Harv's Corner 07/29/2024

The Hottest days ever recorded raise fears that the Earth is near tipping point
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Extreme weather worldwide was deadly.
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Palestinian families flocked to the beach to cool off from the rising temperatures in the city of Gaza

As global temperatures spiked to their highest levels in recorded history on Monday, ambulances were screaming through the streets of Tokyo, carrying scores of people who'd collapsed amid an unrelenting heat wave. A monster typhoon was emerging from the scorching waters of the Pacific Ocean, which were several degrees warmer than normal. Thousands of vacationers fled the idyllic mountain town of Jasper, Canada, ahead of a fast-moving wall of wildfire flames.

By the end of the week — which saw the four hottest days ever observed by scientists — dozens had been killed in the raging floodwaters and massive mudslides triggered by Typhoon Gaemi. Half of Jasper was reduced to ash. And some 3.6 billion people around the planet had endured temperatures that would have been exceedingly rare in a world without burning fossil fuels and other human activities, according to an analysis by scientists at the group Climate Central.

These extraordinary global temperatures marked the culmination of an unprecedented global hot streak that has stunned even researchers who spent their whole careers studying climate change.
Since last July, Earth's average temperature has consistently exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — a short-term breach of a threshold that scientists say cannot be crossed if the world hopes to avoid the worst consequences of planetary warming.

This "taste" of a 1.5 degree world showed how the natural systems that humans depend on could buckle amid soaring temperatures, said Johan Rockstroum, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Forests showed less ability to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Sea ice around Antarctica dwindled to near record lows. Coral bleaching became so extreme scientists had to change their scale for measuring it.

Even as scientists forecast an end to the current recordbreaking stretch, they warn it may prove difficult for parts of the planet to recover from the heat of the past year.

"The extreme events that we are now experiencing are indications of the weakening resilience of these systems," Rockstrum said. "We cannot risk pushing this any further."

This week's broken records come on the heels of 13 straight months of unprecedented temperatures — fueled in part by the planet's shift into an El Niño climate pattern, which tends to warm the oceans, as well as pollution from burning coal, oil and gas.

The warming neared its apex on Sunday, when data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European climate monitor, showed the global average temperature edging out a record set a little over a year earlier.

But the new benchmark only stood for 24 hours, with Monday hitting a historic 17.16 degrees C (62.89 F). Tuesday was the second hottest on record, and Wednesday tied Sunday.

Though these numbers may not seem extreme, they are the average of thousands of data points taken from the Arctic to the South Pole, in places that are experiencing winter as well as those in the midst of summer. The preliminary data was generated using a sophisticated type of analysis that combines global weather observations with a state of the art climate model — a method that outside researchers said Copernicus' is highly reliable.

The world's oceans are also awash in historic heat. Copernicus data shows that the waters around Taiwan are 2 to 3 degrees C (3.6 to 5.4 degrees F) hotter than normal, helping to fuel Typhoon Gaemi's devastation. Research shows that higher ocean temperatures give more power to tropical cyclones, while a warmer atmosphere can hold more water — and thus produce more rain.

Meanwhile, nearly 2,000 weather stations around the planet notched new daily high temperature records over the last seven days, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Although scientists have not yet quantified the role of warming in all of this year's extreme events, there is abundant evidence that heat waves, storms and fires are made more frequent and intense because of climate change.

"We are running out of metaphors" to describe the unrelenting pace and scale at which the world is now breaking records, Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said.

Scientists have estimated Earth's average temperature based on observations dating back to 1850, and now measure it by pulling data from more than 20,000 land-based stations, as well as readings from ships and buoys around the globe.

To convey the severity of Earth's current heat, other researchers have turned to the planet's past. By studying tree rings, lake sediments and other records of the ancient climate, paleoclimate researchers have determined that the world is likely now warmer than it has been in more than 100,000 years, since before the start of the last ice age.

Humanity now faces conditions unlike anything our species has known before. According to a Climate Central analysis of the five-day period ending Friday, nearly half of the planet experienced at least one day of "exceptional heat" — temperatures that would have been rare or even impossible in a world without climate change.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday called for improved warning systems, stronger worker protections and other policies to protect people from these scorching temperatures.

Buontempo expects that Earth's record-breaking streak may soon end. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month declared an official end to the El Nino, reflecting cooling conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere also tends to bring down the planet's overall temperature.

Yet the unprecedented amount of heat-trapping carbon in Earth's atmosphere — which is at its highest level in more than 3 million years — will mean that even without El Nino, the world remains perilously warm.


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