Permafrost melting and consequent methane release is one of the polar feedbacks, but reduced albedo due to ice cover melt is an even bigger one.
Meanwhile I note that here in the Great White North temperatures are predicted to reach 36°C on Tuesday (that’s 97 American Ferrets, which is an extraordinary high for around here). I have icy cold Pina Colada mix in the fridge but I think I’ll have to have it indoors!
The ocean has been helping shield us for awhile now. Another way you can measure how screwed we are is the ocean heat anomaly.
It’s currently at 22 zettajoules. For those who don’t keep up on esoteric multiples like the zetta, it’s 10^22. According to the ever reliable wikipedia, a mere 2.2 zettajoules is enough to heat the entire atmosphere by 1C. Using my impressive math skills, that means the ocean has stored enough excess heat to raise the temperature of the atmosphere by ~10C if it were to all get expelled at once.
Surely nothing to be concerned about as we head into El Nino (aka the oceans’ heat release valve)…
edit: also surprised that page still exists given our current political situation
I have lived in MO all my life, and it does seem it is getting hotter. It comes in episodes now, which are becoming more prolonged. A normal MO day is in the 90s, but lower 90s, and was mostly that forthe majority of the summer, with perhaps a heat wave in July, getting upper 90s. Also, the floods due to the massive rainstorms, that does not seem typical. Yes, we have had big floods from our big rivers, the MO and the Mississippi, but the ones on the small floating rivers south of here seem unusually bad. I have floated many of those rivers, and they are just clear and pretty big creeks when they are in normal bank. Climate change means more frequent, severe storms, including snowstorms (which I try to explain to my friends who say “where is the global warming?” in January when we have very cold temps and large snows. Arrgh).
Ask the doubters to compare how high a basketball gets if they dribble it softly or hit it hard. Maybe that will work, she said doubtfully.
Another record heat day. It will hit at least 100°F here today, which is fully 20 degrees above normal and very unusual in southern Ontario even in mid-July, and the low tonight will not sink below 80°F which is approximately the normal daytime high.
Fortunately there’s a cooling trend after this, but it will still be hot.
There have been a spate of all-time high records set the past couple days extending from Utah up into Montana.
Never a good thing when these graphs start showing X’s
edit: I wish I could find a good resource on the # of records set over time. I expect it worked be enlightening. Or perhaps frightening.
Southern California normally experiences a dry heat. Not today. It’s 88° with 40% humidity that seems a lot higher. Tomorrow, 95° is forecast. I feel like I’m back on the east coast.
I just got back home (suburban Chicago) from three days in Green Bay: highs in the mid 90s every day, dew points over 70, just brutal. It’s about the same here in Chicago (we nearly hit 100 today), and won’t really cool off until Sunday…maybe.
Yup–105 degrees in downtown Bozeman Sunday. Lovely. We had snow 2 weeks ago!
Here is a great general climate change resource. All facts, no BS:
They have an RSS feed that delivers all their articles. And every month they publish a roundup of records set. Here’s June’s:
From there you can learn about a guy named Maximillian Herrera who’s sort of the Dean of climatology records. From the above cited article:
Weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera has documented the records listed below in June. Follow him on Bluesky: @extremetemps.bsky.social or X: @extremetemps.
I don’t know where else that guy writes, or whether he has a website, searchable database of statistics, etc. But chasing him down would be a great way to begin your quest for stats about records set.
Suppose I could write a script to parse through it all if he’s consistently listing them all, but if I’m building my own I’m probably better finding an actual data set and running the numbers myself. Just kind of surprising that no one built a tracker for this sort of thing. I vaguely recall seeing a graph once upon a time of record highs vs record lows, but could never find it again afterwards.
Hot yes, nothing compared to the pollution index: 220 this morning, wow. Thing is, the entire month of June was pristine and cool.
Hot? Maybe a little, but I’d say only slightly above average based on my perceptions. We are having extreme weather here in south Texas this summer, but record breaking heat isn’t part of the package. For heat this summer is shaping up to be merely slightly above average.
PI is up over 600 now, wow. The sun is casting an eerie orange light onto my desk here.
Where are you? I assume this is CO/UT wildfire smoke?
Getting bad air pollution here, too, in the Midwest, though it’s smoke from Canadian wildfires.
AQI number here in the Chicago area is 294, which is in the “dangerous” zone. I have friends in the Detroit and Cleveland areas, and my parents are in Green Bay, where those numbers are even higher.
And all of that is on top of it being 90F, with the dew point at 72F. Nothing about the outdoors is pleasant right now.
Too late to edit: the updated AQI number for Chicago is now at 597, which is the worst ever recorded here.
Cleveland. The poor visibility has already caused at least one wreck.
When I moved back here (my childhood home), I had visions of going to various lakes and such, recalling how awesome July usually was-yeah we had an occ. heat wave, but nada like this. In 1972 my last year here the hi/mean/low temp averages were 81.92 - 71.15 - 56.92. The low was 45 on 7-6-1972.
[edit] Yeah, we then had 6 straight days of highs of 90 from the 18th-23rd, but sheesh.
Here in SoFL at 8pm = sunset it’s 88F/31C w 76F dew point. So sunny & cozy & perfect.
More of the same for the weekend. We ought to be unaffected by whatever is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.
AQI in MSP hit about 160 today. I can’t imagine being in Chicago or even up north in MN where it’s over 300 in Duluth. They’ve evacuated the Boundary Waters because of fire and smoke danger. We’re supposed to get smoke relief by tomorrow, and heat/humidity relief by Tuesday.