10C Above Normal


When the IPCC talks about catastrophic extinctions if there is a rise of more than 6C worldwide, they’re talking about the long-term average temperatures getting pushed up that high. Short-term spikes are expected, too.

[e=mc2]

The temperature in Verkhoyansk, about 4,660 kilometres northeast of Moscow, hit 38 degrees Celsius on Saturday, according to Russia-based meteorological website Pogoda i Klimat.

For those of you who use freedomheit, that’s 100F. Back when I was a kid growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, that was a “heat wave” but now it’s just another summer. But 100F in the arctic circle is something else, entirely.

The arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the globe, because it’s cold – or it was – so the thermal gradient is sharper.

Crop failures, fisheries collapse, wildfires in Siberia, anoxic dead zones in the oceans – we’re right in the middle of a calamity and it’s happening like the death of a thousand cuts, except we’re drunk on oil and don’t feel it.

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Comments

  1. says

    As mentioned somewhere, the current temperature spike is in line with the worst-case scenarios for 2100. In other words, it’s heating up and it’s heating up much faster than even the nightmare model.

  2. StevoR says

    Then there are the Russian “zombie fires” that burnt all through the year and are now remerging on the surface having gone underground.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-19/zombie-fires-and-fire-thunderstorms-hit-arctic/12369818

    The fires, shown on imagery collected by the European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS), are burning in areas where blazes broke out last northern summer.

    Scientists suspect they continued burning underground during winter and then re-erupted amid the persistent high temperatures of recent months, earning the name ‘zombie’ or ‘overwintering’ fires. Last summer, fires in Russia burnt through more than three million hectares of land. Dr Mark Parrington, a senior CAMS scientist, said the new fires above the Arctic Circle had been burning more intensely than the long-term average and increasing day by day over the past week.

    Amidst a six month long heatwave and ever shrinking Arctic sea ice.

    I fear we’ve well and truly passed a serious tipping point here .

  3. says

    SteveoR@#2:
    I fear we’ve well and truly passed a serious tipping point here

    We blew past it with all our flags flying, in a great big Chevy Silverado diesel pick-up truck that was modified to emit maximum smoke. There’s a cinderblock wedged against the gas pedal, and nobody’s wearing a seatbelt as they sing “I put my trust in jesus” and pass the beer around, and drink.

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