Crazy heat extremes

 From Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, climate scientist

So why do we see such crazy heat extremes after “only” 1.3 degrees C #GlobalWarming? A short thread.

Land areas have warmed much more than ocean, and the global average temperature consists of 70% ocean surface. Check out your country here: http://berkeleyearth.org.

[Note that land temperatures are rising by 0.5 degrees every 20 years.  Delaying cutting emissions will guarantee that land temperatures rise by even more than the average]

Extremes can change much more than the long-term average, because weather patterns change.  [And] New study: Europe is a heatwave hotspot, exhibiting upward trends that are three-to-four times faster compared to the rest of the northern midlatitudes. The reason: changes in the jet stream.

Ocean circulation also changes with #GlobalWarming: the Atlantic ‘cold blob’ due to #AMOC slowdown tends to increase summer heat and drought in Europe.

And of course never forget: with those 1.3 C warming we have already left the benign climate of the Holocene, in which homo sapiens developed agriculture, settled down and built cities…