Heat Records Falling Like Dominos
“Pay No Attention,” Say Politicos
This past Sunday, July 21st, was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth—which, other than in Elon Musk’s drug-addled dreams, is the only place in the universe known to be habitable by our species. For now, anyway.
That heat record stood for 24 hours. It was surpassed on Monday, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
While this milestone is technically news, it may not be all that surprising. NOAA reported in June that May had been the 12th consecutive warmest month on record.
Rounding out our review of broken records, while 2023 was the hottest year on record, there is a better-than-even chance 2024 will break that record.
Locally, New Hampshire just suffered through the longest heat wave ever recorded—and the nastiest. As NHPR reported, “a hotter atmosphere can also evaporate more water from the surface of the earth, increasing humidity.” Higher nighttime temperatures brought little relief.
A slew of local heat wave records, set in 2002, fell between July 6th and July 17th. According to WMUR, the records for Rochester, Manchester, and Concord all stood at nine days. The new records are 15, 14, and 12 days, respectively.
’Twas Ever Thus—Or Was It?
The traditional Yankee response to all this would be, of course, to shrug off such matters and stoically endure the suffering. That might become difficult here on the Seacoast, if a recent discovery proves to be as significant as scientists suspect.
According to a report released last Friday by the British Antarctica Survey, published in the journal Astrobiology, previous methods of predicting sea level rise have failed to account for a newly-discovered tipping point.
“Ice sheets are very sensitive to melting in their grounding zones [the region beneath an ice sheet where the ground-based ice meets the sea]. We find that grounding zone melting displays a ‘tipping point like’ behaviour, where a very small change in ocean temperature can cause a very big increase in grounding zone melting, which would lead to a very big change in flow of the ice above it.” the report says.
“This means our projections of sea level rise might be significant underestimates.”
Hmmm… why does that warning sound so familiar…? And speaking of familiar, how about “more study is needed”?
THOR, the Thwaites Offshore Research project, reported in February that over the past 30 years, “the amount of ice flowing out to sea from the Thwaites and Pine Island glacial areas and their associated floating ice shelves has doubled” and that “an irreversible meltdown of some of the frozen continent’s ice masses has already started.”
According to a February report in Inside Climate News, “the Thwaites glacier collaboration is winding down this year for lack of continued funding.
The Thwaites Glacier has been dubbed “The Doomsday Glacier” due to the consequences should it melt.
While we’re on the topic of Doomsday, and funding, Wired reported Monday that “The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine.”
The money would go to refurbishing 450 ICBM silos in five western states which serve as “what lawmakers and military planners have long called the ‘nuclear sponge.’”
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