I tried to write about how extreme the weather has been in the PNW. I wrote at Wonkette & here on my blog. I tried to keep track of high temps, excessively high low temps, fires, and other important aspects of this heat wave. But I wasn’t willing to state that it was the most extreme heat wave event in the history of meteorology. I just don’t have the knowledge necessary to make such a judgement.
So don’t take it from me. Take it from climate scientists (source: Common Dreams):
“Never in the century-plus history of world weather observation have so many all-time heat records fallen by such a large margin than in the past week’s historic heatwave in western North America,” meteorologist Bob Henson and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hurricane scientist Jeff Masters wrote for Yale Climate Connections.“It’s not hype or exaggeration to call the past week’s heatwave the most extreme in world weather records,”
In my writing, I specifically called out that when Canada’s national hottest temperature had been recorded exactly two times total in the history of weather tracking at every damn place in the country, it just fucking has to be frightening that the record was not just broken, but broken multiple days in a row.
Think about this: of the 10 hottest temperatures ever recorded in Canada, at least six of them were recorded in the last 10 days, three of them at the same town, Lytton, on consecutive days. And those 6 aren’t just scattered through the top 10. They occupy spots 1 through 6. There may be many high temps at different towns in BC I’ve missed, but even if I saw and remembered every single temp that broke the previous national record this shit is not remotely normal. And of course I didn’t look at all high temps recorded over the last week. I really don’t know how many other towns might have posted a temp or 3 above the old record. (It’s very possible, in fact I believe it’s probably true, that of the highest 20 temperatures ever recorded in Canada, all 20 were recorded in the last 10 days because press stories kept focussing on Lytton since it had the current highs and not on other towns that broke the previous high that had stood since 1936.) But even if it’s only the 6 hottest temps out of 6 that the country has ever seen, that’s completely mind boggling. I was freaking out when I heard that not just Lytton but other towns in the same area had recorded temps above Canada’s previous national high (though the other towns did not top Lytton), often more than one day in a row, and I’m quite obviously still freaking out about it.
Well, I wasn’t the only one. And as bad as it is to smash the national record the way we did in Canada, Portland’s heat, which did not set records for the USA’s hottest temp ever, is mind boggling in its own way: it was comparable to that of Death Valley:
Portland, Oregon, broke its longstanding all-time record high (107°F from 1965 and 1981) on three days in a row—a stunning feat for any all-time record—with highs of 108°F on Saturday, June 26; 112°F on Sunday; and 116°F on Monday. That 116°F is one degree higher than the average daily high on June 28 at Death Valley, California. (Emphasis mine, because why the fuck not? This deserves emphasis!)
I can try to call attention to this, but I’m not really qualified to say how bad this is. I’m only qualified to scribe slightly more artistic expressions of shock than, “Holy fuck!”
And so I write. It’s what I know how to do. But I honestly don’t care if you listen to me as long as you listen to the scientists:
“Nowhere is safe… who would have predicted a temperature of 48/49°C [118.4°F/120.2°F] in British Columbia?” Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser in the United Kingdom, said in an interview with The Guardian. “The risks have been understood and known for so long and we have not acted, now we have a very narrow timeline for us to manage the problem.”
It’s almost enough to make ya wish Rush Limbaugh was still alive to see his denialism definitively debunked.
Update: Lytton has burned.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2021/07/04/update-lytton-has-burned/
Before it did it was hotter than Las Vegas & Australia’s central deset town Alice Springs have ever been.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-30/canada-us-heatwave-heads-into-uncharted-territory/100252678
Whilst it is at 50 degrees North latitude. This is NOT normal or okay and yet, well, should be headline news yet no.
My home town Adelaide is at 35 degrees South.I am dreading Summer yet again.
@ Pierce R. Butler : It’s not that Limbaugh and his like are dead that should grieve us. It is that they died unpunished. At home and not in jail cells, their names not yet cursed and never held responsible for their crimes and the horrendous legacy they have left for all the rest of us. They made the world far worse than it would’ve been had they not lived and chosen their willful ignorance and sociopathic selfish evil words and actions. We will all pay for what they did. They themselves .. if only karma was real and immediate. There are times I wish for at least a purgatory to be real if never a hell. (Infinite punishment can only apply for infinite evil.. & torture is wrong.)
Have I not written about Lytton burning down on this blog? I thought I had. I certainly have elsewhere on the internet. Let me check…
Wow. I guess I haven’t written about it here. A severe oversight on my part. Thanks for sparking my double check, StevoR.
The accounts I heard were harrowing. Like, this is a town with several hundred homes, and in a period of just a few minutes they went from a few sudden but small fires to 10% of the city’s homes on fire. Tens of homes in a city of only hundreds of homes all on fire, with no time to do anything but run. Some people did not have time to grab their ID and other important documents.
Speaking of national records, it occurs to me that Canada is a big country, and Russia is even bigger.
This late June, there were somewhat extreme heat waves in northeastern Europe and apparently also in northeastern Siberia. They didn’t break Russia’s national June record, in part because they didn’t occur in the part of the country that normally has relatively hot summers. National June records were broken in Estonia and Belarus, two small countries adjacent to European Russia. Local June records were broken widely, including in Moscow and here in Helsinki. Very possibly some places in northern Russia broke their all time record.
(I’ve seen some circulating the claim that Verkhoyansk in Siberia measured 118 F this June. That must be a mix-up, since last summer Verkhoyansk made international news when it recorded 100 F, which is considered about the highest possible temperature at Arctic Circle. I hear now Canada has measured 103 F in NWT, almost as far north.)
At what temperature do the trees doe?
115F
https://www.iflscience.com/environment/land-temperature-soared-to-48c-in-the-arctic-circle-this-month/
“If you head to the Arctic this summer, don’t forget your sunscreen and shorts. Land surface temperatures of up to 48°C (118°F) were detected this month in Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town in the Arctic Circle, according to the European Union’s Copernicus program, and there’s another two months of summer to go.”
That’s land surface temperature, when what’s usually noted as weather is the air temperature.
Muscadine – Ah, that makes sense.
Right now there’s extreme heat in northern Scandinavia, breaking local all time records, almost breaking the all time record for that whole region plus entire Norway. About 34 C/94 F measured at 70 degrees north. Here in Helsinki, it’s been just incessantly warm and often unreasonably humid lately.
Don’t blame Rush Limbaugh. Any one of you who endorsed solar and wind and other nebulous green / renewable energy, and especially those of you who second-guessed building nuclear because of unfounded safety concerns, you are the problem. For most of you, you only need to look in the mirror to see that you’re the problem. You’ve been had. It’s likely that the entire renewable energy movement is mostly a front funded by fossil fuel money in order to attack the only real competition to fossil fuels which is nuclear power. This isn’t just my opinion. This is the position of several leading climate scientists that renewable energy advocates are more to blame than climate change deniers. At least I can convince climate change deniers that we should replace fossil fuels for nuclear for reasons unrelated to climate change. However, renewable energy advocates would rather let the world burn than admit that their entire belief system is a cult based on fearmongering and lies – fearmongering and lies about nuclear power.
Gerrard:
In your opinion. In reality, not-so-much.
And the opinion of most climate scientists.
Nope, in your opinion. What they say is that nuclear should be part of the mix.
(Care to name but 1 (one) climate scientist who claims that “renewable energy advocates would rather let the world burn than admit that their entire belief system is a cult based on fearmongering and lies”?)
First, I was mostly saying that the renewables crowd are anti-nuclear because of fearmongering and lies, and it is true that most climate scientists agree with me here.
Second, it’s not exactly what you want, but it’s pretty close:
Dr. Kerry Emanuel
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/Also Dr. Kerry Emanuel:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1956Dr. James Hansen:
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdfI don’t want anything, Gerrard. Pure SIWOTI, that’s all.
Just telling you that your claim that “most climate scientists” are of the opinion that “renewable energy advocates would rather let the world burn than admit that their entire belief system is a cult based on fearmongering and lies – fearmongering and lies about nuclear power” is not factual.
Most climate scientists believe that Green rhetoric about the dangers of nuclear power is grossly exaggerated.
Most climate scientists believe that nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels.
Most climate scientists believe that the world will burn without lots of nuclear.
I think I can take it as given that most Greens would never accept expanded use of nuclear power.
Thus, it’s a baby step to most Greens would rather have the world burn than use nuclear power.
Even now John, you’re delaying the necessary action because of your wrong-headed beliefs about nuclear power. You are proving my point. You and the rest of Australia are the poster child for this, saying that you’re serious about doing something, but you also recently repealed a greenhouse gas emissions tax, and you’re continuing to burn lots of coal and export lots of coal, and your renewables plans are going nowhere (just like Germany and California). Actions speak louder than words, and your actions are that you prefer that the world burn than use nuclear power.
Here’s a thing I’ve told you umpteen times: I’m all for nuclear power. Bring it on!
(umpteen +1, now)
What I mainly object to is your swivel-eyed belief that to not want nuclear power as the exclusive source of power is to be a delusional cultish greenie. Or that any renewable power anywhere is bad, Bad, BAD!
I keep telling you I am more than happy to have nuclear power, but to no avail.
(umpteen +2)
Amusingly, you’ve very recently asserted in StdErr to the effect that the claimed existential dangers of AGW is way overwrought, yet here you are with the burning world. Heh.
But fine, you’ll carry on your crusade against those who want to phase out fossil fuels, and replace them with renewables. You’ll keep ignoring all the actual technological change that has occurred, all the options for reducing consumption, all the options for changing the grid, all the options for storing power, and so forth.
(And you’ll keep getting no traction)
Kinda sad, really. I know you mean well.
—
Meanwhile, all the forecasts are coming true, including those of displaced populations, dead zones, eco-catastrophe and so forth.
It is cultish. The preeminent climate scientist himself, James Hansen, described this movement as “quasi-religious”.
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041The pro-renewables movement is entirely without any factual basis to stand on, and relies on many disproven claims to create its foundation, including the reactionary conversative, neo-Malthusian belief that a higher quality of living leads to more kids, and the quasi-religious worship of nature and rejection of technology and scientific and technological progress. Somehow we’ve lost the optimism of the 1960s, such as “Atoms For Peace” and the vision of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and replaced with a doom-and-gloom outlook where technology is bad and the only solution is going back to mother Gaia.
Back to you:
Depends on what you mean by “existential”. I said that saying global climate change is very unlikely to cause human extinction nor the end of human civilization. I also said it easily result in the deaths of millions and maybe billions of people. This is also what mainstream science tells us, and some leading Greens needlessly exaggerate.
And none of the mainstream scientific predictions including human extinction.
Heh. You quote your own favourite (supposedly pre-eminent) source thus:
“I’ve spoken to many scientists, and by far the majority agree that nuclear needs to be part of the solution.”
Which is not what you claim; what you claim is that nuclear is the one and only and exclusive solution. Not part of it, all of it.
(That you don’t respect your own best source is… informative)
John
This is a strawman, and it’s moving the goalposts.
It’s a strawman because I never claimed that the only feasible solution is 100% nuclear. I’ve often said that my ideal solution is probably something approximated by: as much hydro as you can get and fill the rest in with nuclear. (Maybe less hydro in the tropics where it can produce as much greenhouse gas emissions as a coal power plant.) Further, with lots of hydro and nuclear serving as the foundation, you could throw on solar and wind and still have a working solution (but it’d probably be more expensive than the solution that didn’t bother building solar and wind).
It’s moving the goalposts because I have shown that a large majority of climate scientists say that there is no solution without lots of nuclear, and at least some scientists who say that the Greens are thus at fault because they are the primary impediment to nuclear power, and one climate scientist – the most famous and preeminent one – characterizing the anti-nuclear movement as “quasi-religious”, thereby (partially) defeating your earlier assertion that climate scientists don’t agree with the characterization that the Green energy movement is a cult.
Is the International Energy Agency part of the cult?
Note: “The IEA has been criticised for systematically underestimating the role of renewable energy sources in future energy systems such as photovoltaics and their cost reductions.[16][17][18]”)
Still: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/renewables
“Accordingly, the share of renewables in global electricity generation jumped to 29% in 2020, up from 27% in 2019.”
“Renewable electricity generation in 2021 is set to expand by more than 8% to reach 8300 TWh, the fastest year-on-year growth since the 1970s. Solar PV and wind are set to contribute two-thirds of renewables growth.”
—
In passing, you’d be better to sticking with either (a) can’t be done or (b) too expensive, instead of using both. They’re contradictory claims, you see.
John
I fail to see how that quotation rebuts any claim that I’ve made.
I feel like I’m talking to a wall. This is why I call you a dishonest dipshit, because you ignore the arguments that I’ve made time and time again. When you do that, it’s dishonest. You’re doing it again here. So, let me again say my argument. Please pay attention this time, dipshit.
The costs of having a working grid rise exponentially with increasing percent of solar and wind, including extra transmission costs, storage costs, synthetic grid inertia costs, and extra blackstart capability. Evidence that it’s cheap to reach 30% solar wind on a grid is not evidence that it’s cheap to reach 80%, or 100%.
So… is it not doable, or is it just too expensive?
Make up your mind.
At the extreme, there’s not a difference. Cost is one measure of society’s physical ability to do something. If something costs a trillion trillion dollars, then it’s currently beyond society’s ability to do. If it costs a billion dollars, then society can do it.
I have been consistent that 100% renewables worldwide is practically impossible. Easily 10x more expensive than fossil fuels (or a solution based on nuclear). That might as well be impossible. Our society could not function with energy costing 10x more than what it currently does. It would radically transform society into something like decentralized groups of subsistence farmers, which is the Green goal anyway.
So, you don’t think it’s not actually doable, you just think it’s too expensive. OK.