Nothing to see here....22/3/2024Conversation shifted between two...

Nothing to see here....22/3/2024

Conversation shifted between two topics. One was the unprecedented, horrifying heat the world has experienced over the past year. The second was the fierce debate that has broken out between climate experts around the world about what the temperatures might mean, and what has driven them so high, so fast.
In one camp is Professor James Hansen, famous as the NASA scientist who in 1988 warned the United States Congress that global warming was not just a real phenomenon, but one that was already observably changing our climate.

He now believes that warming is accelerating faster than scientists had anticipated, that the climate models relied upon by world governments have a built-in flaw that is underestimating warming, and that the Paris Accord’s ambition of holding warming to 1.5 degrees has already failed.

Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climatologist with the University of California, Berkeley, says it is hard to capture the extraordinary heat of the previous year by looking at averages. Instead, he looks at the awful peaks, noting extremes recorded in the Arctic and Antarctic, parts of Asia and the AmericasAlso lending weight to Hansen’s analysis have been the extreme temperatures recorded as recently as this week. Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian who monitors extreme weather events, has a social media feed that is now a litany of shattered records. “South Africa is living a madness. Months with thousands of records destroyed every day,” he wrote on Wednesday. “Today 45.1C at Vioolsdrif, latest 45C in Southern Africa history.”. For periods of the northern summer, the waters off parts of Florida reached an unimaginable 38 degrees, beating a previous world-record water surface temperature in Kuwait Bay in 2020. “That is a hot-tub temperature,” he says.
Days before he noted a temperature recorded in Turkmenistan of 35 degrees, 10 degrees above the previous record. “Latin America is boiling from Mexico to Argentina,” he wrote a day earlier. “Guyana 37.4 at Lethem, hottest March day in Guyana history set twice in few days.”