Once again hot as dog shit this Thursday late afternoon here in California’s Central Valley — if the heat of dog shit can be measured — (it’s 104 degrees outside right now).
Summer blisters the anvil (WTF!).
In the midst of the scorcher, our state today made a nice gesture for our future weather (Vox): ‘California, the state that buys the most cars and trucks in the United States, will ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035. This represents the largest government move against gasoline and diesel to date, with the potential to ripple throughout the country and the global auto industry.‘
Long term the big hurdle is this year’s midterms — not only is democracy on the line, so be our environment:
Biden campaigning in Maryland on stakes of the 2022 midterms: "The survival of our planet is on the ballot." pic.twitter.com/aHfKiBZSxN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2022
If Republicans gain the House and Senate this November, we be totally fucked. In reality, emission cuts need to start soon, if not immediately, to curb the worse coming aspects of climate change. The deep end of the crisis — despite what we have done from here on out, there’s going to be some shit anyway, no matter. Republicans, however, will seal the planet’s doom.
Just to be clear — Lindsey Graham sneered just last month: ‘“I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change.”‘
So Joe Biden be right.
And this afternoon in my numerous news scrolls, I came across a couple of melting freezer climate stories and the red-flag, emergency-level crisis we’re in right now with our one and only environment.
First off, historical heating in the Siberian Arctic is unprecedented, a new study published today at Nature is fairly dramatic — the Abstract:
The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth. Putting this rapid warming into perspective is challenging because instrumental records are often short or incomplete in polar regions and precisely-dated temperature proxies with high temporal resolution are largely lacking. Here, we provide this long-term perspective by reconstructing past summer temperature variability at Yamal Peninsula – a hotspot of recent warming – over the past 7638 years using annually resolved tree-ring records. We demonstrate that the recent anthropogenic warming interrupted a multi-millennial cooling trend. We find the industrial-era warming to be unprecedented in rate and to have elevated the summer temperature to levels above those reconstructed for the past seven millennia (in both 30-year mean and the frequency of extreme summers). This is undoubtedly of concern for the natural and human systems that are being impacted by climatic changes that lie outside the envelope of natural climatic variations for this region.
In worldly context of earth’s regions of snow and ice — glaciers in the European Alps are disappearing at a great rate. According to a study published last Monday in The Cryosphere, more than 50 percent of those glaciers vanished between 1931 and 2016, and our current year is drastic, which continues the terrible trend — per Smithsonian Magazine this afternoon:
“I would say it is off the charts compared to anything we’ve ever measured before,” Mylène Jacquemart, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich, said in an email to the Post.
“We are currently seeing conditions that, even in a pretty bad year, we would only expect at the very end of the season. When we calculate the final mass balance at the end of September, I expect that it will be the worst year on record by a large margin.”
In the summertime, once again here we are…
(Illustration out front from the UN’s International Children’s Painting Competition, and found here.)