Global temperatures: NOAA found August to be the warmest August in their records (which start in 1850), as they did for -July among Julys. August was the 6th warmest month that NOAA ever recorded. Also the warmest ever meteorological summer (June-August).
2026 has a chance to be the warmest year in their records, especially with the El Nino here already: it would need a Sept-Dec average of 1.44°C, when the year-to-date average has been 1.16°C and the 12-month moving average is at 1.14°C. July's anomaly was 1.20°C, and August was 1.32°C. I suspect someone like Berkeley Eart has estimated the chances.
The record year is 2024, at 1.26 C above their 1901-2000 baseline period. Relative to their first three decades, 1850-1879, 2024's anomaly was 1.39°C, while this year's average-to-date is 1.30°C.
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Wall Street Journal (no paywall):
Rebuilding could unfold over decades, too: new infrastructure, new patterns of development, perhaps new evacuation routes and emergency-response units. When truly scarring cataclysms struck, survivors built whole new worlds in their wake. This work was difficult even in stable circumstances. But increasingly, weather extremes are arriving not only as crises but premonitions, with future disasters following now within a generation, often within years, and sometimes, unnervingly, within months.I'm sure AI will be able to solve it, one way or the other.
“Nobody really knows what real recovery looks like,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama and now a disaster-management scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “But the whole apparatus was built on the assumption that disasters were random and rare and that recovery was one and done.”
This, she says, is the original sin of recovery — that we don’t recognize what the disaster itself is telling us. A true thousand-year flood doesn’t reveal much about what new resilience must be built over the next decade, since you only expect to see something like it again 10 centuries from now. That it might come again before the next census or town council election is such an unnerving prospect that we resist it almost magnetically, preferring to believe our suffering was freakish and improbable. And in the immediate aftermath of disaster, public attention and collective ambition are pulled perversely backward, toward restoration, as much as pushed forward, toward adaptation.
After President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement during his first term, many Democratic-led states passed their own laws to curtail carbon emissions.
But most states that set goals for 2030 are not on track to meet them. Now, with voters worried about inflation, and with the war in Iran raising energy prices, some states have begun to cut back or abandon those goals instead.
I'm still optimistic, though the US has made even Canada move away from climate action. We've scrapped our carbon tax. It is not something we can afford while we under attack by the worlds largest economy. Nonetheless, we are still investing in a brighter future:
ReplyDeletePrime Minister Carney announces the largest clean energy investment in North American history
And the bungled US war against Iran is demonstrating to the world that oil is not a reliable energy source. This will only drive further adoption of alternatives.
Canada has the same CO2-emissions per capita as the US. It´s part of the same club of "not our problem".
ReplyDeleteNo doubt, Canada has work to do. It faces a real challenge as it is a very large (larger than the US), cold, and sparsely populated (1/10th the population of the US) country . Nonetheless it has been a leader in many respects. For example, Ontario was the first North American government to eliminate coal-fired electricity.
ReplyDeleteAnd the proof is in the pudding. Canada's emissions have fallen 10% over the last 20 years, even as population has grown. Canada's electricity-sector emissions fell about 58% - with electric cars becoming increasingly available, we should be able to make similar strides in transpiration.
The future is bright.