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Antarctica Logs Hottest Temperature On Record of 18.3C (bbc.com) 229

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A record high temperature of 18.3C (64.9F) has been logged on the continent of Antarctica. The reading, taken on Thursday by Argentine research base Esperanza, is 0.8C hotter than the previous peak temperature of 17.5C, in March 2015. The temperature was recorded in the Antarctic Peninsula, on the continent's north-west tip -- one of the fastest-warming regions on earth. It is being verified by the UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Temperatures on the Antarctic continent have risen by almost 3C over the past 50 years, the organization said, and about 87% of the glaciers along its west coast have "retreated" in that time. The glaciers have shown an "accelerated retreat" in the past 12 years, the WMO added, due to global warming. While 18.3C is a record for the Antarctic continent, the record in the wider Antarctic region -- which includes the continent, islands and ocean that are in the Antarctic climatic zone -- is 19.8C, logged in January 1982. Last July, the Arctic region hit its own record temperature of 21C, logged by a base at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.

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Antarctica Logs Hottest Temperature On Record of 18.3C

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  • by weilawei ( 897823 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @11:35PM (#59703844)

    It's not real! It's not happening! /s

    • After Iceland, Antarctica, the new holiday hot spot!
    • I do not think this is significant as they (and you) want it to be. I suppose that surrounding glaciers work as a coolant, when they melt the coolant effect lessens and the local temperature rises, accelerating the melting of said glaciers and weakening furthermore the local cooling. The effect is mostly a local one, once the temperature reaches the melting point: all this could work even with a stable (or even decreasing!) global temperature, after it starts.
  • by Patent Lover ( 779809 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @11:52PM (#59703876)
    This is just weather. Weather changes. /s
  • It's all because of my original sin!

    Who do I make my cheque or money order payable to?

  • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Saturday February 08, 2020 @12:10AM (#59703920) Journal

    Time to start investing more in these technologies that don't have carbon or radionuclide externalities. There is no point doing to future generations what previous generations have done to us. Only worse.

    To be sincere about creating solutions we, as in us, our generation, has to solve *both* carbon and radionuclide issues whilst there are people still alive that understand the industrial processes of the coal, oil and, nuclear industries that have got us into this mess.

    Any speculation as to what solar and wind are capable of in terms of running our society are scaremongering FUD tactics that these industries have used to keep a tight grip on their economic monopolies whilst corrupting our democratic processes to ensure the survival of their profits over everything else.

    Beside, considering the intellectual challenges in adapting our power grid to extracting energy from all around us, I think this will be one of the most exciting times to be doing all of the interesting tasks associated with the challenge of cutting tie to these industries that hold us in the past.

    Wind, Solar, geothermal are the future, they're so 21st century.

    • Wind, Solar, geothermal, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion are the future, they're so 21st century.

      FTFY.

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday February 08, 2020 @02:50AM (#59704280)

      Time to start investing more in these technologies that don't have carbon or radionuclide externalities.

      This is why this problem wasn't licked 3 decades ago. Do you know how much nuclear waste the U.S. generates? By volume it's about a tractor trailer's worth each year. That's it. 20% of the country's entire annual electricity consumption, at the cost of a single tractor trailer's volume of waste. That's why it hasn't been a problem that there's no long-term waste storage facility. The nuclear plants are simply storing their waste from decades of operation on-site - because there is so little of it. By comparison, generating the same amount of energy from coal generates more than a million times the volume of solid waste, and even more CO2. Any way you cut it, nuclear is vastly superior to coal.

      Remember, nuclear doesn't have to be the end solution. All we need (needed) to do is transition our energy production from fossil fuels to nuclear, to go from decades to a century before destroying civilization and the environment, to several millennia before destroying civilization and the environment. And in that millennia of time we bought, we could've worked on perfecting wind, solar, geothermal, and battery technology to where they could take over nuclear for us.

      But one fanatical* group is staunchly opposed to nuclear, and does everything in their power to block it, filing lawsuit after lawsuit driving up its costs to create the illusion of economic unfeasibility. Forcing us to remain on fossil fuels since renewables still can't handle base load yet. Which keeps us on track for climate doomsday within a century (which is looking more and more like 50 years). All of this could've been avoided if we'd spent the last 3 decades converting our power generation from fossil fuels to nuclear (both are base load). But instead they manipulated economics and public opinion, forcing us into a game of chicken which results in ecological disaster in decades. So if climate change destroys the environment and civilization, it'll be their fault for blocking a perfectly good solution that could've been used as a temporary measure to buy us centuries more time to figure out how to solve it their preferred way.

      * (Yes, fanatical. fa-nat-ic. noun. a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal [google.com]. Amusingly, someone referred to nuclear proponents as fanatics in a previous discussion. Ask any nuclear power supporter - they're perfectly fine with renewables if we can get them to work. Heck, they're fine with fossil fuels if we can figure out a way to sequester the carbon [bbc.com]. It's the renewable energy proponents who reject any solution other than renewables. Single-minded. Fanatical.)

      • Coal ash is also mildly radioactive, in addition to being heavy with mercury.
        Search for mercury poisoning from fish downwind from coal plant, there was a case in S.C. while I lived there, poor bastard fished everyday in a river near a coal plant, and being a good sportsman, ate what he caught and died a horrible death for it

      • You are mixing up spent fuel with waste.
        And you are off by a factor of 1000 ...

        https://www.gao.gov/key_issues... [gao.gov]

      • Ask any nuclear power supporter - they're perfectly fine with renewables if we can get them to work. Heck, they're fine with fossil fuels if we can figure out a way to sequester the carbon [bbc.com].

        I kind of wonder what blindseer (a user here) would say about that.

    • To be sincere about creating solutions we, as in us, our generation, has to solve *both* carbon and radionuclide issues whilst there are people still alive that understand the industrial processes of the coal, oil and, nuclear industries that have got us into this mess.

      What mess are you referring to that was caused by nuclear power? An energy source that is the safest known to human civilization. An energy source with the lowest CO2 emissions of any known. An energy source with the highest known energy return on investment, and with plenty of room for improvement. Tell me, what mess did nuclear power cause?

      I'm not going to claim that nuclear power is perfect, it is not, but all evidence suggests that if we do not continue to use nuclear power, and grow our use of nucl

  • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Saturday February 08, 2020 @01:42AM (#59704126) Journal

    I think it maybe worthwhile considering these two phenomena. NASA's Solar Cycle Prediction [wikipedia.org] suggests we are in a period of Solar Minimum [wikipedia.org] and a period where the sun is less energetic. The sun has been dropping into a cooler phase since 2015 and now seems to be approaching the bottom of this cycle according to NASA [nasa.gov].

    I wonder if we will see increased acceleration of warming events as the sun starts becoming more energetic and goes into Solar Maximum [wikipedia.org] sometime during the 2020s? The reason I postulate this is I also wonder if climate models take the "hard to predict accurately" cycles of the Sun when attempting to predict the *rate* of climate change. The Sun gets hotter during solar maximum, enough to heat our atmosphere up enough to clear low earth orbit of satellites due to drag of an expanded atmosphere.

    This lends credence to arguments I've seen opponents of the science of AGW and how human influence on the earth is trivial compared to the forces of nature, so how can humans be having an influence. It's a valid argument that I never really had an answer to until I started considering the Sun's influence because, by the same logic, if we are in a period of solar minimum, when the sun is coolest, then the Earth shouldn't be heating up. We've had consecutively hotter years during solar minimum, we should be having the coldest winters, however in the last two years it's been the warmest winters and hottest summers in what looks like the coldest solar winters we've had for some time.

    How is this possible if humans don't have an influence on the Earth?

    We maybe at an apex in time where we still can do something to reduce our influence on Earth whilst the Sun gives us a little time to change our laws, that change our industries so they stop changing the chemical composition of our atmosphere.

    In any case I thought that maybe the missing piece that opponents of AGW science had not considered and not unsurprisingly if the people building the climate models hadn't considered it either.

    Who knows? As we enter solar maximum we may find ourselves in a situation where we are forced to extract much more than our trival requirements for energy from the atmosphere to dispel destructive weather systems.

    • by Jzanu ( 668651 ) on Saturday February 08, 2020 @06:52AM (#59704594)
      Wrong. That's all just debunked [skepticalscience.com] global warming denialist claptrap.
    • This lends credence to arguments I've seen opponents of the science of AGW

      It really doesn't. A 5 year cycle doesn't in any way counter what the long term trend of AGW has shown.

    • The difference between solar minimum and maximum is not even 1% in energy difference.
      However it might have influences in the upper atmosphere, e.g. due to more UV radiation - I don't know, never looked it up. However your idea the atmosphere would expand greatly does not really sound plausible.

  • These global warming denialists will not be happy with anything short of burning several hundred million years worth of fossil carbon and dooming us all to global war for the remaining habitable and arable land. If they want mass death, then why not bring it to them early? Let all global warming denialists enter into contests where they can fight each other to the death now. The rest of us can then ignore their blathering while fixing the environment.
  • Good. I can't wait for all that nasty ice will melt so we can begin drilling for oil there soon. Hopefully they'll find a lot of coal there too. Praise Trump, Vote God!
  • 65 is when I switch to shorts. Walking around fucking Antarctica in shorts sounds like a fascinating way to experience a fun novelty and existential dread at the same time.
    • I have actually done this in places that in historical times have been buried deep in glacial ice: Svinajokull, Dawes, Franz Josef.

      Build the nukes. Seed the oceans.

  • We can prove in any number of ways that greenhouse gasses trap heat. We can observe the build up of greenhouse gasses and a corresponding increase in temperature. We can see all the signs, we can hear all the experts and yet.... Science, literally "the search for truth", expertise and empirical data is being ignored while opinions are being formed by clear propaganda.

    At the very least, considering the potential global consequences, why hasn't erring on the side of caution kicked in yet? Our species is doome

  • This is from northernmost tip (direction of warmer temperature on this Earth) peninsula of Antarctica, and we only have records from 1960s. Other stations have recorded temperatures in the 60s F over the years. Whoop de doo, it's called weather.

    Stop the hysteria, it's over nothing

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