Rainy and cold this mid-morning Thursday here in California’s Central Valley — a crank in the levers of the real-deadly horror of the T-Rump, supposedly in the middle of winter:
Wow. Last month wasn't just a usual hottest January on record. Despite cool La Niña conditions, it was *even hotter* than last years record-breaking El Niño January!Graph by @hausfath.bsky.social
— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf.bsky.social) 2025-02-06T11:29:38.784Z
Via the Guardian this morning:
A run of record-breaking global temperatures has continued, even with a La Niña weather pattern cooling the tropical Pacific.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the warmest January on record, with surface – air temperatures 1.75C above preindustrial levels.
The EU-funded Earth observation programme highlighted wetter-than-average conditions in eastern Australia and drier-than-average conditions in other parts of the country.
Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said: “January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years … Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.” Sea-surface temperatures remained unusually high in many ocean basins and seas.
January marked the 18th month of the past 19 to record global-average surface temperatures above the 1.5C preindustrial level. Under the Paris climate agreement, world leaders said they would try to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C – but the threshold was based on long-term multidecadal warming and not short-term monthly temperatures.
Climate scientists had expected this exceptional spell to subside after a warming El Niño event peaked in January 2024 and conditions shifted to an opposing, cooling La Niña phase.
But the heat has lingered at record or near-record levels, prompting debate about what other factors could be driving it to the top end of expectations.
Julien Nicolas, a climate scientist at Copernicus, told Agence France-Presse: “This is what makes it a bit of a surprise: you’re not seeing this cooling effect, or temporary brake at least, on the global temperature that we were expecting to see.”
[…]
The EU monitor uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to aid its calculations. Its records go back to 1940, but other sources of climate data – such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons – enable scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much further in the past.
Scientists say the current period is likely to be the warmest the planet has been in 125,000 years.
Further from the Guardian and this on Monday from noted climate scientist Prof James Hansen: ‘“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) defined a scenario which gives a 50% chance to keep warming under 2C – that scenario is now impossible … The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.”‘
Details on January’s heat at the Copernicus site.
Probably the most-serious problem facing humankind in the now and near future is climate change. Shit has been getting worse for decades, and despite some adventurous outings from the UN, the hot shit continues to pour without regard to any kind of future — our kids and grandkids are going to catch the worse. Or as things are going right this moment, us old assholes, too, will still be alive to face the wrath heat of our dependence on fossil fuels.
Climate change is not going away only going to get worse.
Fire alarm for the weather forecast:
The U.S. #NationalWeatherService, housed within #NOAA, is a truly world-class meteorological predictive service, perhaps singularly so. It costs only ~$3/yr per taxpayer, & yields ~10:1 return on investment–saving economy 10s-100s of billions, not to mention thousands of lives.
— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T19:21:31.734Z
And insert the T-Rump at the worst possible time. Aside from his other horrible shit, he and his asshole minions are pushing to eventually kill us all:
Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis. Climate scientists said they were braced “for the worst”.
A major climate portal on the Department of Defense’s website has been scrapped, as has the main climate change section on the site of the Department of State. A climate change page on the White House’s website no longer exists, nor does climate content provided by the US agriculture department, including information that provides vulnerability assessments for wildfires.
An entire section on “climate and sustainability” hosted by the Department of Transportation has now vanished, with the department’s new leadership also ordering the elimination of any policy positions, directives or funding “which reference or relate in any way to climate change, ‘greenhouse gas’ [sic] emissions, racial equity, gender identity, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ goals, environmental justice or the Justice40 initiative”.
[…]
Some researchers have found that their own studies, from ocean carbon cycles to the connectivity of cleaner electrical grids, have now vanished from federal government websites. Critics say the actions will stifle the public’s understanding of the climate crisis amid record-breaking temperatures and a wave of storms and wildfires that are being worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.
“We should plan for the worst,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The keys to the car have been given to the polluters and fossil fuel plutocrats and they intend to drive it off the climate cliff.”
Mann said the Trump administration may be following in the footsteps of Florida, which last year passed a law banning any reference to climate change from state laws.
“Nothing would surprise me at this point, including efforts by the administration and the polluters who are running it to ban all references to climate change by administration agencies,” Mann said. “[Florida governor Ron] DeSantis and Florida were indeed the test bed.”
[…]
Wildfires that have scorched Los Angeles were worsened by human-caused global heating, researchers have found, while in Greenland, which Trump wants to acquire for the US, the vast ice sheet is cracking up faster than ever previously seen, further fueling worldwide sea level rise.
“A plan for a modern-day book-burning is not a plan for American families,” Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said of the website deletions. “By stripping taxpayers from having the ability to access life-saving websites and information, websites and information paid for by taxpayers, Donald Trump will be putting families across the country in peril.”
Why am I not surprised/shocked? Scared shitless — of course!
A nutshell explainer via the BBC:
Fucked, or not, yet once again here we are …
(Illustration out front found here.)