Wake up call
Stay home with your phone ...
I saw this cartoon in a recent mailing from Coal Action, Aotearoa. Their catchphrase is to “Keep the Coal in the Hole”. Good idea. It’s an embarrassment to all Kiwis that our new right-of-centre and aptly named Coalition of Chaos isn’t on board with that. The long-term stakes are more than just an embarrassment for everybody, especially our Pacific Island cousins ☹.
Dark humour indeed, though a bit dated. I’m old enough to remember calling the front desk of my hotel in a strange country after a long-haul flight and asking a real person to book me a wake-up call so I wouldn’t miss my appointment the next day. And I can also remember that front-desk voice later changing to a sanitised computer response. It’s different nowadays. Everybody has their own personal alarm clock ever-present on their smartphone.
But is there any truth in that hottest days message?
Sadly, there is. As reported by New Scientist, it’s not fake news. The week in question was in early July this year, when the global mean temperature reached 17.23 C. A new Sea-Surface Temperature record was also set around the same time. That one was a huge outlier.
At the time, pundits confidently predicted that it wouldn’t be the last temperature record to be broken this year. And so it wasn’t. A substack article on November 20 by Bill McKibben showed that the global mean temperature had already exceeded that July record several times and, for the first time ever, its increase has exceeded the 2C threshold that the IPCC warned against exceeding, as shown by the graph below.
Those different shades of blue tell a damning story. The progression to lighter shades of blue over time is unmistakable. This year is also bucking the usual annual pattern of variability. Hopefully that’s mostly because of the changing phase of the El Niño and La Niña cycle, rather than something more sinister. Fingers crossed.
Sorry about that bad news. Better news next week. 😊
In the meantime, perhaps it’s time to consider curtailing our travel across time zones that leads to the need for those hotel Wake Up calls.
P.S. If you want another wake-up call, take a look here. Make sure you the graphics there plenty of time to update fully. They make a compelling case for action that should begun years ago. It’s great that Nature Articles like this are now freely available. Sure, there’s an additional cost to the author institutions, but it’s money well spent in a belated defence against the misinformation that abounds out there from vested interests.