Deadly heat wave in Asia
For weeks during April and May, searing heat roasted India and Thailand. More than 500 people died because of the heat.
A small town in northwest India reached 123.8 degrees — the hottest temperature that country has ever measured. In Thailand, it was the longest heat wave in at least 65 years.
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Far-north Pacific Ocean warming
Thousands of exotic crabs showed up on South California beaches. A Galapagos sea turtle appeared near San Francisco. Mahi-mahi could be caught off the coast of Oregon. And a toxic algal bloom erupted along the west coasts of the United States and Canada.
All of this was possible because of the incredible warmth in the North Pacific Ocean.
Ocean temperatures were as much as 6 degrees warmer than normal in 2016. It was the second year in a row that the warmth was present, and scientists colloquially nicknamed it “the blob.”
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Here’s what that heat-sink of a “Blob” looks like in real life …
The third Extreme Event “scientifically link” with Climate Change was “the 2016 record global heat” [which was “was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the average in the 20th century,” according to NPR link in the intro]. Here are some of the details from the source report itself:
Global annual-mean surface temperature set a record high in 2016 in at least three observational datasets — GISTEMP (Hansen et al. 2010), HadCRUT4.5 (Morice et al. 2012), and NOAA (Karl et al. 2015) — exceeding the previous record set in 2015 (Fig. 3.1a). In contrast, the last global mean annual cold record occurred around 1910. Record global warmth implies some record warmth on regional scales as well (Kam et al. 2016), which can cause important impacts such as thermal stress, coral bleaching, and melting of sea and land ice (IPCC 2013). Decreased land ice, combined with ocean heat uptake, contributes to sea level rise, which can exacerbate coastal flooding extremes (e.g., Lin et al. 2016).
Figure 3.1 compares observed global-mean temperature anomalies with simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5; Taylor et al. 2012; Table ES3.1).
Record warmth in 2016 largely follows a pronounced century-scale warming trend, and was far outside the range of internal (un-forced) climate variability sampled across over 24000 years of CMIP5 Control simulations (Fig. 3.1c) [...]
Here is that Chart of the record Observed Heat vs Climate Models (un-forced by CO2) as the baselines. Subcharts b and c have “baselines” in blue and in gold. In those terms, the global temperature trendlines are very ‘off base’. In Subchart d, the blue line is the “Natural Forcing” line; notice the dip in response to the eruption of Mt Pinatubo. The Observed Temperature lines, are all climbing skyward, unfortunately for 98.6-tuned creatures.
This will be quite unfortunate for any finely tuned eco-system too. Say like, farming … or wildfires … floods.
Live and learn. Or sometimes live, and don’t learn. It’s truly amazing we’ve gotten as far as we have in that regard, as species with a stunted capacity for making long-term course corrections.
Some future Darwin, will have a field day studying US.
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Sometimes we just can’t see the forest, for the trees …
Enjoy it while it lasts … “sometimes you just don’t know what you got — til it’s gone.”