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On June 20, in the small Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle, a heat wave baking the region peaked at 38 degrees Celsius — just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. In a world without climate change, this anomaly, one Danish meteorologist calculated, would be a 1-in-100,000-year event. Thanks to climate change, that year is now.
If you saw this news, last weekend, it was probably only a glimpse (primetime network news didn’t even cover it). But the overwhelming coverage of perhaps more immediately pressing events — global protests, global pandemic, economic calamity — is only one reason for that climate occlusion. The extreme weather of the last few summers has already inured us to temperature anomalies like these, though we are only just at the beginning of the livable planet’s transformation by climate change — a transformation whose end is not yet visible, if it will ever be, and in which departures from the historical record will grow only more dramatic and more disorienting and more lethal, almost by the year. At just 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming, where the planet is today, we have already evicted ourselves from the “human climate niche,” and brought ourselves outside the range of global temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization. That history is roughly 10,000 years long, which means that in a stable climate you would only expect to encounter an anomaly like this one if you ran the full lifespan of all recorded human history ten times over — and even then would only encounter it once.
Click here to access the entire article as originally published on the New York Magazine website.
Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time by David Wallace-Wells, Intelligencer, New York Magazine, June 27, 2020
A La Nina watch has been issued by the Bureau of Meteorology for the first time since February 2018, strengthening evidence that Australia may be heading out of drought.
"La Nina basically means, for Australia, an increased risk of rainfall — particularly in central, eastern and northern parts of the country," said Andrew Watkins, the head of long-range forecasting at the Bureau of Meteorology.
A La Nina watch means the chance of La Nina forming in 2020 is around 50 per cent — roughly double the average likelihood.
"La Nina is a cooling in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean," Dr Watkins said.
"When that couples with the atmosphere, we start to see some global impacts, including those in Australia."
Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the ABC News website.
The chance of a La Nina forming has doubled, Bureau of Meteorology says by Ben Deacon, ABC News (Australia), June 24, 2020
Hat tip to the Stop Climate Science Denial Facebook page.
Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 28 June, 2020
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