Both of Earth's Poles Blazing Hot*

*relatively

Both of the Earth's polar regions had a heatwave over the weekend: +30°C in the north and +40°C in Antarctica. Here's a telling graph from Berkeley Earth showing the spike in eastern Antartica:

🔥Heat wave in Antarctica, +38 °C (+68 °F) above normal.

That's not an error, or a typo.

The remote research station at Dome C recorded a temperature nearly 40 °C above normal for this time of year, beating the previous March record by a startling 20 °C. pic.twitter.com/HkzydQyQ7A

— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) March 21, 2022

It beat the old March record by 20°C. That just seems unreal... Here's an explanation:

"... [T]he warm conditions over Antarctica were spurred by an extreme atmospheric river, or a narrow corridor of water vapor in the sky, on its east coast. ... The excessive moisture from the atmospheric river was able to retain large amounts of heat..."

Of course it's never as simple as just "global warming," but it seems hard to imagine global warming isn't somehow behind it. We'll see what attribution studies say....