New high
The world’s average temperature reached a new high on Monday 3 July, topping 17 degrees Celsius for the first time. Scientists say the reading was the highest in any instrumental record dating back to the end of the 19th century. The high heat is due to a combination of the El Niño weather event and ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide.
Researchers believe there will be more records in the coming months as El Niño strengthens.
Stay in the shade.
That would have been Dad’s ninetieth birthday; he died four years ago, of leukæmia (after fighting polycythæmia vera for many years), just after his 86th birthday. Not a pleasant way to commemorate. “Happy Anniversary of your father’s birth! The world has never been hotter!”
I don’t know how to live differently enough even to make a dent in this graph. No individual person or family can; our part of the world has been set up for us in such a way that those of us who can make changes are too few to have any effect, and those who can make a significant difference (such as allowing all office staff to work from home, drastically cutting vehicle emissions), won’t.
tigger, that day was my own dad’s yahrzeit. He died at 86, too, not even a whole month after his birthday.
I’m done worrying about emissions. Or population.
I just hope I’m alive long enough to watch oil production go into terminal decline. I’m 63 and have had a good life.
Mike B, Dad came home from the hospital a few days before his birthday, after the sitting room had been converted into a home-hospice room for him (my youngest sibling stored their own furniture for them). He died sixteen days after his birthday. I’m 65, and (ignoring the health issues) have also had a pretty good life.
I’m beginning to think that we’ve lived through the best time in history, despite it all. Women almost got equality, children got vaccines against the diseases which killed many up to and including our generation in childhood, we got antibiotics, effective treatments against many cancers – and even preventive vaccines against some – and a couple of really nasty diseases were rendered extinct by the efforts of humans.
And it’s all going wrong again.
tigger, agreed; and another “best times” indicator: I got to marry my husband. But I’m sure The Supremes are busily conspiring how to scuttle that.