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Earth

July Was Earth's Hottest Month on Record (noaa.gov) 99

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: July 2021 has earned the unenviable distinction as the world's hottest month ever recorded, according to new global data released today by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "In this case, first place is the worst place to be," said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. "July is typically the world's warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded. This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe."

The combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees F (0.93 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.8 degrees C), making it the hottest July since records began 142 years ago. It was 0.02 of a degree F (0.01 of a degree C) higher than the previous record set in July 2016, which was then tied in 2019 and 2020.

The Northern Hemisphere: the land-surface only temperature was the highest ever recorded for July, at an unprecedented 2.77 degrees F (1.54 degrees C) above average, surpassing the previous record set in 2012. Regional records: Asia had its hottest July on record, besting the previous record set in 2010; Europe had its second-hottest July on record -- tying with July 2010 and trailing behind July 2018; and North America, South America, Africa and Oceania all had a top-10 warmest July.

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July Was Earth's Hottest Month on Record

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  • This is nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @02:37PM (#61689209)

    Melting ice and glaciers, dry rivers, and ever more greenhouses in the air guarantee we'll see this headline again soon. This is going exponential.

    Given how absolutely clown-shoes our response to COVID is for years running now, given headlines of yet more fracking and oil wells being funded, it's pretty inevitable. We're about to leave the Permian-Triassic mass extinction in the dust.

    Better study what you need to know how to save an ecosystem in critical condition, because otherwise, only archaeologists will know we were ever here.

    • I think we're suppose to be moving to Mars or something. Can't make that place worse than it is.

      • I think we're suppose to be moving to Mars or something. Can't make that place worse than it is.

        You make that sound like a challenge that humanity is bound to overcome.

        • I think we're suppose to be moving to Mars or something. Can't make that place worse than it is.

          You make that sound like a challenge that humanity is bound to overcome.

          Well - Who wouldn't want to live in a cave, go vegan, and die if they went outdoors without a whole lot of protection? And live under almost certainly a dictatorship.

          This is the funny thing - we have people going nuts about how horrible life is on earth - and they think that going to Mars is the cure?

          Last time I checked, the Earth is a nice beautiful place.

          • Well - Who wouldn't want to live in a cave, go vegan, and die if they went outdoors without a whole lot of protection? And live under almost certainly a dictatorship.

            How is this distinct from the life we are being coerced into living by the eco-terrorists? With the dual threats of global warming and COVID-19 we are expected to stay at home, never travel, rarely go outside, and generally isolate ourselves from any human contact. When we do we have to wear a mask, wear sunscreen, hat, sunglasses, get no closer than 6 feet from anyone, avoid crowds, so we can't see the faces of others. Every other person is a walking petri dish carrying some new variant of a deadly dise

            • Well - Who wouldn't want to live in a cave, go vegan, and die if they went outdoors without a whole lot of protection? And live under almost certainly a dictatorship.

              How is this distinct from the life we are being coerced into living by the eco-terrorists?

              Where on earth do you get your news? QAnon? Glenn Beck?

              With the dual threats of global warming and COVID-19 we are expected to stay at home, never travel, rarely go outside, and generally isolate ourselves from any human contact.

              Wow dude - you might get some counseling, because getting through a health crisis is completely separate from the agenda of environmentalists. Or what you call eco terrorists.

              I don't usually advise counseling, but you're in Tinfoil hat territory now with your fascinating ideas.

            • Even if I believed that humans were causing climate change, which I don't, I'd still say that liberty, rather than leftism, socialism, communism or Marxism, would offer humanity BY FAR the best chance to overcome it.

              Same for every challenge that humanity faces.

              That we are being pushed in the very opposite direction, and that this push is now pretty much universal thanks to a lab-manufactured virus and consistent lies from government health agencies nearly all over the world that have exacerbated its spread

      • A little global warming on Mars is not really a bad thing. Thank goodness we are good at that.
    • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @03:01PM (#61689319) Homepage Journal

      Nice FP. Related to this question:

      How much extra water vapor enters the atmosphere for each degree of temperature increase?

      My initial searches came up dry, but I think the answer is a large number. And what goes up into the atmosphere as water vapor comes down wet. As rain. LOTS of rain these days, and in places where it wasn't expected. (While in other places the expected rain is failing to show up...)

    • by ELCouz ( 1338259 )
      Mod Parent UP!.... ran out of points
    • because otherwise, only archaeologists will know we were ever here.

      Hyperbole is part of the reason people don't take climate change seriously, and this is a great example of it. By ending your post like that people will dismiss everything you said as nonsense. "Dasher42 is an idiot if he thinks we're all going to go extinct" is the reply you'll get. Whereas in reality you post has a few great concerns and if it ended up with something more real such as that climate change will lead to mass displacement and very likely many smaller wars you're not providing the deniers any

    • by lorinc ( 2470890 )

      I have come to the conclusion that it's not a question of handling. It's a question of wealth, something deadly engraved in our genes: we have to have more.

      The world consumption exceeds roughly 3 times the earth biocapacity*, so to make it even, we all would have to divide by 3 our standard of living (and bear in mind that a really large part of the population cannot reduce its own because it's already so low). That includes, but is not restricted to: dividing by 3 the surface of your home, dividing by 3 th

      • by amorsen ( 7485 )

        If you think a pandemic is hard, think of a pandemic when health care has become to expensive to be common.

        Health care is one of the least CO2-intensive things we can do. Living life like in a Western nation in the 60's except with 2020-level health care is a pretty darn good outcome.

      • Nobody is going to willingly do that. Especially when they see some not doing it.

        And why would anyone do such nonsense when he only needs to cut down on CO2 production?

        Or do you really think living in a cut down apartment to 1/3rd reduces magically your CO2 output?

        • by lorinc ( 2470890 )

          Heating/cooling your house contributes a big part of your CO2 emissions (around 20% in the USA). Cutting down the size of your apartment reduces as much the energy use for that purpose, which does indeed reduce your carbon footprint. It has nothing to do with magic and more with thermodynamics. I grant you that thermodynamics sometimes looks like magic.

          • You can also insulate your apartment instead of making it smaller.

            I never cool anything artificially :P and I only heat the rooms in use. A smaller apartment would not change anything.

            It has nothing to do with magic and more with thermodynamics.
            Ha nothing to do with Thermodynamics :P

            As Thermodynamics, despite the fact of the word "thermo" has nothing to do with heating or cooling a house :P

  • by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @02:45PM (#61689251) Homepage
    At least we were warned.
  • It's August now. There's no need to worry about the past. As they say, past history is not an indicator of future results.

    • Might explain declining birth rates.

      • Birth rates increase the closer a population is to the equator. Got to have something to do on those restless hot summer nights.

        If you want birth rates to decline it's simple. Make sure that infant mortality is low. If you want to lower it further, make sure women have access to education so they will be encouraged to put off having children until they've graduated high school or college. Want to lower it further? Make sure women have opportunities to build a career and access to benefits that allow them to

  • by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh@@@gmail...com> on Friday August 13, 2021 @02:56PM (#61689297) Journal

    It's important to deny this problem and put our ecosystems in immediate ever-worsening danger in order to preserve the wealth of fossil fuel CEOs and thus the power of conservative politicians who sided with them. Hastening and completing the Anthropocene mass extinction is the only way to prevent an egalitarian socialist future and bring about a hyper-unequal autocratic ethnostate in which almost all of us will be impoverished but some of us will be slightly compensated with racial privilege.

    • It's important to deny this problem and put our ecosystems in immediate ever-worsening danger in order to preserve the wealth of fossil fuel CEOs and thus the power of conservative politicians who sided with them.

      Says the person who pretends years of American buyage of SUVs never existed. Fossil fuel CEOs benefited but let's not pretend we didn't either.

      • How did owning SUVs benefit Americans? They could've hauled just as much with a station wagon. 99%+ of SUVs are never taken off-road. Did it improve their feels somehow? The closest thing to an SUV I've ever owned weighs less than a family sedan, is very light on fuel use, and was taken off-road regularly until recently.

  • 10 hottest years (Score:5, Informative)

    by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @02:57PM (#61689301)

    On month could be an outlier.
    But the 10 hottest years on record are all 2005+, with 8 out of 10 being 2013+

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Oblig (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @04:18PM (#61689679) Journal

    Fake news! CNN doctored the charts with a Sharpie, everyone saw it, believe me! It's so cold I have to use extra thick make-up to keep my face warm. And I had to send my KFC back because it got cold too fast, a terrible terrible thing. I thought KFC wasn't sending their best chicken, but it turned out to be the air, the cold cold air. No legal American citizens should have to put up with cold chicken. I hired top people, the best air people ever, who tell me coal will fix any climate problems. The anti-coal communists will stop at nothing to keep me and coal out of office! #MCGA!

  • ... on your side of earth...
  • ...north-hemisphere-centric?

    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      ...north-hemisphere-centric?

      Winters can be warmer than usual too, even at the same time as a summer is hot.

  • There's a lot of great work out there on people working on solutions. New means of producing energy with low environmental impact. New means of producing carbon neutral fuels. I guess solutions don't get as many clicks as more fear over the problem.

    I'd almost call this FUD but global warming is real, it is happening, but we can fix this. We are NOT all going to die as the heat causes our bodies to burst into flames, only for our burning corpses to be extinguished by the rising seas. We are going to sol

  • When the social collapse happens, that will change carbon foot print of the human race. And the old saying "The bigger they are the hard they fall" will prove true. The more developed countries will fall the hardest. Every body will become a farmer.
    • Social collapse? The only collapsing outside of 3rd world shitholes I've seen are areas in big cities where lawlessness was encouraged by local government and in one case by politician going out of office. Trivial to beat that down when wussiness is thrown out the window.

      • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

        Social collapse? The only collapsing outside of 3rd world shitholes I've seen are areas in big cities where lawlessness was encouraged by local government and in one case by politician going out of office. Trivial to beat that down when wussiness is thrown out the window.

        WTH are you talking about? Crime in cities has generally been trending down for decades.

        • You are correct overall, but I was only talking about certain cities where savages encouraged to run amuck, and prosecutors purposely throwing out cases instead of enforcing the law, letting savages run amuck without rule of law. There are a few notable cities in USA doing just that, e.g. Chicago

    • The more developed countries will fall the hardest.
      Unlikely.
      Solar panels and wind and power lines and water pipes and rail roads do not just stop working for nothing.

      Every body will become a farmer.
      Also unlikely as the northern developed countries most likely lose most of their farmland.

      Every one becomes a pirate and a raider: more likely :P

      Yarrr!

  • It may be accurate, but to say that one 5 minute song on a 45 minute record is the "loudest song on record" is not necessarily meaningful -- or at least not in the way THEY want you to believe it is meaningful.

    Yes indeed, the "Bigest Bump" on the part of the hockey stick we can see (the last 2 inches) occurred just a few microns from the end -- but we will ignore that huge bump 4 feet away at the other end of the stick since we cannot see that part of the stick while looking at this part.

    These morons are th

    • Sitting in the basement of your mother house, writing stupid things, you may not feel the weather.
      You must not even read the news about the fires that are covering the planet.
      You are correct to say that there is thermal noise, BUT the article does state since records are kept.
    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      what huge bump are you talking about?

      I should certainly hope that the planet is warming up as it emerges from an ice age.

      That ended 8000 years ago. We've been out of the ice age that long. The trend from then until 1850 was downwards (some variations, but overall, relentlessly down). This is now the warmest it has been in those 8000 years. Please go and look at some actual facts.

  • We had the warmest July (and June) on record in New Zealand too, but it's Winter here. https://niwa.co.nz/news/record... [niwa.co.nz]

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    "In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet increased by around 8 ÂC over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[3] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 ÂC change over 30â"40 years is more common."

    Oh and what causes them?
    We don't know.
    "..The processe

  • What kills me is how little attention methane release is getting.

    It's way more efficient at trapping heat (orders of magnitude over CO2) and it's being released in droves from permafrost and, even more scarily, marine sediments as the Arctic ocean warms.

    If that sedimentary release begins to be seen globally, we are well and truly fucked -- and not in 100 years, within our lifetime.

    https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org] https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com].

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

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