I wrote a story yesterday about Monday being the hottest day ever recorded by humans. It turns out, the next day, Tuesday, was hotter. And then yesterday was hotter still. Maybe I shouldn’t write and publish this article until tomorrow to see if we go for 4 days in a row. In any case, the story is the same: the world is getting hotter, a lot hotter. As I wrote toward the end of my previous story, “The obvious and unfortunate thing is that this record likely won’t last for long. In fact, there’s a decent chance it’s broken in a matter of days or weeks.”
Regarding the new record, “The average global temperature was 62.9 degrees, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition. That matched a record set Tuesday and came after a previous record of 62.6 degrees was set Monday,” CBS News writes.
Unsurprisingly, June was also the hottest June on record. That’s according to the European Union’s climate monitoring service. The previous hottest June was June 2019. “The month was the warmest June globally … exceeding June 2019 — the previous record — by a substantial margin,” the EU climate monitoring service noted.
Screenshot from U.S. CDC Health & Heat Tracker
Naturally, the long-term heating trend stems from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and some greenhouse gas emissions from other sources. However, there is also the medium-term El Niño vs. La Niña matter. The former heats things up more, while the latter cools things off. La Niña hides the global heating, while El Niño shocks us and brings to the forefront what is happening. We are entering an El Niño period, so we’re going to see heat wave after heat wave and new heat record after new heat records. It’s not going to be fun.
Note that the fresh figures are not official records yet. But yeah, we’re seeing the hottest weather we’ve seen since humans started recording the temperature.
Solar power, wind power, electric vehicles, and heat pumps continue to set new records, too. However, it’s still not fast enough. We need faster growth, faster adoption. With the heat records that are already guaranteed to be coming, humans will become more and more aware of the problem and bothered by the stronger and stronger effects of global warming. The challenge is that we need to act faster before the world is completely on fire.
“High-temperature records were surpassed this week in Quebec and Peru. Beijing reported nine straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 95 degrees and ordered a stop to all outdoor work Wednesday as high temperatures were forecast to pass 104 degrees,” CBS News reports. “Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon to Tampa, Florida have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.”
For all of the heat we’re feeling, though, there’s even more that we’re not. Many of the biggest temperature differences are being seen over the oceans. Plus, they are soaking up the heat and pushing it deeper, to places that do not get our attention. It’s scary.
For now, if you’re in a place getting scorching heat, be careful. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, and get into cool air when you can.
I don’t like paywalls. You don’t like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it! We just don’t like paywalls, and so we’ve decided to ditch ours. Unfortunately, the media business is still a tough, cut-throat business with tiny margins. It’s a never-ending Olympic challenge to stay above water or even perhaps — gasp — grow. So …
