September of extreme warmth has climate scientists alarmed
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
"Gobsmackingly bananas."
"Uncharted territories."
"The writing is so clearly on the wall."
Last month shattered the record for the hottest September on record by such a wide margin that climate scientists say it was almost beyond belief.
The September milestone, reported in new data released late Wednesday by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, added to an alarming stretch of record-breaking global temperatures. During June, July and August, the planet had its hottest summer on record "by a large margin."
September's temperatures have climate scientists even more stunned.
"This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas," Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for the financial services company Stripe, wrote Tuesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
After a week of frequent rain, New Yorkers take advantage of sunny, warm weather in Brooklyn's Prospect Park on Sunday.Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said it's worrying to see so many new records set, but it's even more alarming to see by what margin they are being toppled.Average surface air temperatures last month were almost a degree Fahrenheit hotter than September 2020, which had been the warmest September on record.
"Normally when you're beating a record, it's by hundredths of a degree," she said, "so this is really a huge amount."
September was also the most anomalously warm month in recorded history, meaning its deviation from the average was higher than any month so far, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
That warmth has continued into October. Temperatures around the world have remained elevated with a resurgence of summerlike conditions gripping residents of the Upper Midwest and the Northeast this week, despite being almost two full weeks into fall.
Record-smashing temperatures — above 90 F in some places — added to unseasonable warmth across a huge swath of the country, with cities from the Great Lakes to the Northeast experiencing high temperatures 10 to 30 degrees above average.
But the United States was hardly alone with its wild temperature swings: An October heat wave is baking Western Europe, with temperatures soaring well above 90 F in parts of France and Spain. And in the Southern Hemisphere, unseasonably warm temperatures have been recorded across South America and Australia, all coming on the heels of multiple bouts of extreme heat in previous months, during what should have been the winter season in that part of the world.
It's the kind of topsy-turvy warming trend that has left climate scientists bewildered.
"We have to find in our brains a new awareness for what 'extreme' means today, and just how horrifying that word is going to continue to be when our baseline is changing so quickly," said Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University.
For researchers like Cobb who pay close attention to extremes, 2023 already has them in spades.
Month after month of warmer-than-usual conditions have put 2023 on track to become the hottest year ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set in 2016.
"It's looking like it's a virtual lock," Cobb said of the problematic honor.
This trajectory of global warming has been predicted in climate models, but the pace of change has surprised many scientists.
"Most, if not all, climate scientists had a feeling that the next two years were going to be pretty warm, but I think everyone has been a little surprised just how warm globally it has been," said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Princeton University.
Warm conditions both this year and in 2016 were boosted by El Nino, a natural climate pattern characterized by warmer than usual waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. El Nio can impact weather conditions around the world and the phenomenon typically compounds background warming from human-caused climate change.
In a warming world, that means El Nino events are more likely to "push temperatures into ever more uncharted territories," Cobb said.
El Nino conditions are expected to persist into 2024. That could mean more records broken next year, but Burgess said it's too early to make any reliable forecasts of that nature. Still, events that have unfolded this year — devastating floods in multiple continents, weeks of unrelenting heat waves and some of the most catastrophic wildfires ever seen, to name a few — offer a concerning outlook.
"It really makes me very nervous of what's to come," Burgess said.
Burgess and others said the current situation should be a wake-up call for policymakers on the need to take immediate action to avert the most devastating consequences of climate change.
And while conditions and temperatures will fluctuate in the coming years, it's impossible to ignore the outsize impact of human-caused global warming, according to Cobb.
"The writing is so clearly on the wall," she said. "We have our foot all the way down on the accelerator in terms of our emissions, and we're basically not able to keep up with the changes that are occurring today, let alone the continued warming and extreme impacts that we know are coming down the pike."
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When I was a young kid I used to read the SciFi pulp magazines my older brother bought, and read about impossible things like space ships and men on the moon and wrist watch telephones like Dick Tracy wore and AI and other amazing things that we were not going see in our lifetimes. Well, when I was in university sputnik happened and how long ago was it that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and we have been able to navigate a lander on Mars and a seven year old girl I helped with her English a few years ago was wearing a wrist telephone, and many other things that were considered mere fantasy are everyday items and situations today.
Everyone knows I watch a lot of movies, and I always enjoy SciFi movies, and some of the things I saw in the movies many decades ago actually exist today. Think of Robbie the Robot in the movie Forbidden Planet. Have you seen what robots can do these days? What scares me, knowing that so many of those predictions that people deemed to be only fantasy actually happen, is because I watched the movie The Day After Tomorrow a couple of days ago and I don't know if there is any scientific accuracy concerning what happened in it, but I think we all have reason to be concerned, and I mean VERY concerned about where we are going and what is going to happen to our planet and to us.
is because I watched the movie The Day After Tomorrow a couple of days ago and I don't know if there is any scientific accuracy concerning what happened in it,
The movie was made using the current scientific thoughts, which I consider assumptions. The whole movie is based on the assumption that a mammoth froze instantly causing it to die without even swallowing the food in it's mouth, forgetting the fact that the food in its mouth was a summer plant, that mammoths are a herd animal (so where is the rest of the herd?). The mammoth died of hypothermia from breaking through the vegetative cover of a bog where it had to keep it's mouth shut and breathe through it's trunk therefore not able to swallow the food in it's mouth, it couldn't get out and it's heart gave out from the cold.
There is a line in the movie concerning the AMOC, in which the lead character states that the AMOC could shut down from all the fresh water coming from Greenland's ice sheets melting and it's consequences in front of a group of climate scientists and the one lady states "Yes we all know this", that line should be "Yes we all assume this", no one's seen this and they all believe the computer models that they themselves entered the data.
The one final thing that many don't think about is the scene of NYC being flooded by a 25 foot tsunami and the water stays there, they had to put that into the movie because that is a scientific and historical fact that the sea levels were higher by about that much before every ice age, the problem with the movie is that that sea level rise is the whole planet not just NYC and the movie doesn't explain how that is possible with everything turning colder before the ice sheets of Greenland melt to cause that sea level rise.
Screenwriters and reality are often at odds.
Notwithstanding your excellent explanation of scientific reality rather than conjecture of a dystopian future, I believe that eventually life on earth, save for perhaps the hardiest of creatures such as cockroaches, is doomed - how long it will take matters not, and I put the blame on only one of the seven sins (and previously I posted an article about it) and that is 'greed'. I'll let you ponder why I believe that.
I don’t see it quite that way, yes there will be a time when life ceases to exist on earth, but the purpose of life on earth is to escape from earth and spread out into space and other planets and we are the means of getting that done. Capitalism/greed is a way to achieve this goal and doing away with co2 emissions will not speed us on our way but slow us down. Co2 is now becoming an excuse to limit our advancement and control capitalism and eventually ending it by making us believe we are somehow saving ourselves from ourselves.
An interesting theory.
If human population and lifestyles destroy our environment to the point where our species goes extinct, then so be it. The millions of haves are not going to quit having and the billions of have nots are not going to quit trying to have.
I only say that regarding myself.
Overpopulation is the problem
Population is naturally declining in industrialized nations.
Educated women, who have access to birth control, are choosing to only have the number of children they want and can support - which often means 1 or 2.
The robber barons, who are demanding an increase in population, are only concerned about increasing their own personal wealth and power. This is why the US has open borders to increase our population of wage slaves and consumers.
Overpopulation is just one of the problems.
Ignorance, malfeasance and corporate profiteering play a role.
The fossil fuel industry is hard for We the People to fight.
Bring ALEC into the mix and fighting them is suicide (literally).
It was making Venezuela rich until socialism and mismanagement said no.
I'm reminded of the opening of the original Superman movie, when Superman's dad, Jor-El I think his name was, tries to warn the government of Krypton that the planet was going to explode in a few weeks , or days, or whatever it was ( I havent seen the movie in a couple decades). The leaders told him he was wrong and pretty much ridiculed him.
As it turned out, he was smarter than they were and understood the situation better and had better information and a better theory. And Krypton did go kaboom on schedule.
We have a lot of non fiction Jor- Els warning us about coming climate disaster, but unlike little Superman who went to another world (earth) in a little space ship, we have nowhere to go.
In the movie When Worlds Collide they did build a kind of Ark spaceship in which to go, but we are too far away from anywhere where we could survive unless we were to perfect the science of cryology to preserve the living as in the movie Passengers rather than only to preserve the dead, otherwise IMO humanity is 100% doomed.
It's inevitable.
Thoughtful (and short) article at the link below. Good comments follow the article.
Thanks for posting that very interesting theoretical analysis and prediction. It speaks of the danger of volcanoes. When I was teaching high school English there was a chapter in the text that spoke of the Yellowstone super-volcano. It wasn't until later that I first watched the movie 2012 wherein that volcano erupted, but the movie was more optimistic than the textbook, because such an eruption could cause the prevention of crops growing anywhere and starvation would result, rather than a few massive "arks" reaching a sunny South African shore.
"Overpopulation is the problem"
True that. And most of the global population will not willingly give up their standard of living or decimate their economies in a futile attempt to reverse a warming era. After all, we are in an interglacial period following the last major Ice Age
Here in Denver, one brutal storm last year saw the temperature go from +50 to -22 in 24 hours, with a 40 degree drop in one hour. Right now, at 9:00 AM local time it is 45 degrees and overcast. No snow yet, but first frost is likely in the next week or two.
The climate cultists have adopted a new word, "extreme", to label many weather events these days. Such language helps to stir up the hysteria that the world as we know it is coming to an end. 10 years ago Colorado had a rain event that was similar to New York's. In both cases the intensity and duration of the rain was caused by tropical storm remnants that stalled out and became almost stationary.
To not publish is to perish in scientific circles and woe to those who go against the group think that seems to define climate scientists.
The Fake Climate Consensus (townhall.com)
Science is real. Climate reporters apparently just don't bother to read it (msn.com)
Climate Scientist Blows The Lid Off The ‘Manufactured Consensus’ (msn.com)
Interglacial - Wikipedia
Yep, and todays climate cultist will pull the alarm on events like that.
Reality is, extremes like that while rare, have happened regularly since I’ve been on this rock. At least they have here in Northern Michigan. Large double digit temperature swings, in a 24 hour period, are nothing new and don’t seem better or worse. Not here anyways.
The point is that they are getting less rare and more extreme.
Per the IPCC, the only increase in "extreme events" that they have any confidence are related to global warming are heat waves. That's it.
All the rest are within natural variability.
Super.
Provide links that prove that assertion. And since I know you value accuracy, please make sure they specifically addresses your assertion with hard data. Specifically.
Awesome …..
It's called GLOBAL for a reason.
Your backyard and limited denier perspective don't count.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Big reader of the IPCC reports are you?
As Earth’s climate changes, it is impacting extreme weather across the planet. Record-breaking heat waves on land and in the ocean, drenching rains, severe floods, years-long droughts, extreme wildfires, and widespread flooding during hurricanes are all becoming more frequent and more intense.
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Akin to election denier…when the facts mean nothing, so does anything that follows.
Blah, blah, blah ….. still waiting for links to prove your assertion. Otherwise, your assertion is bullshit.
Nothing specific about the question at hand
Fail!
Just following the liberal model of hyperbole/exaggeration on all things.
Learn to deal with it.
Google is your friend.
I am not your god-damned research assistant!
You wouldn't believe NASA or USGS anyway.
Science deniers will always remain ignorant.
The Feds disagree:
Google’s search engine dominance is at the center of the biggest US antitrust trial in decades
Poor attempt at deflection.
Go straight to the NASA, NOAA sites then.
Climate change deniers just go straight to Fox.
That's not proof, just another unsupported assertion.
Thinking people back up their claims.
Goobers don’t
Only ignorant fascist assholes with no education deny the best scientists on the face of the planet.
I could vote up your comment if the word 'fascist' had not appeared and you did not limit denial to those with no education.
Denial of climate change science is, IMO, a result of confirmation bias and stubborn ignorance.
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What on earth are you talking about?
We are in complete agreement on this topic.
Lol …. Hilarious!
Do you not understand that I was NOT criticizing cjcold in any way??
So there was no criticism from a friend, it was actually support for his argument.
I cannot comprehend how he could possibly think I was criticizing him. What is your excuse for your misread?
Oops didn't mean that for you. Please forgive my son for hitting the wrong buttons. Going to have to start locking my computer when I'm away from it.
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My comment agreed with him that it is absurd to categorically deny the best scientists on the face of the planet who spend their lives studying the climate based on hard evidence such as the dramatically rising CO2 level and unusual warming of the planet.
I disagreed that this stubborn ignorance was limited to "ignorant fascist assholes with no education".
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I will clear it up for you. There are some here who routinely misrepresent what I, et. al. write.
When I spend time explaining one of my comments, it usually is because I am dealing with someone who seems to be intentionally attempting to misrepresent me with a strawman argument or some other intellectually dishonest tactic.
Your comment did not reflect that you understood what I wrote.
The CO2 level in our atmosphere (440ppm) is the highest in 800,000 years and it has risen (dramatically) from 280ppm to 440ppm in the last 200 years (a geologic instant). We can measure the effects from this such as a steady acceleration of global temperature that has now moved 1.1°C in 100 years and is on target to be up to 2°C by 2050.
As with the stock market, there will be fluctuations along the path, but the trend is undeniable.
Only a paid fossil fuel industry denier could deny this reality.
Not true. There are all sorts of people who deal with climate change and AGW with what, to me, seems like stubborn ignorance. Further, this apparent stubborn ignorance seems (to me) to be tied heavily to ideology and party.
Some (many it would seem) have accepted the talking points from 'trusted sources' and blindly continue with their reckless beliefs regardless of anything to the contrary.
Have spent half of my life studying AGW.
Pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.
How is it that you became a science denier?
I do not understand what you are talking about. My posts are very much NOT denying the science.
Do you mean to reply to me or someone else?
I was not referring to you as having stubborn ignorance. You are reading my post in a very strange way.
Graphically:
Oops! We humans have screwed the pooch!
At 69, so glad I won't live to see the end of human folly.
One has to wonder what goes on in the mind of someone looking at data like what is depicted in this chart and denies the anthropogenic element of climate change.
Do they just dismiss it as fake?
Fossil fuel industry folk will always deny AGW.
Where do you get the idea that the scientific practice of peer review and verification does not exist with climate science?
And where do you get the idea that their models are not based on hard empirical evidence?
What are you talking about? Seems like you are just making wild claims.
The fact that you call them "cultists" suggests that you are entirely closed to understanding what is happening with our climate.
When you see a chart like this, for example, what is your takeaway?:
The CO 2 level in our atmosphere (440ppm) is the highest in 800,000 years and it has risen (dramatically) from 280ppm to 440ppm in the last 200 years (a geologic instant). We can measure the effects from this such as a steady acceleration of global temperature that has now moved 1.1 °C in 100 years and is on target to be up to 2°C by 2050.
The haves continue to live and travel without even a nod to their contribution to climate change.
Where are the elites sacrificing one aspect of their privileged lives?
In fact, it looks like they expanding their contribution to wasting the Earth's resources and atmosphere wherever it is possible they can make more money.
Why is it the responsibility of the average citizen to live austerely in order to "save" the planet?