Going up
The hotness was most likely because of hotness.
The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists.
In their study, the team of researchers says that the deadly heatwave was a one-in-a-1,000-year event. But we can expect extreme events such as this to become more common as the world heats up due to climate change.
If humans hadn’t influenced the climate to the extent that they have, the event would have been 150 times less likely. Scientists worry that global heating, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels, is now driving up temperatures faster than models predict.
That is worrying. If it gets too much faster everything will simply burn up.
Beating records by several numbers is virtually unprecedented, the BBC says. Seattle is one of the places that happened. 108 F. ONE OH EIGHT.
Since the start of the heatwave, people have linked the unusual and extreme nature of the event to climate change. Now, researchers say that the chances of it occurring without human-induced warming were virtually impossible.
…
Co-author Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, explained what the researchers meant when they said the extreme heat was “virtually impossible” without climate change.
“Without the additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in the statistics that we have available with our models, and also the statistical models based on observations, such an event just does not occur,” she explained. “Or if an event like this occurs, it occurs once in a million times, which is the statistical equivalent of never,” she told a news briefing.
So basically we’re sitting on a stove burner that is on.
And yet the idea of not replacing the propane tank six or seven more times is pretty much universally considered the “radical”, “extremist”, “crazy” view..
Soon we’ll have a stove that seats eight billion. PROGRESS!
That’s so fucking scary. I confess, climate change has always felt to me like something that’s in the future, not quite here yet. I was chatting about this with Glinner; he quoted William Gibson, who (allegedly) said, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” He said the same can be said for climate change. Well, we can no longer say it hasn’t palpably arrived, right here and right now. We’re in the future now, and it’s a living hell.
There are those who either a) don’t believe it at all, or b) think some combination of wealth and geography will shield them from that even distribution. It might delay it, but it will not protect them. Unless they have a handy, spare inhabitable planet they can escape to, they will burn and starve with the rest of us.
It’s a tragic flaw that we attained our technological power and population without coming up with more reliable, stable governance systems that might have prevented us from taking this self-destructive path. Combine this poorly controlled power with the ignorance of its use within and impacts upon the biological, material and energy systems and cycles from which we arose, and upon which we depend, and you’ve got the makings of planetary disaster.
I know there’s more to it than this, but the fuckers at Exxon who buried the findings of the own scientists and decided to follow the route of the tobacco industry in sowing doubt and uncertainty, in order to delay meaningful action which would interfere with their precious bottom line, should have to answer for the decades of lost lead time we no longer have. Thanks, corporate responsibility!
Our local news said that for us to be as far above normal as Seattle was we would have to be at 130F. A few days last month, I think we were trying.
I am 58. Hoped I would be “gone” before it really hit. Nope.
Inland Northern California has had a hot summer, but not uniquely or unusually so. We have had three (counting this weekend) brief heatwaves (I live in a very hot area, so it always warm. Unusual is triple digit for us) but there have been previous years with a month of this. I feel sorry for NW people-we are sorta used to it.
Anyway…I am still calm. How can anyone not be calm when their landlady/housemate is playing Deepak Chopra and his calm, mesmerizing deepities rolling over the room?
Wasn’t Louis XV supposed to have said “Apres moi, deluge.”?
I find myself saying that a lot these days…