If it felt exceptionally hot to you on Monday, that’s because it was. Monday was the hottest day ever recorded by humans.
The global average temperature on Monday was 17.01°C (62.62°F). That’s up from 16.92°C (62.46°F), the previous record set in August 2016. Of course, the heat doesn’t hit everywhere the same. In Poland during that previous record heat, Poland was scorched (I remember it well, as I had a newborn baby at the time and Poland was not used to or equipped for such heat). During this record heat, it was fairly mild in Poland. However, other regions felt the brunt of it. “The southern US has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued with temperatures above 35°C (95°F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50°C (122°F),” Al Jazeera writes.
“Even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent’s Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7°C (47.6°F).”
Understatement of the year, climate scientist Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London said, “This is not a milestone we should be celebrating.” More to the point, though, she added, “It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”
Screenshot from U.S. CDC Health & Heat Tracker
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. But it will certainly be broken in the coming decade, because the Earth continues heating up as we continue burning fossil fuels. Also, while La Niña may hide the heating temporarily when she’s in town, we’re in another El Niño era now, so the heat is on. Expect Monday’s record to fall soon.
From extreme wildfires to extreme heat and hurricanes, “the gods” will continue to seem more and more wrathful. The problem is that in this battle with ourselves, the devil on our shoulders continues to win. We continue to burn too many fossil fuels, cut down too many forests to satisfy meat-eating habits, produce too much plastic because we are lazy b***ards. The only thing for those of us concerned to do — that makes sense — is to keep working for the greater good. So, keep doing what you do, and we’ll keep doing what we do here at CleanTechnica. One day, perhaps, we will get to stop reporting on heat records.
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 …
