Clear, bright, and hot as shit already just past the noon hour Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley — we’re under an intense triple-digit-heat advisory for the next couple of days; then a ‘cooling‘ span over the weekend (temps ‘only‘ in the high 90s), followed with an abrupt return to 100-plus warmth for early next week.
A relocated ‘heat dome‘ is the immediate culprit, but actually, it is the season — although we’re still two weeks from ‘official’ summertime.
Of course, a shifting burn: ‘“Temperatures well above average for the time of year — some spots as much as 10 to 20 degrees above average,” said Marc Chenard, a weather service meteorologist. He said unseasonably hot weather was expected to spread northward through California to the Pacific Northwest … California was the hottest place in the country Tuesday with 112 degrees at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, 108 degrees in Needles and 104 degrees in Palm Springs. Such temperatures don’t usually bake the Southland until July.‘
And, too, this shit is the ‘new normal‘ nowadays — there’s an obvious routine to the murderous melting madness:
???May 2024 was the warmest May on record, marking the 12th consecutive month in which the global average temperature reached a record value for the corresponding month.
The #C3S data were cited by the UN Secretary General, @antonioguterres.
For more? https://t.co/ZwQCkgiuiC pic.twitter.com/NVy7L4m5pP
— Copernicus ECMWF (@CopernicusECMWF) June 5, 2024
Details via The Washington Post this morning:
A streak of record-setting heat that began last summer has now persisted for an entire year across the globe, researchers announced Wednesday, pushing Earth closer to a dangerous threshold that the world’s nations have pledged not to cross.
The data released by European climate scientists showed May was the 12th consecutive month during which average global temperatures surpassed all observations since 1850, and probably any extended period for more than 100,000 years. Over the past year, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, global temperatures averaged 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
Under the landmark 2015 Paris agreement, the world’s leaders pledged to limit Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) over preindustrial levels, to avert some of the worst effects of global warming. The fact that the planet surpassed this mark for one year does not amount to a permanent shift, but it comes as scientists are warning that it is likely to happen again — within a few years.
The World Meteorological Organization said that it is highly likely that, for at least one calendar year in the next five, temperatures will exceed 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels once more.
This unprecedented stretch of warmth, which has astonished scientists, prompted an urgent call by the United Nations to ban fossil fuel companies from advertising and encourage the public to stop using their products.
“For the past year, every turn of the calendar has turned up the heat,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a special address in New York. “Our planet is trying to tell us something. But we don’t seem to be listening.”
[…]
Carlo Buontempo, the Copernicus director, said that as remarkable as the trend is, “this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold” without action to reverse it.
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas act to trap heat within the atmosphere, preventing it from escaping into space.
A separate study published by a group of 57 scientists on Wednesday found that human activities were responsible for 92 percent of the warming observed in 2023, the planet’s hottest calendar year on record. It said the rate of warming in the past decade is “unprecedented in the instrumental record.”
Further on UN Chief Guterres’ speech today (the Guardian):
“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco,” he said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”
In his speech, Guterres announced new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showing there is an 80% chance the planet will breach 1.5C (2.7F) in warming above pre-industrial times in at least one of the next five calendar years. The past 12 months have already breached this level, with the average global temperature 1.63C (2.9F) higher than the pre-industrial average from June 2023 to May this year, following a string of months with record-breaking heat, according to the European Union’s Copernicus monitoring system.
[…]
According to the WMO, there is a roughly 50-50 chance that the period of 2024 to 2028 will average above 1.5C in warming, globally. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” Guterres, known for his strident language on the climate crisis, told an audience underneath a suspended 94ft model of a blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”
In a nod to the venue of his speech, Guterres said that “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs – we are the meteor. We are not only in danger – we are the danger.”
[…]
“The godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil-fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said. “It is a disgrace that the most vulnerable are being left stranded, struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create.
“We cannot accept a future where the rich are protected in air-conditioned bubbles, while the rest of humanity is lashed by lethal weather in unlivable lands.”
Guterres attacked fossil-fuel firms for their meagre investments in cleaner forms of energy and for “distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt” about climate science, before calling for government bans on fossil-fuel advertising and for public relations and media companies to cut ties with oil, gas and coal interests.
“I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil-fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand.”
Yeah, right. How will that fit into our current agenda? And if T-Rump is re-elected?
A burst of bleakness to close this out — from the contemplative Enigma:
Heat dome time, or not, yet once again here we are…
(Illustration out front found here.)