feedback loop that encourages flash flooding, making it more difficult to farm all areas, both old farmland and new potentially arable land.
Its fun to learn about the complex system dynamics of climate physics, it'd just be more fun if it didn't come with a side serving of impending catastrophe.
And probably it will have local climate effects if not global ones.
Many areas are in fact predicted to have increased precipitation.
> What borderline arable lands will become arable as a result of climate change, if any?
Anywhere with water will experience forestation. With higher CO2 levels, the earth will definitively become greener. But don't hold your breath for humans (pun intended).
- El Paso has shattered the old record for consecutive 100+ degree highs by several days and still going strong - Phoenix just broke the old record for consecutive 110+ degree highs with the highs forecasted to continue for over a week with no end in sight. Phoenix has also broken the record for consecutive lows above 90 - so no relief from the heat.
Antarcic sea ice seems to be broken as well - https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... - switch to "Antarctic" and click "Show All Years" to see how all the other years overlap each other and 2023 is just... way off.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/jet-stream-is-climate-change-cau...
Seems like an active area of research, as climate models don't capture these large-scale blocking events well. They're not a new phenomenon brought on by warming, but their scale and intensity might increase due to increased moisture in the atmosphere and Arctic amplification. A warming Arctic means a lower summertime temperature differential between polar and mid-latitude zones and hence a weaker jet stream more likely to meander about, which leads to these blocking events.
Seems like there's 2 options:
1) Encourage people to migrate to other cities and essentially "give up" on saving the city
2) Spend a lot of money trying to fortify existing cities
I'm guessing it will start with #2 (technically it's already happening) and then eventually we'll get to #1 but only when the situation is truly dire after which it becomes a politically favorable philosophy.
And then the question is how long do we think it will take for #1 to happen (assuming it will happen in the first place). 1-2 decades? Half a century? Multiple centuries?
There must be some contrarian billionaires out there buying up tons of land in undeveloped areas with a multi-decade idea that the land will 100x in value if/when mass migrations occur. That said, I would guess that most easily habitable areas of the US are already pretty well built up. Maybe what's more likely to happen to migration to suburbs and eventually to rural areas, until those areas are in such demand that the suburbs become metros and rural becomes suburbs.
/end of armchair science ramblings
What we should be doing is locating rural areas expected to be least hit by climate change and building them up to accommodate the people who will be displaced including climate refugees from elsewhere. We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started. Sadly, immigration policy isn't being enforced much these days at all and it's kind of scary to think of what will happen when people start to become really desperate. When they're not just looking for better paying jobs and instead don't have clean water or homes to go back to.
In any case, it's going to get a lot hotter and a lot more crowded in the near future, and it'll be a balancing act to get more and more people packed into spaces without it becoming more people than a given area can sustainably support. High population density is never good for the local environment and we don't want to make a bad situation worse by creating or allowing slums.
Yeah! These places will start out as camps, of course, but we'll later give them the resources to become cities. It certainly makes sense to concentrate immigrants and refugees in them.
This is an honest representation of our values and in all sincerity I do predict more of it in the future.
Sadly, I don't think we can avoid creating heavily segregated areas while unprecedented numbers of immigrants and refugees are coming in who'll need time to get acclimated and recover from the loss of their homes and previous lives, but we could still provide the areas with diversity (there'll be people from all over coming in) and hopefully they wouldn't stay filled with mostly just immigrants and refugees for long. The new cities, built in safe areas with all new infrastructure using what we've learned from our past mistakes and from the successes of others, could become very attractive for all kinds of people. Today there's an embarrassing number of places in the US full of crumbling infrastructure. Places where people don't have clean drinking water, broadband, or reliable electricity.
I simply do not trust the motivations, commitment, and competence of anyone who would try to accomplish this.
I get that there'd be a lot of potential for abuses and corruption and that traditionally that has totally been our MO as a country, but if we're smart about it I do believe that it's possible to save ourselves, maintain a high standard of living, and help as many climate refugees as we can while providing them with a higher standard of living than many of them were used to.
It's just so very clear that your "we" is safe in your scenario. Certainly it's coming first and hardest for other parts of the world and people poorer than yourself. But there have already been surprises and there will continue to be.
It's not easy to imagine myself and my family as climate refugees, because I have never experienced the level of poverty many of them will have come from (and I've been homeless!), I can only try to imagine what's it's like to lose everything and have your city washed away, or be forced to leave because there's no food. What I can imagine more easily is hearing that the US will give my family a home, in a safe place to live with water and food on the condition that I move to a clean, beautiful city they just built with the only catch being that I have to live there for at least, say, 10 years.
I'd still be able to try my luck at several other countries to see what they offer, but I'm guessing I'd be thrilled! I'd get flown from the border to a city in the northern part of the country where many others around me speak my language and several of my neighbors share my culture and we can support each other while we work to adapt to our new home. There are lots of jobs because new cities need people everywhere, and so I'd have more money than I'd made before. I'd miss my home and my old life, but me and my family would be safe and cool and fed. I'd be even better off if I were someone who was already wealthy, highly educated, but suddenly lost their home due to climate change.
The US is a country that will face many problems because of climate change, but we're also one of the lucky ones because we'll have places that can still grow food at scale, provide water, and maintain livable temperatures. That gives us a responsibility to help take in the billion+ refugees from elsewhere. Somehow we have to figure out how to do that without jeopardizing what we have or hurting the very people we're trying to help. We'd better figure it out fast too. By some estimates we've got as little as 25-50 years, and some people believe that the largest mass migration of humans in Earth's history is already well underway.
The story ends on a hopeful note, I think in practice it would turn into mass murder at some point.
(SB Divya; Textbooks in the attic; 'The best of SF of the year 2022, vol. 6; Neil Clarke)
Instead, it will likely be the insurance companies that dictate how/if things are rebuilt when catastrophes strike. Rebuilding won't be an option when no insurer will issue a policy for houses, office buildings, manufacturing, etc due to the expected future consequences of climate change. It's already starting to happen in Florida with multiple major insurance companies pulling out of the state.
Not because it's paywalled, just because Yale didn't put it on sufficient hosting to serve a giant 13MB gif and it's throwing 500 errors.
EDIT: Added the graphic converted to webm here: https://webmshare.com/play/mRWR4
Temperature depends on the kinetic energy of a certain amount of whatever molecules, but the universe is essentially empty/void, thus there's nothing really to measure the temperature of.
I know that it isn't strictly empty/void, but for a temperature related measurement it essentially is.
> in the deepest depths of intergalactic space — an object placed there would gain or lose energy until it reached the background temperature of that light left over from the Big Bang: 2.725 K.
The heat capacity of space is nearly non-existent.
Related fun fact: the vacuum of space is not only very very cold, but also very insulating. Space suits have to be fitted with a cooling system, otherwise the heat of the astronaut's body and suit electronics would become too warm, even though it's 2.7K all around them.
> Of particular importance, although planets and stars (including the Earth and Sun) are neither in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings nor perfect black bodies, black-body radiation is still a good first approximation for the energy they emit.
Fine, you win Timon3, earth is not a blackbody because blackbodies don't actually exist.
It's fine to say "the earth behaves similarly to a black-body" or "a black-body is a good approximation for the earth". But that's different from "the earth is a black-body".
Digging that oil up from the ground and the burning it does a tremendous amount to free up all that energy stored in a low-entropy system.
The book Into the Cool makes an interesting case regarding this overall concept.
Greenhouse gasses have natural sources, but far and away the largest sources are manmade in the form of carbon dioxide as industrial byproduct, and methane as agricultural byproduct.
This is why experts are so concerned: stopping production of manmade greenhouse gasses will not immediately reduce the amount of those gasses in the atmosphere, so heating will likely continue for many years after peak output.
I meant that had earth been closed, then the temperature would be fixed and life [eventually] wouldn't be possible.
Regarding the stopping of manmade greenhouse gasses, the consensus has been changing over the last few years though and it's pretty wildly believed that the "heat in the pipeline" phenomenon isn't actually true. Here's the best summary on why zero emissions will mean an immediate end to global warming: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...
A couple days ago in central Texas at 10 pm, the air temperature at ground level was 90 F, but the temperature above was 60 F. As a comparison, last year on the same date it was 100F at ground level and 83F in the sky. In winter, on a moderately cold day of 30 F, the sky temperature is as low as -50 F. This radiant temperature has a huge effect on the "Feels Like" temperature, especially if you're not in direct sunlight.
In other words, the Earth is always radiating heat away, and at night it radiates faster than it gets heated up.
I'd like to collect this data automatically to see how it changes over a season.
Holy bad starting premise, Batman.
https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/energ...
Humans have decreased the rate that the earth dissipates heat into space, and even small changes can cause large feedback loops that we care about because Humans can only survive within a TINY threshold of temperature variance [1].
Over the long term (~100-200k years) it will probably go back to some kind of pre-human equilibrium - with the very long term earth being mathematically uninhabitable based on the increasing amount of radiation that will bombard the earth as the Sun goes Red Giant.
[1]https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1681703538181668869
Don't be obtuse.
Given Earth's record temperatures of -89.2C to 56.7C, sure, we can survive in a large chunk, but the mean temperature of cosmic gas is 2.2 million deg C
It is not inconceivable that we mess things up so much that peak temperatures move by double digits, in which case it will be evident if our temperature range is tiny or not
Yes, but they have no atmosphere.
This means that the system becomes harder to predict, and we're not looking at a mere "redistribution" of weather. It's very possible for weather to get worse (i.e. disruptive to the current functioning of the local ecosystem) everywhere
I would not at all be surprised if some areas suffering from extreme heat right now become unlivably cold in the coming decades.
The problem with climate change is that it does not, in a human life time, lead to a new normal. If these new weather patterns were here to stay, we could adapt. what we'll get instead is constant changing which becomes increasingly resource intensive to survive.
It used to snow frequently and heavily enough that the cul-de-sac got together to prepay snow removal for our garages.
We also only burned about 600 liters of oil last winter in a house that has a 4500 liter tank. Part of that was conserving in order to send Putin as little money as possible, but a lot of it was just a really mild winter… like the last several.
And this region has also started producing some nice, light-bodied red wines over the past decade (at the likely cost of its Eiswein tradition).
On the downside, we’re getting more summer days that make me contemplate nagging my husband into drilling a vent for air conditioning into our bedroom. And we’ve started to need to water our wildflower yard a few times each summer to prevent it from completely baking, even though it requires less moisture than a stereotypical green grass lawn, and the country as a whole has started having forest fires, though nothing like the terrors seen in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.
It’s been 27-30 degrees C (80-85 Fahrenheit) the last few days, and should be for the next week or so, with nighttime lows sufficient to really cool things off if you open the windows overnight. But we had near-40 degree temps that awful week last summer about when the UK got their first taste of it.
So, sort of?
I am not sure if it is pure luck for this summer or climate change effects. We'll see if it holds until the end the summer.
So during this 2023 summer heatwave, Belgium seems to have 16 C less than during last year's heatwave. In that way it improved a bit.
I'm in neighboring Luxembourg and weather is kinda chilly for mid July (it's still okay: jeans and a t-shirt, but it's not crazy warm).
I do wonder if it's all the warm air trapped south (south of france / italy / spain / etc.) by the slow jet stream that's keeping Belgium/Luxemburg/Netherlands chill (at least chill for a mid July) atm?
There is an almost constant breeze so I can walk around even in the sunlight yet remain comfortable. I drink lots of water and take extra salt. With the low humidity sweat evaporates immediately unless I am laboring.
I fear however that this long hot and dry spell in SE Texas will result in something we haven't seen in decades here - a malaria epidemic:
1. we already have some cases not brought in from outside the area,
2. severe malaria outbreaks are sometimes preceded by an unusually hot and dry period such as we're experiencing,
3. malaria was once endemic here. The land has changed somewhat but we have flooding, heavy rains and their effects,
4. It is hurricane season and a hurricane would undo all the good things I described in the first paragraph.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere#/media/Fil...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere#Demographi...
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
oh, they do
Effects spread wide enough can be said to be characteristic of the Earth's dynamics without needing to cover 100.000% of the surface. In the case of the article, if it affects enough of the population, we can generalize without missing the point.
Only other data available on that chart is 2022 and 1981-2010 median.
edit: I was reading the Arctic chart and I was corrected below
Switch to Antarctic and make sure to click "Show All Years". Until 2023 even low years were at least slowly marginal departures overlapping with previous years. 2023 is so far off the trend it almost looks like a data error. I've never seen anything like it.
Can the 15% from four square kilometers bunch up in one square kilometer resulting in a 75% decrease of ice ?
https://portal.nccs.nasa.gov/datashare/polar/CSIC/SH_animati...
but rest assured, we also measure the total sea ice area which removes all possibility of the 'bunching' you're concerned about -- it's similarly catastrophic;
Compared to the past 10 years: https://portal.nccs.nasa.gov/datashare/polar/CSIC/SH_yearly_...
Compared to the past 45 years with low/high/average: https://portal.nccs.nasa.gov/datashare/polar/CSIC/SH_decadal...
You mean Southern, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Gtm2Z_70
PS did I really need to add /s? Anyway the video is an interesting watch about the implicit biases that come from map orientation.
Why did everybody talk about it so much and spend so much effort fixing it?
'global' is ambiguous between 'worldwide' and 'somewhere in the world', but 'worldwide' unambiguously means 'everywhere in the world', and in fact literally half the world is not experiencing intense heat right now
i don't think it's being pedantic to point out that actually half the world is in the middle of winter, not experiencing intense heat, and that actually people live here too
It is also the case that winter in Argentina was and is expected to be warmer than usual, per https://www.smn.gob.ar/noticias/%C2%BFc%C3%B3mo-ser%C3%A1-el... .
No internet in rural India.
No rainfall in many places in the world.
No aging in HeLa present all over the world.
And it appears the last one is only present in your original comment, eh? Tragic, mate, though a valiant and hence amusing attempt.
> Increased variability (both spatial and temporal) is a documented effect of climate change.
and kragen:
> i'm arguing that the intense heat isn't worldwide,
are in furious agreement and both saying the same thing in different ways.
Of course, this is a spectacular year since its been a while since there have been a La niña sandwiched between 2 el Niño events, contiguously. Not sure when that happened last.
In the UK, you probably hear about the Gulf Stream a lot.
2014-16, 1986-88 and 1957-59 since 1950 [1]. (Before that, 1913-14 and 1940-42 [2].)
[1] https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitorin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Niño#cite_note-BoM_El_Nino-...
2016 in particular is a recent and next-to-last el Niño event, and its one that i would have expected to remember / know more about.
But clearly i did not
Sea water temp changes the air temp above it. A big enough change will clash with existing air above.it, and the interaction of those 2 causes jet streams.
I'm open minded as to believing those are mutually exclusive but reading doesnt suggest that at all
I wander if this is related to the abnormally warm North Atlantic sea surface temperatures.
I think this is correct [1]. Whether they are separate names for the same or related phenomenon, or separate (but analogous) phenomena, I don't know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Niño–Southern_Oscillation
El Niño is a warming of the water in the North Pacific that sometimes happens and sometimes isn't. It has an outsized impact on the weather in the Western US.
The Gulf Stream is a current in the North Atlantic that brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic, where it has an outsized impact on the climate in Europe.