August Temperatures, Brought to You by NASA GISS

August temperature anomalies from GISS are the highest in four months:

Global: 3rd-highest for the month of August, after 2024 and 2023

Northern Hemisphere: 3rd-highest after 2023 and 2024

Southern Hemisphere: 2nd-highest after 2024

Land-only: 2nd-highest after 2024.

The Southern Hemisphere could see a record high this year: the record was last year's 0.91°C, whereas through August its record is 0.90°C.

IRI says a La Nina is expected to develop this fall. What's going on with ENSO? It seems especially agitated lately.

Posting This Just On Accounta I Like It

 Iggy Pop and the Teddybears, Punkrocker:

Record Low for August Average Arctic Sea Ice Thickness

average thickness = sea_ice_volume_(PIOMAS)/sea_ice_area_(NSIDC).

A record low for August:

The linear regression trend is -3.0 cm/yr (for Augusts).

PS: Sorry, I couldn't get the chart to embed from Datawrapper, so had to cut-and-paste. So the links in the chart don't work.

Lately in America

Lately in America:

• There was a high school shooting in Colorado today -- three high students wounded (includes the shooter.)
• Prominent conservative podcaster and executive of a conservative activist organization was shot in the neck [WARNING: GRAPHIC] in Utah while speaking to a large group outdoors, and died. After a chase of a few hours the suspect is now in custody. 
• This activist, Charlie Kirk, once said that these kind of events are "unfortunately" worth it in order to keep the precious Second Amendment. 
• I think they really think a country where everyone is armed and carrying will be a much safer society.
• The US Secretary of the Interior recently said that an underwater “swarm drone attack” was part of the reason for the Trump administration’s decision to halt construction on the 704-megawatt (MW) Revolution Wind offshore wind farm, which had already reached 80 per cent completion. The Secretary told a CNN journalist there are “concerns about radar relative to undersea” and, in particular “undersea drones”.
• Apparently it was just discovered that Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" that funds everything, passed last month, "finds that President Trump’s flagship legislation will grant $40 billion in new subsidies to the oil and gas industry over the next decade."

That's enough for today. This country is really getting to be fracking exhausting.

--

Added 6:30 pm: Just to be clear, I am not trying to minimize Charlie Kirk's assassination. I am not implying he deserved it. Far from it. This was a horrible thing to happen--the guy has a family with children--and it's a terrible thing and you have to feel for the family. It's also a horrible thing because political violence seems to be rising in the US: Trump was almost assassinated last summer, two Democratic state representatives were killed just 6 weeks ago, and now this. And of course school shootings seemingly every other day. We are headed downhill and the slope is getting more negative.

The Lack of Peer Review for the DOE Climate Report

A clever depiction of the peer review process:

This if from The Climate Brink blog, where Andew Dessler addresses the lack of peer review for the DOE climate "assessment." Well-worth reading.

Of course, that assessment won't go anywhere. Like, nowhere. I truly feel sorry for its authors. 

Foreman Says These Jobs Are Going Boys, and They Ain't Coming Back*

* lyrics from Bruce

This is not a good sign: jobs available per unemployed Americans has decreased from 2 three years ago to a just under one now:

 

And that's with the arrest of about 60,000 immigrants this year. Those are supposed to be good jobs now opened up to Americans, like picking lettuce and slaughtering animals </s>. 

Or does it (also) mean jobs are disappearing due to AI?

Not looking good.

Updates on Sea Ice Extent at Both Poles

Here is the latest graph of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents--specifically the 12-month moving averages, in millions of square kilometers. 

Projecting the 2025 final annual numbers based on the monthly anomalies year-to-date, 2025 is 4th-lowest since 1978, but only 0.18 Mkm2 higher than the lowest year of 2020. That's 1.8% higher. It's not inconceivable that Arctic SIE extent will set a record low soon for the 12-mth moving average. Except this August suddenly jumped to 5% higher than 12 months ago, when the monthly SIEs had been lower than last year's all months up to now. Maybe (?) it's the La Nina that seems to be trying to form?

Maybe useless numerics, but I find them fun.

Asimov on the American Cult of Ignorance

A comment on a NY Times op-ed from past directors of the US CDC (Center for Disease Control), which the dangerous idiot Robert F Kennedy Jr is decimating to enact his anti-vaccine, anti-science, anti-expert agenda:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance," Newsweek, January 21, 1980.

It honestly seems like Kennedy is trying to kill Americans--he's already decided that Americans can't get a COVID shot unless they have special circumstances and a prescription from their doctor. He's cut research left, right and center. (Links in the essay.) And Trump is letting him--really, too ignorant to stop him. Someone else is pulling the strings attached to Trump anyway, likely the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 managers. They seem to be trying to destroy the country as a whole, not just the health of Americans.

Something very strange is going on behind the scenes.

This Photo is From Washington DC This Past Week

What other countries does this remind you of?

"...priests of the industrial system"

“Psychologists are in danger of becoming the priests of the industrial system.”

— Erich Fromm

Very perspicacious. I would say this is exactly what happened.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gizem Doğan (@gizem.digital)

Back-to-School Notebooks

 I just can't help myself this time of year when notebooks are 3 for $1.

Peak Oil Demand Again, by the Numbers

I couldn't resist analyzing the numbers in the peak oil demand projection chart in the previous post.

The peaks are at about 200 qBTU (quadrillion BTU). Silly, but that's the unit they use. That's about 2e20 joules. 200 exajoules. Used over a year, that comes to an average of 7 terawatts (TW). 

The last number I've seen for world energy consumption is about 20 TW. So about 35% of world energy consumption comes from driving ICE* cars (and sure, a little from heating). I don't know why but that's not hard to believe.

* Internal combustion heating

Trump is Angry Oil Demand Might Peak

Trump, of course, is angry that many groups are predicting global oil demand will peak by 2030. Or maybe has already. That's not what the oil companies bought him for!

From the NY Times:

Trump's administration is so angry at this they are threatening to leave the IEA (International Energy Agency, where the US gives 14% of their funding. That will show them not to dare make a projection Trump's purchasers don't like. Even though BP is making such a projection, and ExxonMobil is saying oil demand will flatten.