Arctic Sea Ice Extent Record Low

The average monthly Arctic sea ice extent for the first half of this year was a record low among all the first halves going back to 1979. Second was 2018, 10,000 km² higher (0.01 Mkm²). At this pace it will lead to an annual low. 

June's SIE was 3.4% below May's. The average month year-to-date (YTD) has been 3.8% lower than last year's values. If either of those continues for the rest of the year they'd make this year a new annual record by about 0.12-0.14 Mkm² respectively. Even if the rest of the months of this year are identical to the corresponding months last year, Arctic SIE would tie 2016 for a record low. 

This seems to have snuck up out of nowhere.

(MA in the label box = moving average)

In other numerology, Antarctic SIE in June was 3rd-lowest in the record, and the year-to-date average is 6th. 

UAH's global lower troposphere temperature for June was the 2nd lowest, after last year's. 

The Hadley Central England Temperature (HadCET) was 5th highest going back to 1659. The year-to-date average monthly temperature is also 5th lowest. Its graph is looking pretty dramatic:

   

The South Pole temperature was 21st highest out of 68 years. The year-to-date average is 13th highest of 69 years. As always things are kind of weird down there:

Europe's Heat Wave

The heat wave in Europe over the last week:

Note: these aren't temperatures but a metric of "conditions." 

The Eiffel Tower was closed yesterday because of the heat. 42.8°C in Portugal (109°F). Mora, Portugal 46.1°C (115°F) yesterday. (That's like Arizona!)

Working outdoors has also been banned during the hottest parts of the day on building sites, roads, and farms until September, in Lombardy.

In Germany, record-breaking temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit could take place on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Hospital admissions rose by 20% in the Tuscany region in Italy, according to local reports.

Link.

I found this image depicting air conditioning around the world. Only 10% in Europe? Or is that just the UK? 17% in Portugal. 19% in Germany. 40-50% in Italy. 

I couldn't find a systematic list of all countries.

BTW under 5% of building in India have A/C. 

I don't have A/C here in Oregon, which is fine with me, I don't like it at all because of the feeling of being cooped up. I prefer to keep the windows open, which is how I grew up, and I use a fan. I keep track of the daily weather where I live, and in the last 12 years (2012-2024) the average maximum daily temperature here is 39.2°C (102.5°F), occurring on average on July 25th. But the average of the last 5 years is 41.2°C (106.2°F).

I survived the great 2021 heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest, which got up to, where I live, 47.2°C (117°F), and I didn't have A/C. Not any permanent damage as far as I'm concerned, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little of something. Uncharacteristically, that maximum occurred on June 28th, showing there was something more going on besides just global warming. 

Wikipedia says:

The heat wave was characterized as a heat dome because of the extreme temperatures and the exceptionally strong ridge centered over the area, whose probability of formation was linked to the effects of climate change by multiple studies.

I think I once read it was the 5th worst heat wave in recorded history, but I can't find that now.

Corrupt US Supreme Court Makes an Unbelievable Decision

Every day now America finds itself in a new nightmare, and today's is something you're expect to see in a truly autocratic country: rights guaranteed by the US Constitution are now effectively subject to the whim of the president. Yes, really, that's what the US Supreme Court ruled today. 

In particular, the SCOTUS case was about birthright citizenship--do individuals born on US soil have the right to be a US citizen? The Constitution unequivocally says yes:

Fourteenth Amendment

Section 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Couldn't be clearer, right?

Not in the eyes of the corrupt US Supreme Court. Today, while not exactly making a decision on this part of the 14th Amendment, they did decide that federal district judges--judges who decide in federal courts all across America--cannot individually decide that a law is unconstitutional or illegal and have that apply to the entire country.

The legality of federal laws can only be decided nationwide by, apparently, the Supreme Court.

This case came up because three federal judges decided that Trump's attempt to end "birthright citizenship" was unconstitutional and ruled his executive order could not go into effect. (Mind you, this was an only an executive order from the President, not even considered by Congress let alone passed, let alone subject to the arduous process for amending the Constitution.) 

Today the Supreme Court decided, 6-3, that federal judges do not have that authority. 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion, said the judiciary does not have “unbridled authority to enforce” the executive’s obligation to follow the law, because doing so would create an “imperial judiciary.” (NY Times, free link)

Instead they decided that the only way to challenge an executive order is if a state challenges it, or a class action lawsuit is filed in a federal court. 

So a woman, undocumented or not, who has a child on US soil and has the child denied US citizenship--which lots of medieval states in the US are very wont to do--has almost no recourse, especially if she is poor. 

The same presumably goes for all other constitutional rights--due process, free speech, gun rights, separation of church and state, free practice of religion, right to peaceably assemble, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, right to a speedy trail, the law against slavery, the right to vote, woman's suffrage and more can be denied at the whim of the president, at least temporarily (at most forever).

And look at the monstrosity we have as president. 

To be sure, the SCOTUS didn't explicitly rule on birthright citizenship. Maybe they will take that case up next year, maybe never. But they almost don't have to, because plenty of red (extreme conservative) states will be happy to deny birthright citizenship to brown people. 

In dissent Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote (the full paragraph quoting her is from the NY Times):

Those without resources to sue, Jackson wrote in a separate dissent, are disproportionately “the poor, the uneducated and the unpopular,” and so they will be subject to Trump’s whims. “This is yet another crack in the foundation of the rule of law,” she wrote, “which requires equality and justice in its application.” It creates two zones, she said: one where the rule of law prevails, and one “zone of lawlessness” where “all bets are off.” And that’s anathema to the universality of law that the Constitution’s authors envisioned. 

Already the Supreme Court ruled that the president is subject to immunity for his actions. Now he can do whatever he wants with little-to-no recourse by anyone. Jesus Christ. 

"Where do climate models go for their apology?"

Climatologist Andrew Dessler on Bluesky:

Lewis's and Curry's predicted values for TCR (1.33°C) and ECS (1.64°C) are spectacularly wrong. 

TCR = Transient Climate Response = global temperature change at the time when CO2 has doubled.

ECS = Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity = global temperature change when the climate has stabilized after CO2 has doubled, viz. after short-term and long-term feedbacks have played out.

We're at CO2 = 430 parts per million, so CO2 is up 54% since its pre-industrial value of 280 ppm. Nowhere close to doubling. Global warming in their year of 2014 was (GISS) 0.75°C and in 2024 was 1.24°C. 2024 was an exceptional year so let's take the average of the five years up through 2024; that's 1.05°C. +0.29°C in just about 7.5 years. 

At that rate their TCR will be attained in another about 7-10 years. That's a very bad prediction. It was just obviously not at all likely. I'm surprised it passed peer review. It could be wrong by a factor of 2 at the rate temperature has increased since 1975 (1.30 C). That's a bit of a cherry pick since for whatever reasons (clean air regulations on cars? higher emissions?) temperature took off around 1975

 

I think it's hard to grasp how massive a 0.20-0.25°C/decade increase is. It's starting to seem normal in a sense, but it's anything but. 

Former Fetus

Arctic Sea Ice Currently at a Record Low

Look, Another Healthy Country!

The Austrian government on Wednesday proposed a bundle of new laws on private gun ownership, eight days after the deadliest school shooting in the country’s history.

The measures include raising the minimum age to own some firearms, including handguns, to 25 from 21, strengthening the mandatory psychological test that must be passed to buy a gun and instituting a four-week waiting period between the purchase and the delivery of a first weapon.

- The New York Times, yesterday (free link)

Here in the US not enough Americans care enough about little kids being murdered by big guns to do anything of the sort. It's often said that that was clearly the country's decision after the Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012, killed by a crazy 20-year old who killed 26 people, mostly six- and seven-year olds, and six teachers. (Not sure if that includes his mother, who he shot and killed before leaving for the school.) 

The country simply shrugged its shoulders and said, "there's just no way to stop this."

 
There is one particular image about that event I can't get out of my head. About a dozen students and one (I think) teacher went into a closet to hide. It was 3 ft by 4 ft. The shooter came and opened the door and rapidly fired with one of his five guns. Into the closet, packed full of people. One child survived, somehow. Can you imagine. Can you even imagine being the police official who found this scene. Can you imagine being the child who survived. Can you imagine the parents who have to think about this every day since.

 
Last year there were 39 school shootings in the US that injured or killed someone. Yet not one new law on gun restrictions, as far as I know. We just have to put up with it. My sister had to run out of a store at the mall when a shooting began. I've personally had a neighbor point a rifle at me. (I called the police and he was arrested, lost his & his wife's apartment, but I was never able to ascertain if he had been convicted of anything.) 

We're just supposed to live with it. This is a very sick country. 

New Record for Ocean Heat Content

Ocean heat content reached a record high in the first quarter of this year:

data: 0-700 m, 0-2000 m

The quarterly changes were mostly negative for the three quarters before this one, but this time increased by large amounts: 3.1 W/m2 for the 0-700 m region and 3.0 W/m2 for the 0-2000 m region.

Over four quarters the increases were 0.2 W/m2 and 07 W/m2, respectively.

1.5°C by 2035

Note 6/10 2:20 pm: Oops, this is the graph is for Mays. I've put the graph for all months down at the bottom. Sorry.

Here's a graph Berkeley Earth presented today:

The trend, a 30-year LOESS smooth regression (the thin red line), is a little over 1.3°C right now. Their trend is 0.20°C/decade, perhaps (paper coming out next month) 0.25°C/decade. 

That means the trend line will hit 1.5°C in about a decade. The 2023-2024 warming spike will then appear relatively cool from that perspective.

0.25°C/decade is a monstrous value. (Even 0.20°C/decade is.) It's hard to get one's head around it, it's such a rapid increase. It's changing the future incredibly fast. It's like the last ice age global maximum went to the Holocene in only 240 years, instead of the actual 12,000 years it actually took. Warming now is 50 times faster. 

It's just worthless now to talk about limiting warming to 1.5°C. It will not happen, hard stop. At that point 2.0°C will be here by 2055-2060, looking also a done deal. It's tragic, and absolute failure of world leadership. The worst failure in human history.

Extremely discouraging. 

==

Added, as noted at the beginning of the post: Average global temperatures for all months:

Americans to Pay More to Cause Even More Climate Change

I don't even know what to call this--a reverse carbon tax?--but it's laughable and incredibly stupid. (But what isn't from Trump?) From the NY Times (free link): 

A 63-year-old coal-fired power plant was scheduled to permanently close its doors in Michigan on June 1. So was an oil- and gas-powered plant that was built in the 1960s in Pennsylvania.

But at the last minute, the Trump administration ordered both to stay open. The orders came as it pursues a far-reaching plan to boost fossil fuels, including coal, by declaring a national “energy emergency.”

The grid operators in Michigan and Pennsylvania said they hadn’t asked for the orders and hadn’t planned on using the plants this summer.

The costs to keep the plants open, which could total tens of millions of dollars, are expected to fall on consumers. Experts have said there’s little evidence of a national energy emergency, and 15 states have sued to challenge President Trump’s declaration, which was issued the day he took office.

Of course there is no "energy emergency" in the US. (Trump is declaring emergencies everywhere, like with immigration, so he can use special powers given to the President is such situations.) It produces more oil than it consumes, oil exports are growing and there is certainly no shortage of natural gas.

But Trump hates clean energy, because he's stuck in a 1970s mentality and maybe because he couldn't stop a wind turbine being installed in view of his golf course in Scotland. 

And he did ask the fossil fuel industry for a billion dollars for his last campaign. Presumably this is the quid of that quid pro quo.

America is already one of the largest CO2 emitters per capita, but apparently that's not good enough, Americans will have to pay more to emit more and cause more climate change. 

It's really shocking how fast the US is declining.

2nd-warmest May Globally

Both Copernicus and Berkeley Earth reported today that May 2025 was the 2nd warmest May -- in BE's case, since 1850.

BE had a Monthly Press Briefing Zoom call this morning with more details:

• May 2025 was 1.33 C above the 1850-1900 average
• that's 0.15 C below April 2025 and the first month in 12 months below 1.5 C
• 2nd warmest Spring (Mar-May)
• 2nd warmest spring (March-May)
• 5th warmest May for land temperatures
• Third warmest May for ocean temps
• notable: the marine heat wave around UK, probably due to short-term meteorological conditions
• 4% of the Earth’s surface had a locally record warm May average
• 1% of land surfaces and 5% of ocean surfaces
• India cool in May; record high rainfall
• A city in central India had coolest May in 100 yrs
• Land only anomaly – +1.62 C above 1850-1900 avg
• Ocean third warmest for May, +0.99 C
• Probabilities for 2025:
• 5% chance 2025 could be the warmest yar
• 50% chance 2025 is 2nd warmest year on record
• 43% chance to be above 1.5 C
• Long-term trend presently reads 1.4 C, rising at 0.2 C/decade.
• 2023/2024 warming spike likely to be the average year a decade from now
• Paper coming out next month: rate of rise has increased to 0.25 C/decade
• Likely due to declining aerosols

HadCET: Warmest Meteorological Spring

Meteorological spring is March to May. (*In the Northern Hemisphere.)

The Hadley Central England Temperature (HadCET) just had the warmest meteorological spring in its 367-year history.

(OK, it's really only 303 years, because some of those early years had temperatures taken inside buildings, etc., not in a systematic fashion, but can you really blame them for trying?)

But still, 303 years. That's pretty impressive.

And this year's March-April-May average saw the warmest temperature anomaly in that little region, 2.26°C, which was the same as last year's value, exactly.

Baseline is 1901-2000.

Still, this year's year-to-date average only ranks 11th highest in all those years.

But things are cooking.

The 10-year moving average for HadCET is at a maximum, 0.52°C higher than 10 years (120 months) ago.

The 50-year linear trend is an impressive 0.31°C/decade.

But it's just a little region in England.

Some Retractions and Clarifications

So I wrote a few things the other day that were pretty dumb and which I don't really think. 

What can I say? I was having a bad day. A very bad day. It happens, more than I'd like. I've been dealing with bad days (and bad weeks and bad months) since I was 17 years old. Depression is an illness and one of the worst illnesses, I think. I've often wished I had cancer instead, because then you get to die from the disease and it's over, or you are (usually) cured and get over it and move on. Not always, I know. 

Psychiatrists and doctors and therapists like to say depression is curable, like a doctor I recently read in the NY Times. But I've never found that cure. There is such a thing as treatment-resistant depression. Or maybe, perhaps, and I'm not kidding, I'm just a weak person. It's a real possibility. In any case, nothing else has had such a large impact on my being in the last 50 years. 

On May 24th I wrote:

...but I'm also not that interested in climate change anymore. I was only ever interested in the science, not the politics, but as the science seems more and more established it's falling out of my Overton Window. I'm not interested in every nuance of the AMOC ocean stream and polar ice and carbon capture, and certainly not whether the world will seriously address the problem.

It's true that the US politics are a mess, and I don't want to write about every stupid thing Trump says or all the other deniers who, to me, seem less relevant every year. Of course, since Trump is cutting science in about every way possible, including climate science and meteorology, deniers like Anthony Watts probably think they are winning, or have won. 

But that just speaks to their ideological focus and lack of scientific understanding. It's always been clear that Watts knows little science and was more interested in traffic and money than in publishing the truth.... Of course, no professional scientist or expert thinks climate change is done, and no sane person would believe the usual denier suspects than the professionals. They will have to answer to someone, someday, though surely are too arrogant and full of themselves to do so honestly.

We have a lot of climate change still ahead of us, probably enough to get us to at least 3°C. 

One-half of an ice ages' worth of warming. My God.

While I might not be interested in every up and down of the AMOC's decline, I know the trends and they are extremely worrisome. Few people outside the climate community and smart readers (like you) understand this.

I also wrote:

I hope he [Trump] brings about the collapse of the US as soon as possible--it's been coming on for 50 years, and America certainly deserves it--so US regions can secede and start again. But I don't care about that either--I'm not married, I don't have any kids, so I don't have any stake in the future.

Well, to be honest, I do hope the US collapses soon. It surely won't be pleasant, but it is necessary, I believe--not just for Americans, but for the entire world. The US is now 1/3rd of a billion people, too big to form a true democracy, even a democratic republic. Our representatives don't give a shit what their constituents think, there are simply too many of them. I've read that they all spend a significant fraction of their time simply on the phone calling past donors for more donations. I don't doubt it. Citizen's United, and all that, set the ultimate destruction of the US in place. Yet I don't think it was incorrectly decided. This was a fundamental flaw in the Constitution (speech=money), which I don't see any way out of. If newspapers get free speech, why doesn't anyone else get it in a similar fashion?

The US needs to break up to return government closer to the people. 

Trump -- probably the devil incarnate (if I believed in supernatural beings like the devil) -- isn't fixing anything, and only accelerating our downfall.

Yes, I'm not married, never will be, don't have any children and never will. I have a niece and nephew whom I love, but they are pretty intelligent and come from a great home and have (and will have more) a ton of advantages. They'll get by, even if maybe they need to leave the US to do it. But what am I to do? I can hope the future is amenable to them, but there's nothing I can do to make it so, besides loving them. But now that they're no longer children, they need me less, and frankly not at all anymore.... 

None of us can do anything else for them. That's the huge tragedy of all this. It's long since been out of our hands. And, what did we really do wrong? 

Again, the country (and the world) is too big.

More and more it seems futile to me to hope for a better future when there's nothing I can do to make it so. Not really. And I'm getting old and tired and sore and am all stoved up and just don't have the energy I used to. Not that my energy has ever done any good anyway. I really don't see that I've accomplished anything in my life. I didn't even pass my genes on--intelligent genes, even though they carry depression.

This is what I felt I needed to say about that post, now over a week old. It's embarrassing, and I hope you will forgive me.

Cheers.

Excellent Anthropology YouTube Channel: @stefanmilo

I recently discovered a great YouTube channel called @stefanmilo about issues in anthropology, and I've been watching its back issues. It's by Stefan Milosavljevich, who, it turns out, lives in Portland, Oregon, just an hour north of me. He's interesting, he's a very good video producer, level-headed and enticingly curious, has a global perspective, and he asks real scientists for interviews. He writes:

"To ensure I'm not spewing bollocks into the void I follow these golden rules: 

Use only academic sources for my videos

Share those sources with the viewers

Make it obvious when I'm just giving my personal opinion

No Atlantis, No Aliens, No Nonsense."

It's very engaging and has really open my eyes to world of anthropology (in a way a 6-9 pm college course never did) and the modern issues within it. One of the best channels I've found in awhile.

from E B White

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."

E. B. White

from the 2016 book The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen, which I'm reading now and gives a lot to think about.

E.B. White was a prominent US writer last century who wrote a great deal for The New Yorker magazine, and who wrote, among many other things, the famous children's book Charlotte's Web.