From Nahel Belgherze
Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.
We face a climate catastrophe, and politicians, CEOs and the "elite" do nothing to slash emissions, and in many cases actually attempt to reverse climate-saving initiatives.
From WeatherZone
After a month in which the record for the Earth's hottest day was shattered more than once, then the record for the Earth's hottest week melted away, is it any surprise that July 2023 turned out to be the world's hottest month on record?
News came through overnight from the Copernicus Climate Change Service – a climate monitoring body administered by the European Union – that average global air and ocean temperatures both reached record highs in July 2023.
How hot exactly?
Let's deal with air temperatures first.
- As mentioned, the global average temperature for July 2023 was the highest on record for any month, as in not just for July
- July 2023 was 0.72°C warmer than the 1991-2020 average, and 0.33°C warmer than the previous warmest month, July 2019.
- Interestingly, Copernicus estimated July 2023 to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the average for 1850-1900
Now for sea temps. These often get less airtime in the discussion around human-caused global warning, but the ocean is a key part of the equation.
- For the month as a whole, global average sea surface temperatures were 0.51°C above the 1991-2020 average
- Marine heatwaves developed south of Greenland and in the Labrador Sea, in the Caribbean basin, and across the Mediterranean Sea
- The North Atlantic was 1.05°C above average in July, as we discussed in this Weatherzone story
"These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events," Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said.
Meanwhile World Meteorological Organization Director of Climate Services Chris Hewitt said that the years from 2015 to 2022 were the "eight warmest years" according to readings going back at least 170 years, despite prevailing La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean that "tend to rein in the global average temperature and suppress them slightly".
"The long-term warming trend is driven by continued increases in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," he added.
We face catastrophe. And still we do too little to cut emissions.
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| An American model simulation of high-altitude weather patterns Tuesday shows five heat domes spread around the Northern Hemisphere. (WeatherBell) |
From The Washington Post
As viewed on a weather map of the globe, no fewer than five powerful heat domes are swelling over the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. These zones of high pressure in the atmosphere, intensified by climate change, are generating unforgiving blasts of heat in North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.
The heat domes, in a number of instances, are the source of record high temperatures and are contributing to swarms of wildfires in western North America and in Siberia. In recent days, all-time record highs have been set in Turkey, northern Japan and Northern Ireland.
Lined up like a parade, the heat domes are also part of a traffic jam of weather systems that instigated the flood disaster in Europe last week.
Heat domes like this are normal at this time of year, the hottest point of summer, but it’s unusual to have this many this intense. Every one of these heat domes is generating exceptional weather.
Starting in the western United States, temperatures in Montana climbed more than 20 degrees above normal on Monday. Glasgow, Mont., spiked to 110 degrees, matching its third-highest temperature on record since 1893. Billings hit 107 degrees, tying its second-highest temperature recorded since 1934. The heat is worsening exceptional drought conditions in both the western United States and Canada, creating tinderbox conditions for wildfires that are spreading smoke all over North America.
Across the Atlantic, the heat dome lodged over the British Isles brought Northern Ireland its hottest day on record Sunday, which was then broken four days later.
The heat dome has hardly budged, prompting the Met Office, Britain’s meteorological agency, to issue its “first ever” extreme heat warning Monday. The warning, in effect through Thursday, calls for prolonged unusually high temperatures over “a large part of Wales, all of southwest England and parts of southern and central England,” the agency wrote. Temperatures may reach the low 90s in this zone.
Farther east, the heat dome parked over southeastern Europe and Western Asia has also produced exceptionally high temperatures. On Tuesday, the thermometer in the Turkish city of Cizre, near the border with Syria, surged to 120.4 degrees, the country’s highest temperature ever observed.
Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with Meteo France, the country’s meteorological agency, tweeted he expects this heat wave to produce additional record-challenging temperatures into Wednesday in adjacent areas, including in Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia.
Farther to the east and north, record heat has also invaded northern Japan, where all-time highs were set on Sunday and Monday. In Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island known for its ski resorts and abundant winter snowfall, “the heat was so intense that the train rails were distorted,” tweeted Sayaka Mori, a meteorologist based in Tokyo.
The exceptional heat also bled into eastern Russia and Siberia, where a siege of wildfires has torched the landscape.
Finally, crossing the Pacific, much warmer-than-normal temperatures cover Alaska. The responsible heat dome is the least intense of the five affecting the Northern Hemisphere. Even so, it pushed the mercury to 81 degrees in Anchorage on Sunday, a record for July 18 and tied for the city’s 16th-warmest day ever observed, according to Alaska-based climatologist Brian Brettschneider.
The heat over the Last Frontier has helped fuel unusual thunderstorm outbreaks in recent days, including some over the Arctic Ocean sea ice north of its border.
Scientists have determined that climate change is increasing the intensity of heat domes and making heat waves hotter than they would have been without human influence. This explains the frequency at which temperature records are being set every summer. Already this summer, seven national high temperature records have fallen.
But the current weather pattern, in which these heat domes are not only intensified but also prolonged, may also be linked to climate change.
Climate change is expected to decrease the strength of steering currents as the high latitudes warm more quickly than the mid-latitudes, reducing the north-to-south temperature differences that drive the wind. According to a 2018 study from climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, weaker high altitude winds will produce a slower jet stream with more wavy peaks and troughs, which he ascribes to a process known as “quasi-resonant amplification.”
The more wavy peaks are the breeding grounds for intensified heat domes, like we see spread around the Northern Hemisphere, while the troughs are the low-pressure zones that can set the stage for floods like we just saw in Germany and neighboring countries.
The configuration of heat domes we see at the moment looks like a “classic” example of a pattern “associated with wave resonance,” Mann wrote in an email.
From Open Mind
My investigations suggest that the strongest influence on extreme heat is the increase in average temperature during summer; the shape of the distribution can change, and that has an effect, but change in the average value dominates. So I decided to look at how summertime heat has changed in each climate division of the conterminous USA (i.e. the “lower 48 states”), according to the data for high temperature from NOAA.
For each division, I fit a smooth curve (lowess smooth), then estimated the “summer warming” as the difference between the smoothed values now (i.e. in 2021) and at the start (i.e. in 1895). Some of them show considerable warming, in fact the northeast corner of Utah has warmed by a whopping 6.05°F:
Although most climate divisions show summer warming, not all of them do; in fact in Alabama there’s a division which shows cooling by -2.39°F:
Whichever divisions in the USA have warmed by the most, are most at risk for never-before-seen extreme heat. And here they are as red dots (bigger dots, bigger risk), with blue dots indication regions which have shown net summer cooling (rather than heating) since 1895:
Two regions stand out as being at greatest risk. First is the entire U.S. west, westward of longitude 100°W. Second is the northeast coast, northward of Washington D.C.
In a La Niña year, too.
From The Guardian
North America endured the hottest June on record last month, according to satellite data that shows temperature peaks lasting longer as well as rising higher. The heat dome above western Canada and the north-west United States generated headlines around the world as daily temperature records were shattered across British Columbia, Washington and Portland.
The new data reveals this was part of a broader trend that built up over several weeks and a far wider area, which is underpinned by human-driven climate disruption.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service also revealed that June temperatures in North America were 1.2C higher than the average from 1991 to 2020, which is more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
This is the 12th consecutive year of above-average June temperatures in the region, and the greatest increase recorded until now.
At the start of the month, the record-breaking heatwave conditions were centred over the south-west of the US. They then moved over the north-west of the US and south-west Canada, causing more than 500 heat-related deaths and creating tinder for wildfires. The town of Lytton in British Columbia broke Canada’s heat record three days in a row. The latest hydrological bulletin shows many of the affected regions had unusually dry soil.
Northern Europe and Siberia also experienced an unusually hot June. Temperature records were broken in Moscow and Helsinki. The world as a whole was also warmer than average for this time of year. This would not normally be expected in the same year as a La Niña phenomenon, which is generally associated with a cooling effect.
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| Source: DemonTattler, Santa Fe's high school student magazine |
“Exxon knew.” Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as investigations revealed the extent to which giants like ExxonMobil and Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even as they undermined the work of scientists.
But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows.
In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.
Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.
“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”
“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
Cherry was floored.
“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”
In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”
While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying, and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.
As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”
“While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran.
“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”
Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost:“Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”
Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even ExxonMobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.
The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.
Adelaide forecast 42C [107.6 F] Wednesday, 17 degrees C [27 F] above Nov. average! Extreme temperatures in Adelaide projected to keep increasing (red) unless emissions are reduced (green). Fuelled by massive Aus gas and coal exports.
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| Source: EPA Buildings includes heating buildings, transportation is all transportation, industry includes iron and steel and cement. Heat production can be electrified as can transportation. But that still leaves industry and agriculture. |
Some things deserve repeating.
One of those things, which happened to come up in conversation recently, is that climate change has its most profound effect on extreme events. Climate change is a change in the probability function (the odds for each possible outcome) of weather, and when you look at probability functions you find that if they change in the way we expect them to, it can increase (or decrease) the chance of extremes by a surprising amount.
Zagreb-Gric, Croatia, is smack-dab in the middle of one of the fastest-warming regions of Europe. It has already warmed by about 3°C (5.4°F) since the year 1880 (here are annual averages of temperature anomaly):
The local warming is especially pronounced since around 1980. It’s entirely possible that by the year 2040, this region will have heated up to 4°C (7.2°F) above its pre-2000 average.
Let’s talk about the daily high temperature during the month of July. We can get a decent picture of its climate — or at least, what it used to be — by taking all the high temperatures on July days prior to the year 2000, and making a histogram:
Zagreb can get pretty hot during July, but not extremely so. I’ve delineated three regions: temperatures as high as 30°C (86°F), which I call “hot” days, with those reaching 35°C (95°F) being “VERY hot” and days peaking at 40°C (104°F) and above are “WICKED hot.” About 20% of July days in Zagreb reach “hot” status, while “WICKED hot” has only happened once in nearly 140 years of record-keeping.
Here’s an idea of what we’ll see, if the average increases by 4°C (7.2°F) [i.e., by another 1 degree C from today]:
Roughly 60% of July days will be hot days, three times as likely as they were before 2000. VERY hot (dangerously so) will be ten times as likely on a July day as it was. And “WICKED hot” temperatures will happen fifty times as often as they used to. When temperatures of 40°C (104°F) go from “once in a century” to “every other year,” there are consequences.
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| Chart shows global temperature anomaly in the 12 months to June each year. Source: NOAA. The 1998 and 2016 El Niños are clear, as is the longer-term uptrend. There are rising odds of a new El Niño in 2019. |
The extreme heatwaves and wildfires wreaking havoc around the globe are “the face of climate change,” one of the world’s leading climate scientists has declared, with the impacts of global warming now “playing out in real time.”
Climate change has long been predicted to increase extreme weather incidents, and scientists are now confident these predictions are coming true. Scientists say the global warming has contributed to the scorching temperatures that have baked the UK and northern Europe for weeks.
The hot spell was made more than twice as likely by climate change, a new analysis found, demonstrating an “unambiguous” link.
Extreme weather has struck across Europe, from the Arctic Circle to Greece, and across the world, from North America to Japan. “This is the face of climate change,” said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University, and one the world’s most eminent climate scientists. “We literally would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change.”
“The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle,” he told the Guardian. “We are seeing them play out in real time and what is happening this summer is a perfect example of that.”
“We are seeing our predictions come true,” he said. “As a scientist that is reassuring, but as a citizen of planet Earth, it is very distressing to see that as it means we have not taken the necessary action.”
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| Source |
All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week.
From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.
Large areas of heat pressure or heat domes scattered around the hemisphere led to the sweltering temperatures.
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.
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| Berlin Flood (Source: The Local.De) |
Global floods and extreme rainfall events have surged by more than 50% this decade, and are now occurring at a rate four times higher than in 1980, according to a new report.
Other extreme climatological events such as storms, droughts and heatwaves have increased by more than a third this decade and are being recorded twice as frequently as in 1980, the paper by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (Easac) says.
The paper, based partly on figures compiled by the German insurance company Munich Re, also shows that climate-related loss and damage events have risen by 92% since 2010.
Prof Michael Norton, Easac’s environmental programme director, said that greenhouse gas emissions were “fundamentally responsible for driving these changes”.
“Trends towards extremes are continuing,” he said. “People have experienced extreme weather already - big switches [between] warm and cold winters - but the frequency of these shifts may be changing.”
“Some of the underlying drivers of extreme weather which were speculative four years ago are now looking less speculative and [more like] credible hypotheses. That is the weakening of the Gulf Stream and the meandering behaviour of the jet stream.”
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