The surge in 2023 and then 2024 really is extraordinary. For the month:
and for their entire record:
Here's BE's prediction for the year: well above 1.5°C.
2025 is going to be very interesting. Will its temperature anomaly stay aloft like 2023 and 2024, or will it decline three- or four-tenths of a degree Celsius? It will likely depend on the ENSO-state, but the last ENSO prediction I saw had significantly lower probabilities of a La Nina emerging by September....
Two days ago the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University issued its latest November 2024 ENSO Forecast (emphasis mine):
According to the ENSO forecast issued by the IRI in November 2024, ENSO-neutral conditions are favored (52% probability) for Nov-Jan 2025, while the likelihood of La Niña emerging has decreased to 48%. For December-February 2025, the probability of sea surface temperatures reaching La Niña thresholds is 50%, while the likelihood of ENSO-neutral conditions is estimated at 49%. From Jan-Mar 2025 to the end of the forecast period in Jul-Sep 2025, ENSO-neutral conditions are favored, with probabilities ranging from 51% to 77%, while La Niña probabilities during the same period are estimated between 18% and 42%. The probability of El Niño remains very low throughout the forecast period, staying below 10% until April-June 2025, and gradually increasing to 24% by Jul-Sep 2025....
More than 30% of the global land area now sees monthly temperatures above the two-sigma statistical level in any given year, up from about 1% in 1950. (Robinson+Nature 2021, Figure 1a.)
"'We're concerned': Walmart, Lowe's among latest companies to warn Trump tariffs could raise product costs" (Yahoo Finance).
I just checked something on a weekly spreadsheet I keep. During Trump's first term, the average real price of gasoline in the US was $3.10. That was the nominal price adjusted weekly for inflation, using the interpolated Consumer Price Index. By now that's $3.724 in this week's dollars. The average real price under Biden so far is...$3.718.
"Early in the pandemic, people living near oil and gas wells experienced higher rates of COVID-19 and related mortality compared with those with no exposure to well pollution." (Eos)
In communities within 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) of an actively producing well, COVID-19 cases were 34% higher and mortality rates were 55% higher in the first 4 months of the pandemic. Though the results did not show a significant association between well production and COVID-19 cases over the entire year, mortality rates were higher in the areas with the highest production.
"Few Minerals Are Named for Women - New research shows that less than 3% of all minerals are named after women, and progress has stalled since 1985." (Eos)
Emproto and his colleagues found that of the 2,738 minerals named for people, those named for men outnumbered those named for women by more than 15 to 1....
Because the number of women entering the geosciences has almost doubled since 1985, the group expected the number of minerals named after women to have also risen steadily. However, they saw that the increase in the rate that minerals were being named after women slowed significantly after around 1985. In the years since, women’s representation has plateaued at about 10% for new mineral namesakes each year....
Boulton said she suspects this effect might be related to fewer women being afforded positions in which they are more likely to have minerals named after them. Although most mineral eponyms were named for scientists, no minerals were named after graduate students and, on average, people were 60 years old when they had a mineral named for them. “Even now, it’s much harder for women to become senior scientists and to stay senior scientists,” she said....
According to the study’s findings, naming trends are variable worldwide. For example, Russian women account for about 43% of all women honored with mineral names, despite Russians constituting less than 15% of all mineral namesakes. Americans account for 16% of minerals named after women.
Emproto said that the large representation of Russian women likely reflects the Soviet Union’s emphasis on women’s participation in sciences."
Projections for the annual global temperature anomaly from six different groups, via Zeke Hausfather at Skeptical Science. All will be the warmest year in their data record. Doubt it will make any difference to the deniers.
October's temperature anomaly, relative to 1850-1990, from Copernicus:
For annual temperatures. 2024 is through October; year-to-date anomaly=1.59°C. This will likely be the first year the annual temperature is above 1.5°C. (Last year it was 1.48°C.) Nov24 and Dec24 have to average 1.06°C or higher for the year to be 1.5°C. Seems very likely.
I wish they wouldn't color the tops (halfway through and higher) with darker orange, bordering on red; it biases the view. Just use one solid color and let us draw our own conclusions.
I'm thinking that the best way to gauge the presidential election in real time might by following the betting markets. After all, these traders are buying and selling in real time based on whatever scraps of information (or rumors or gossip or misinformation) they can find. These markets were skewed for the last few weeks because some big buyers ("whales") were buying a lot of Trump shares, raising the price dramatically (and, some think, giving Trump another excuse to dispute the election). But now that it's push-come-to-shove that should be over and they're looking to make money based on reality and the whatever "information" is available to them.
With that, here's how the PredictIt Presidential Market has been going today. Trump is up, but the difference is now trending down.
Of course, the site has their own graph which is updated in real time:
Here is longer audio of the Trump "grab her by the pussy." I've never heard this before, from the beginning.
Yes, people do lots of things for love & sex. Not all are the proudest moment of our lives. But most of us don't assault people. And who the F brags about it like this if they do?? And to the media, of all places.
Anyway I feel I have to post this because I've never heard it before. It's upsetting young Gen Z people who are voting for the first time but never knew this happened....as it should.
What woman or Christian could vote for this piece of shit? Or any man who cares about women? I just don't get it. I don't understand what's happening in that half of America.
The other day I noticed that the level (elevation) of Lake Powell in the US changed by 0.01 ft:
I thought it would be fun to see how much water is in the 0.01 ft (= 3 mm). Subtracting the contents gives
785 acre-feet
= 970,000 m3
= 0.97 Mm3
= 260 M gallons
= 968 ML.
≈ 1 billion liters
where L=liter. (using little L -- "l" -- for liter can get confusing).
So a water rise of 3 millimeters is about a billion liters of water.
(I assumed vertical edges on the lake, so I can approximate the rise as a being in a box with nice vertical edges. But probably not a good assumption for more than that.)
PS: It's Excel's fault if I made any calculation errors. It always is.
The US has done much better after getting out of the Trump depression than most other countries:
Yes, Trump and his stupidity are responsible for the 1Q20 to 3Q20. Biden wasn't even elected until 4Q20 and didn't take office until 1Q21.
It's all on Trump. His MAGA supporters really are too stupid to understand this. Simple data and they can't understand it. Or how well the Biden economy has done post 1Q21 when he was sworn in.
Shear stupidity, nothing but, is going to drive a stake into the heart of America. Just watch. It's already happening. Stupid people who just can't think.
Maybe we deserve it. Probably, This country is a complete mess.
A regional public health department in Idaho has outright banned COVID-19 jabs, the Associated Press reported Friday. The Southwest District Health Department board, which governs six counties along the Idaho-Oregon border, voted 4-3 against the recommendations of the district’s medical director, Dr. Perry Jansen. “Our request of the board is that we would be able to carry and offer those [vaccines], recognizing that we always have these discussions of risks and benefits,” Jansen said at the meeting last month. “This is not a blind, everybody-gets-a-shot approach. This is a thoughtful approach.” The ban appears to be the first such instance of a U.S. governmental body blocking inoculations, the AP noted.
If I'm reading this correctly, a local state clinic in the state of Idaho will no longer vaccinate people against COVID.
Because they can't understand the difference between science and conspiracies. This is medieval.
I saw a little cartoon a few years ago. A woman in it says, "You can't fix stupid." A COVID virus replies to her, "I can fix stupid."
This is a little old, but here's a map of Canada divided into four areas of equal populations, about 8.6 million each. (Canada's total population in 2024 is 41.0 million.) About the same as Virginia in the US.... It's almost like Canadians want to be as far south (warm) as possible, given their national border. Except for the yellow Canadians. Probably like Alaskans... Anyway, I think Canada has about the right-size population for a decent country--not too many, not too few. Maybe a bit too many though.
Nota bene: But Canadians aren't weird! I've never met a Canadian who wasn't a nice person. (Traveled there a lot for work in 1993-94.)
“Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the 'adjustment' of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society.”
There's too much climate news to keep track of anymore, but here are a few recent items I've come across:
Students are now required to take a course in climate change in order to graduate from the University of California at San Diego. Forty different versions that meet the requirement will be offered. The article says, "...at least 30% of a course's content must be related to climate, and the class must address two of these areas: scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies, and project-based learning." I'd choose scientific foundations and mitigation strategies, but that's just for me. Irrelevant fact: I took Introduction to Statistics from the psychology department to fulfill my college's social science requirement. I knew most of it from high school. It wasn't a good choice, in retrospect, as I took very few "soft" courses in college; it was almost all math & physics
The Independent: "...hurricanes as intense as Helene, which were once expected to occur every 130 years, are now likely to happen every 53 years – about 2.5 times more frequently."
"A separate analysis of Helene last week by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists determined that the climate crisis caused 50 per cent more rainfall in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, and that observed rainfall was “made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming."
UniverseToday.com: Advanced Civilizations Will Overheat Their Planets Within 1,000 Years
"Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. Depending on the extent of temperature increases, the impact on Earth’s habitability could be catastrophic. In a recent study, a team of scientists examined how temperature increases are a long-term issue facing advanced civilizations and not just a matter of fossil fuel consumption. As they argue, rising planetary temperatures could be an inevitable result of the exponential growth of energy consumption. Their findings could have serious implications for astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)."
Mind, this has nothing to do with fossil fuels. It's only about how much power the planet uses--could be solar, could be nuclear (fission or fusion), geothermal, FFs -- because the problem is waste heat from the machines run by our power sources, not the type of power sources.
"They're Made of Meat" is a sci-fi short story by Terry Bisson, written in 1991. It only takes about 4 minutes to read. I thought it was very good, but that's all I'm going to say. You might like it too.
There's also a short audio play that takes about the same amount of time to listen to. Also good, IMO.
"For me, it is an honour. The discovery of element 118 was by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, and it was my colleagues who proposed the name oganesson. My children and grandchildren have been living in the US for decades, but my daughter wrote to me to say that she did not sleep the night she heard because she was crying."
These booster landings still never look real to me, but always like something out of a movie. Maybe that's what progress always looks like.
And whoever came up with the idea of including the cheering crowd of employees on SpaceX videos is a public relations master. Why didn't NASA ever do that? Maybe their skinny neckties were too tight.
Here's another view--a stark view--of Kamala Harris's plunge on the PredictIt Presidential Election market. It shows the difference between the share price of Harris and the share price of Trump:
From +12¢ three weeks ago to -4¢ now. Stunning.
Here's how this market works. Basically, but shares in your candidate. If she/he wins the election, you get $1 per share. If she/he loses, you get nothing.
I really don't understand why. My guess is that she might be getting attention as a lightweight--doing very few interviews with the press, for example. Saying "nothing comes to mind" about what she would have different than Biden. Trump's insanity seems to be normalized by now, everyone thinks he's crazy but MAGA's kind of crazy. Harris has to go at him much harder.
I don't understand this sudden plunge and it's very worrisome. Two weeks ago she was up 56-47. A week ago was up 54-50, and it felt like she was on track to win the election. Now she's down 49-53. I just don't get it.
Of course I don't understand has any person in the US could vote for Trump. This country is a mess and could well get a lot messier.
The Tampa Bay Times calls this "life-threatening."
Millions of Floridians along the Gulf Coast could be told to leave, and officials in Tampa Bay are warning the storm could be far worse than Helene. Sewage systems and power could be out for weeks.
Are there any countries more prone to natural disasters than the US? We have it all -- hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, extreme heat events. Of course, the US is very big and small countries can't be expected to match us in total. What about per unit area? Earthquakes in Turkey? Heat in India? Cold in Russia?
Sorry, but I'm still a little obsessed with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, as I explained a few days ago.
It's such a beautiful region. They mountains are layered, each one higher than the one in front of it. The highest is Clingman's Dome in the Smokey Mountains, 6644 ft in elevation (2025 m). Not high enough to feel a lack of oxygen, but high enough to not feel part of the real world.
You know, I think I'm getting a better understanding of what's going on there from Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts and Insta than any network news programs. It's raw and it's personal without all the pretty people in makeup.
This guy says it's worse than a Middle East war zone and there's no coming back. He and his family are moving:
(Sorry, these shorts aren't embeddable, and sometimes barely connectable. Sometimes you have to unmute the video and then hit your up-volume key to get audio.)
In this last link, to his credit, David Wallace-Wells points out that these kinds of storms have hit this area before:
Helene gives one vision of the future, with the storm scarring a whole region and imposing perhaps a decade of recovery. But in truth, as extraordinary as its devastation might seem, this kind of flooding in this kind of setting was not unthinkable or, for that matter, even unprecedented. Indeed, it happened in western North Carolina in 1916, and Hurricanes Camille (1969) and Agnes (1972) offered additional cautionary tales.
Some of the families in those mountains have been there for a century, generation after generation. (They can be quite xenophobic in that region, too, as I learned on the Appalachian Trail.) They won't leave, but will rebuild as best they can. But some people aren't going to be able to dig out and start again. They're the ones with a little more money, more options, probably not native to the region. They're not barely getting by. Ironic that the very poor are the ones who will survive there and stay there. Reminds me of the Middle East, with all its turmoil. People with deep roots respect them. Sometimes I think I should have respected mine too.
We stopped that real quick, pointing out that his entertainment implied the world would end in January 2171.
He got the message and ended his "entertaining third-order polynomial." Shame when you have to teach a scientist how to be scientific.
Of course, there has been a lot of warming since.
--
An "entertaining" thought: how many people did climate denialists kill via Hurricane Helene? Say, to the nearest factor of 10 human beings? Too soon to ask?
I'm perfectly happy to wait until professional climatologists present their verdict on climate change and Hurricane Helene, the hurricane that slammed into northwestern Florida a few days ago, but it's hard to imagine it wasn't a factor. It struck Florida as a Category Four hurricane--only two years after the Category 5 hurricane Ian tore close to Helene's path, and did a huge amount of damage there, and Georgia and, especially it seems, in western North Carolina.
I'm OK with waiting because I lived through the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes in June 1972, which hit Pennsylvania especially hard. That storm caused 128 deaths, 50 of them in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. (Adjusting for population, 128 deaths then would be the equivalent of approximately 206 today, if you adjust for population.) About Agnes in Pennsylvania, here's what Wiki says:
Though Agnes made landfall as a hurricane [in Florida], no reports of hurricane-force winds exist....
In Pennsylvania, heavy rainfall was reported, with much of the state experiencing more than 7 inches (180 mm) of precipitation. Furthermore, a large swath of rainfall exceeding 10 inches (250 mm) was reported in the central part of the state. Overall, the rains peaked at 19 inches (480 mm) in the western portions of Schuylkill County. As a result, Agnes is listed as the wettest tropical cyclone on record for the state of Pennsylvania. Overall, more than 100,000 people were forced to leave their homes due to flooding. The Allegheny River reached above flood stage at several low-lying locations and at some places rose about 7 in (180 mm) per hour during the height of the storm. Additionally, the Susquehanna River threatened to reach record crests along its course.[42] Some buildings were under 13 ft (4.0 m) of water in Harrisburg. At the Governor's Mansion, the first floor was submerged by flood waters. Governor Milton Shapp and his wife Muriel had to be evacuated by boat due to flooding.
Our little white wooden house--which didn't even have a bathroom, just a toilet under the stairs and a rusty shower in the coal cellar--had a pretty stream that went along two sides of our big yard. It was great for messing in for hours, catching crabs (crayfish), shooting the legs of water skippers off with BB guns (if you shot two legs off one side it could only go in a circle), throwing your puppy in on a cold winter day, that kind of thing. But it must have worried my mom to death because after big rains it would become a roiling brown deluge about 20 yards wide, not too far from our backdoor then curling around and across the bottom of the yard. Kids were always outside then, unsupervised, so she had to have worried one or more or her kids or others' kids or both might get swept away.
For Hurricane Agnes, the creek ("crick" where I grew up) went up over its bank and flooded most of your yard. Our lawn furniture was swept away, as was a swing set. We were standing around watching it and my grandmother said to my dad's uncle, you better get that [Volkswagon] Beetle out of the driveway before it floats away! For some reason they never spoke again after that incident. There must have been bad blood going into it.
I was just a kid so I didn't really understand the extent of the damage, which was over the entire region and other parts of the state. Downstream a few miles from us it wiped out a Mennonite community, so afterward the state brought bulldozers in, scraped the creek clean and piled the rocks up on the side.
Was Hurricane Agnes affected by climate change? I don't know. It was 1972, when CO2 was only 328 ppm. So what does that say about Hurricane Helene? I don't think we know yet until climate scientists run their models with and without the effect of today's added CO2. I suspect those will be coming in due course. But sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were higher, so there must have been at least some impact. But clearly there have been greater or equal storm when CO2 was much lower.
Helene's damage in Florida is bad enough, but western North Carolina looks worse than a war zone and it's possible to imagine it might never come back full.
It's such a beautiful area. In 1996 I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Massachusetts (sprained my ankle 1/4th of the way and only made it 2/3rds of the entire trail), and there are so many pretty towns way up in westernmost North Carolina, some of which the Trail runs down main street: Franklin NC, Hot Springs NC, Damascus VA all of which we took a day or three off in and which I have great memories of.
I had maybe the best day of my life there, thanks to heavy hiking the days before, nothing but rest and eating on a beautiful early spring day with green buds coming out, several of our friends there at the same time, four fun white kittens on the back porch of the B&B we stayed at, a big cozy bed and a major shot of testesterone due to having lost 30 pounds in 30 days. (It affected all the men the same, my girlfriend said her trail girlfriends told her.)
The mountains there are so beautiful. A couple are over 6,000 ft in elevation (1,830 m). Not huge compared to the Alps and the western US and the Himalayas. But they are flooded with green, and snow, and hiking them for an extended period was like living in a cloud no one else ever saw.
I'm sad other hikers might not get to experience Hot Springs in the same way. There have to be huge blowdowns over the trail in that entire region. Yesterday the director of the Appalachian Trail Conference said it may be years until the Trail is back in shape. It probably won't deter hikers planning to start in Georgia in the spring, but there could be lots or erosion and damage way up there in the mountains.
The people way up in those mountains usually don't have much money and are very unlikely to have flood insurance. Many may have lost everything they own and will simply not have a house to go back to. One day you think you're living in paradise and the next day it's entirely gone.
I've never been to Asheville NC, but it's such a well known place now after attracting a lot of breweries and artists and businesspeople and progressives and good people in the last few decades. It might be worst of all. People haven't even been able to get in or out of town, though that's probably taken care of, in part, by today. There's almost no gas, I saw a video of a casket floating down a flooded stream, no electricity, the entire River Arts District was wiped away.
Predictably, Trump is already telling obnoxious lies about it about President Biden's response to the storm.
Anyway, this is what I'm thinking yesterday and today. If I didn't have to work I have half a mind to drive across the country and help out there in whatever way I could.
--
Added a couple hours later: Of course I’m aware of the impacts of climate change in other parts of the world: in Bangladesh, where the area affected by the encroaching ocean has increased by a factor of over 12 from 1973 to 2009, in western and Canadian wildfires, in Africa, where climate change is costing up to 5% of GDP, etc. It’s just that it really hits home when its somewhere you love or know well. Obviously.
I haven't followed methane much because I couldn't find a good data source, but now I have, from NASA. And even better source is the Global Carbon Project, which is updated every 7.6 days.
After that weird lull in the mid-aughts, methane is on the rise again and is the highest it's been in 800,000 years.
Methane's radiative forcing has increased by about 0.4 W/m2 since 1979, while CO2's has jumped about 1.6 W/m2 in the same interval.
This page has formulas for calculating radiative forcing for the major greenhouse gases.
Global radiative forcing has increased by about 50% (as of 2022) just since 1990. Here, "AGGI" is the ratio of radiative forcing to what it was in 1990.
It's incredible that the world, despite all the rhetoric and (token) efforts, keeps allowing this to happen. Clearly, I think, these trends will only be taken seriously once some catastrophic effects happen, and by then it will be too late. So human and we can't even help ourselves.
The other day I gave the data on global ocean acidification, which I'm reproducing below. But first, here are the projections from the IPCC AR6 (WG1 Figure SPM.8c p22 of SPM):
On the top figure, the black line is the data, which matches the bottom. Of the two projections, maybe SSP2-4.5 is the most likely, with SSP3-7.0 if we're naughty. So a pH decline of about 0.15 by 2100, maybe 0.35.
[The "4.5" and "7.0" represents the total forcing from...everything, in Watts/m2. The AR6 WG1 was published on 9 August 2021.]
And these curves don't stop declining after 2100.
I don't know if a pH decline of 0.35 in a century is large for aquatic animals or not. I suspect they've gotten used to a pretty stable pH over the Holocene. I don't know a lot about this subject, which I've seen people write is "the other global warming problem."
Comments welcome, especially from fish and other ocean dwellers.
PredictIt is a market where buy and sell "shares" in various categories. One which is closely followed this time of the election cycle is for US president. So here Kamala Harris's price rose sharply shortly after the debate started:
at 9 pm US Eastern Time. The blue column bars are shares traded, labeled on the left vertical axis, and the price per share, labeled on the right.
Kamala Harris was superb in the debate and she badly outplayed him. Trump was an angry, lying, bombastic, bumbling fool. I'd like to think this sinks his chances, but in today's America apparently nine years of observing such a fool on the political stage may not be enough yet.
A human brain (average size 1,300 grams) versus a dolphin brain (1,600 g). However
"The human brain has a far more developed hippocampus than the dolphin brain. The hippocampus is a somewhat small region in the human brain that is shaped like a seahorse. The hippocampus is responsible for the elements of memory, learning, motivation, emotion, and more."
Apparently it's too late for dolphins to ever transition back to land again. They're probably safer there anyway. Besides it looks much cooler, with significantly less waiting in line.
So that's a pH change of about -0.075 in 40 years, or an average of -0.019/decade (-0.19/century, if you want to unfairly extrapolate). I don't know what the projections have been--will try to post that later. Is this a significant change in ocean water, if your species has chosen to reside there?
There's an article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) titled "As Extreme Heat Becomes More Common, the Unprecedented Pacific Northwest Heat Dome Offers Lessons." It might be paywalled, I'm not sure--I'm on their media list and not sure what I get for that.
Anyway, it says a few interesting things [sorry/not sorry for the bullet point format]:
An estimate of the total number of deaths is about 900, 600 of them in British Columbia. "Most of the deceased were older adults who lived alone and died at home."
Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon together saw about 200 deaths. "There [Portland], the heat dome lasted from June 25 to June 30. Temperatures reached 116°F (46.6°C) in Portland—more than 40°F (4°C) higher than normal
Except that last number is wrong, it should be 22°C. Strange they would make that error.
"June 29 reached 121°F, or 49°C, in Lytton, a small town in British Columbia, becoming the hottest day on record in Canada."
Researchers have since classified the 2021 event as one of a handful of the most extreme heat waves on modern record.
They write, "Throughout the globe, where we have reliable data, only five other heat waves were found to be more extreme since 1960."
"Excess mortality due to extreme heat is well documented, with an average of 6 heat-related deaths per 100,000 residents each year in North America estimated for 2000–2019.
"We have shown that the western North America event of 2021may have been caused by a combination of high pressure and dry conditions, but it is well known that heat extremes in different parts of the world may be driven by other combinations of Earth system processes." They don't say anything particular about climate change per se related to this event.
They give the following table for extreme heat waves with standard deviations of 4 or higher, since 1968.
Anyway you can read it if you want. Back to the JAMA article.
"And this August, researchers reported in JAMA that heat-related deaths in the US have been steadily increasing since 2016."
The article talks with an emergency room physician and a director of emergency management. The latter said "We had heard, anecdotally, folks saying, “I called my uncle at 11 in the morning and he was fine. By 10 at night, he was dead.” I think 15% of the fatalities were in homes that had air conditioning. But these were people oftentimes on fixed income who were afraid they couldn’t afford the extra utility bill, so they never turned their air conditioning on."
He also says, "I think my call to action on this is that we need to find that sense of community again. The thought of someone losing their life in a heat event by themselves in an apartment or in a mobile home that was 125 °F, 130 °F, 140 °F inside is devastating. There’s no reason in a city like Portland, in a metro area like Portland, in a place like the Pacific Northwest, that someone should be alone and suffering without a neighbor or someone being able to come and check on them." But that's exactly the situation I was in. My own fault, really. If I die here no one will notice for weeks, until I start to smell. My poor cat.
Anyway I obviously find this heat event interesting because I lived through it. (And without air conditioning! Nor did I go to anywhere else to cool down.) Others probably not so much.
--
PS: Looking back at it, this is kind of a lousy blog post. Sorry.
The last couple of weeks for the current year are always subject to changes (increases).
I'm not going to start wearing a mask yet, but I am going to get vaccinated as soon as the new batch is available in mid-September. (Will be my 7th; I still haven't had COVID yet.)
Data source: CDC (scroll down to "Click here to download", then click "Export", then "Download file".)
Notably this doesn't include land use changes, or any other anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
As of 2022, annual per capita CO2 emissions had declined by 4.6%. Since 2020, the height of the pandemic (but a local minimum in emissions), it has increased by 4.3%. It would need to increase by another 4.7% to reach the 2012 maximum.
Interesting to see the effect of two world wars and a Great Depression. But what happened between 1970 and 2000?
Here's a plot of NOAA's annual global temperature (anomaly) versus the annual change in atmospheric CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa Observatory in uppermost Hawaii.
Temperature anomalies relative to 1901-2000. (But a change of anomaly wouldn't change the graph, only the numbers on the y-axis.)
"They left, saying they would return after five o'clock if they received permission to prune, and on their way out they muddied the interior terrace and the drawing room and ripped Fermina Daza's favorite Turkish rug. Needless disasters, all of them, because the general impression was that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos to escape through neighboring patios. And in fact Dr. Urbino looked for him in the foliage, but there was no response in any language, not even to whistles and songs, so he gave him up for lost and went to sleep when it was almost three o'clock. But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus."
-- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
"9 Things Musk and Trump Said About Climate Change, Annotated: In a conversation on X, Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk spoke for a bit about climate change. Here’s what they got wrong and what they got right," New York Times, 13-Aug-2024.
“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property."
For the record, 1/8th of an inch is 3.2 mm, which global average sea level rises every 9 months now.
"The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s: It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated," Kate Yoder, Grist, 5-Aug-2024.
The Hunga Tonga volcano, the underwater volcano that erupted in January 2022 and has been blamed for the recent warming spike, crop failures on Mars and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, had an overall cooling effect when it injected vast amounts of volcanic aerosols and water vapor into the atmosphere, according to a paper just published in JGR Atmospheres. Its effect has been over since the end of 2023.
Plain Language Summary
The Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha'apai (Hunga) submarine volcanic eruption on 15 January 2022, produced aerosol and water vapor plumes in the stratosphere. These plumes have persisted mostly in the Southern Hemisphere throughout 2022 and into 2023. Enhanced tropospheric warming due to the added stratospheric water vapor is offset by the larger stratospheric aerosol attenuation of solar radiation. Hunga induced circulation changes that reduce stratospheric ozone and lower temperatures also play a role in the net forcing. The change in the radiative flux would result in a very slight 2022/3 cooling in Southern Hemisphere. The Hunga climate forcing has decreased to near zero by the end of 2023.
Lots of details of their conscientious work in the paper, which like all research published by the AGU is free, but here is graph of overall forcing from HT, compared to what would have happened without it.
Here's a video clip of Paul A.M. Dirac explaining how theoretical physicists worked -- or, at least, how HE worked:
He was British, and his full name was Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. I'm surprised I still remember that.
The Schrodinger equation wasn't consistent with Einstein's special relativity. Among other things, it got the spin of the electron wrong. (In fact, Schrodinger didn't include spin at all.)
Dirac derived the relativistic Schrodinger equation, consistent with Einstein, and, miraculously, it correctly predicted the spin of the electron (within a few percent; quantum electrodynamics--the field theory of relativistic quantum mechanics--would do the rest). Here's what Dirac's equation looked like:
That's kind of messy, though the Wiki page explains it. Psi is the usual wave function of quantum mechanics, although in Dirac's theory it's a 4-dimensionl vector. (In Schrodinger it's just a regular function over all of space and time, what physicists call a "scalar.") But my generation, and the one before, and those following know it as:
It's just mathematically simpler. Moreover, now we set c=1 (the speed of light), and, for that matter, G=hbar=k=1, where G is Newton's gravitational constant, hbar is Planck's constant divided by 2*pi, and k is Boltzmann's constant. These constants simply set the scale of dimensions, and can always be added back if you're looking for real-world predictions.
{If you're said it will take you "an hour" (or whatever) to drive from home to you grandma's, you did the same thing with units, taking your velocity to be =1.}
I don't think I've ever solved the Dirac equation except for a free electron, as has every other graduate student in physics, but I once saw a PhD dissertation that solved it for the hydrogen atom. It was nontrivial.)
Anyway...when he was a young physicist in Europe, Dirac derived his equation from general considerations, a real tour-de-force of both quantum mechanics, special relativity and mathematics for its time. It was better than Schrodinger.
His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour.
This likely contributed to his great success. Dirac put forth his equation in 1928, and by 1933 won the Nobel Prize in physics, along with Schrodinger. Dirac has just turned 32 years old.
Wiki:
"After having relocated to Florida to be near his elder daughter, Mary, Dirac spent his last fourteen years of both life and physics research at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida."
Dirac did other notable work besides his relativistic wave equation, but nothing on its scale, and it's what he will forever be known for.
So I found it really interesting to watch him talk about what made him tick.
