Dust Bowl records
Be sure to report all this in a cheerful optimistic manner:
About 100 million Americans from California to New England were sweating through heat advisories and warnings from the National Weather Service on Wednesday, with a brutal heat wave across the central part of the country showing no signs of letting up.
Oh that sounds harsh. Let’s not say brutal heat wave, let’s say misunderstood heat wave.
Heat warnings and advisories were in place for parts or all of 28 states. People in the Southeast and the Southern Plains faced the most oppressive temperatures, with triple digits forecast for Wednesday and beyond across parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, said Andrew Orrison, a Weather Service meteorologist.
Oklahoma City broke a daily heat record dating back to the Dust Bowl era on Tuesday with a temperature of 110 — tied for the state’s highest-ever July temperature, the Weather Service said — and Austin is set on Wednesday to see its 40th straight day of highs over 100 degrees.
“These are definitely dangerous heat conditions,” Mr. Orrison said.
Well, only if you’re not a reptile.
It’s only slightly less bad in New York and New England.
It’s difficult to blame any particular heat snap on climate change without extensive scientific analysis, but heat waves like the ones in Europe, Asia and North America this summer are typical of what scientists expect as the globe warms — more frequent, longer lasting and more dangerous.
Heat waves in the United States jumped from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year by the 2010s. And it’s all part of an overall warming trend: The last seven years have been the warmest in the history of accurate worldwide records.
But don’t talk about it, because that’s a downer.
While it may be difficult to tie a particular weather event to climate change, what we can do is predict trends based on climate data. And the trends are towards hotter weather, longer heat waves, more volatile weather (including blizzards) as the climate changes. It’s looking like the predictions are right.
“We like to keep the bad news light!”
It’s “only” 90 degrees here in Maine, and yet I’m prostate. Prostrate. Whatever.
Parts of the great land Downunder are experiencing unusually cold winters. This is proof global warming is a myth, say some.
We are on track to have a third La Nina event in a single calendar year, with some regions reflooding before they have recovered from floods earlier this year. But you said “Global warming will cause droughts”, say some.
These people are incapable of joining the dots. Extreme heat events will cause droughts in some places and floods in others. Hotter air holds more water vapour and carries it further. Rain clouds pass over parched landscapes and release their bounty over the already sodden land.
It ain’t rocket science, but it is Climate Science.
The atmosphere is an inherently chaotic system, with the accuracy of forecasting diminishing the steeper the further out from the present we go. More heat in the atmosphere means more energy in that atmosphere. That can lead to greater cyclonic depressions, which in this Southern Hemisphere drag more cold air north from Antarctica, causing the members of the Ostrich School of Climatology to cheer and squawk about how wrong the whole global warming predictions are.
So I say forget temperatures. This Earth is its own thermometer, whose ‘mercury’ is its one ocean. And that has been rising relentlessly (at ~ 3.3 mm/yr) ever since satellite monitoring of it began, and no doubt for a long time before that; but disguised at a local level by local isostatic movements in the Earth’s crust.
Global Mean Sea Level Rates
CU: 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr
AVISO: 3.3 ± 0.6 mm/yr
CSIRO: 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr
NASA GSFC: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
NOAA: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr (w/ GIA)
3.3 mm/yr = 33 mm/decade = 330 mm/ century = 3,330 mm / millennium
330/100 x 2,500 = 8,250 mm in the last 2,500 years since classical times in Greece.
8,250 mm = 8.25 metres; enough to swamp a fair hunk of the classical world unless compensated for by upward crustal movements.
From which we may conclude that this sea-level rise is comparatively recent in historic time; likely since the Industial Revolution which began C 1750 AD.
https://skepticalscience.com/
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Somewhat counterintuitively breaking very old records is less concerning than breaking new ones. The Dust Bowl ended around 1936, so breaking a record set then could just mean every century or so we pop a hot temperature.
Breaking last year’s record year after year is what’s really concerning, and we’ve definitely seen some of that.
Extreme heat events are even more dangerous for reptiles – they have little ability to metabolically regulate their body temperatures and can suffer excess mortality when environmental temperatures are over 37C, as they will overheat. Their only recourse is to find cool shelter away from the sun, which may be difficult for larger species.This is especially true of cool-climate species.
So global warming isn’t a boon for reptiles either.