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The Heat Is On
Jul. 11th, 2023 10:41 pmLast Monday was the hottest global average day according to estimates against the instrument record. Until Tuesday, which was hotter still. Wednesday decided to match Tuesday's value, and Thursday decided it could do even better. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday temperatures dipped slightly and increased again on Monday. But all have been above last Monday's record-breaking value. One can follow the trajectory at the University of Maine's "Climate Reanalyzer", which does area-weighted daily means from the surface, radiosonde, and satellite observations. This sudden increase has been pushed upwards by the natural warming phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), but of course, occurs on top of decades of greenhouse gas emissions and resulting temperature increases. Whilst I am extremely wary of making correlations between local temperature changes and global averages the mildness of Melbourne's winter this year led me to check the temperature record at BOM just as a quick comparison to last year; nine of the eleven days this year have had a higher maximum, and the minimums have been much higher - almost as high as last year's maximums.
Turn the clock back almost forty years to 1986 - I learn about the greenhouse effect for the first time and, by beautiful coincidence, I am living next door to a Perth punk band of the same name in Pakenham Street, Mount Lawley. Several years later, as I'm finishing my undergraduate degree, I would read in Habermas' 1971 social theory book "Legitimation Crisis" which stated that the environment's capacity to absorb heat from energy consumption was an absolute limit on industrial growth. More years pass and one day, on aus.politics on USENET, I encounter my first climate change denier. I am perplexed by their attempt to politicise a question that seemed obviously a matter of science. Of course, it's the practical policy implications that are of concern, not the truth. Shortly afterward I comment: "There will be a year when winter doesn't happen. That will be when people will finally believe that global warming is happening and by then, it will be too late". It is, after all, only in the past two decades that we've truly learned that carbon dioxide, once emitted, remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Now, as I increasingly dedicate my life to this concern, I rather suspect that my comment of some twenty years ago was optimistic. Locally, I rather suspect we've pretty much seen the end of winter already. Globally, we're in for some real scorchers over the next few years. I'd like to be wrong - I suspect I won't be.
Turn the clock back almost forty years to 1986 - I learn about the greenhouse effect for the first time and, by beautiful coincidence, I am living next door to a Perth punk band of the same name in Pakenham Street, Mount Lawley. Several years later, as I'm finishing my undergraduate degree, I would read in Habermas' 1971 social theory book "Legitimation Crisis" which stated that the environment's capacity to absorb heat from energy consumption was an absolute limit on industrial growth. More years pass and one day, on aus.politics on USENET, I encounter my first climate change denier. I am perplexed by their attempt to politicise a question that seemed obviously a matter of science. Of course, it's the practical policy implications that are of concern, not the truth. Shortly afterward I comment: "There will be a year when winter doesn't happen. That will be when people will finally believe that global warming is happening and by then, it will be too late". It is, after all, only in the past two decades that we've truly learned that carbon dioxide, once emitted, remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Now, as I increasingly dedicate my life to this concern, I rather suspect that my comment of some twenty years ago was optimistic. Locally, I rather suspect we've pretty much seen the end of winter already. Globally, we're in for some real scorchers over the next few years. I'd like to be wrong - I suspect I won't be.
