Death Valley’s 113°: Hottest April Temperature On Record In U.S.
Nearly every weather station in the Inter-mountain West has broken, tied, or come within 1- 2 °F of their all-time record April heat record since Sunday. Most notably, the 113°F measured at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California on Sunday, April 22 was tied for the hottest April temperature ever recorded in the U.S.
According to wunderground weather historian Christopher C. Burt, the hottest reliable April temperature ever measured in the U.S. was 113°F in Parker, Arizona in 1898. A 113°F reading was also taken at Catarina, Texas in April 1984. A hotter 118°F reading measured at Volcano Springs, CA in April 1898 is considered unreliable, since we don’t know much about the exposure conditions or if the thermometers were even in shelters at remote California desert stations back in the 1880s and 1890s. The previous hottest April day in Death Valley was 111°F. Yesterday, the high temperature in Death Valley “cooled off” to 110°F, merely the third highest April temperature ever measured there. The heat wave peaked Sunday and Monday, and temperatures will be closer to normal for the remainder of the week.
As is often the case when a major Nor’easter is affecting the Eastern U.S., the record-breaking heat is due to a contortion of the jet stream that has created a strong ridge of high pressure over the Western U.S. Wunderground’s extremes page lists 56 stations in the West in the past four days that have tied or broken all-time heat records for the month of April, including:
Phoenix, Arizona: 105°F (previous 105° April temperatures occurred on 4/20/1989 and 4/29/1992)
Las Vegas, Nevada: 99°F (tying old record set 4/30/1981)
Reno, NV: 90° (old record 89° 4/30/1981)
Elko, NV: 87° (old record 86° 4/30/1981). This also beat the previous so-warm-so-early-in-the-season record by 4°
Ely, NV: 84° (old record 82° 4/28/1992)
Winnemucca, NV: 90° (tying old record set 4/30/1981)
Grand Junction, CO: 89° (tying all-time April record also set on 4/29 and 4/30, 1992)Boise, ID (91°) and Salt Lake City (88°) both came within 1°F of their record April max.
When our own (in)actions threaten the planet, we question science, bicker about responsibility, and generally ignore it.
We are, truly, our own worst enemies.”
_
That aliens premise is based on history, psychology, and Will Smith movies.
(via realcleverscience)
![mohandasgandhi:
The Pacific nation of Kiribati is negotiating to buy land in Fiji so it can move islanders under threat from rising sea levels, in what could be the first climate-induced relocation of a country.
Anote Tong, the Kiribati President, said he was in talks with Fiji’s military government to buy up to 2000 hectares of freehold land on which his 113,000 countrymen could resettle.
[…]
”This is the last resort, there’s no way out of this one,” Mr Tong said. ”Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages.”
(Continue reading…)
[Image via]
It’s time to start seriously talking about climate change. It should have never gotten to this point.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0qf1bzveW1qzhl7go1_1280.gif)
Anote Tong, the Kiribati President, said he was in talks with Fiji’s military government to buy up to 2000 hectares of freehold land on which his 113,000 countrymen could resettle.
[…]
”This is the last resort, there’s no way out of this one,” Mr Tong said. ”Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages.”
[Image via]
It’s time to start seriously talking about climate change. It should have never gotten to this point.
Senator Inhofe Says Only God Can Change The Global Climate
James Inhofe, Oklahoma Senator (R) and self-anointed global warming and climate change denier, says only God has the power to change the global climate. During a radio interview to promote his new book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe said people are arrogant to think that humans can change the climate.
excerpt of Inhofe’s interview with Voice of Christian Youth America:
Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night. My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
Astrophysicist deGrasse Tyson schools former GM exec Lutz on climate change
Popular astrophysicist –and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History– Neil deGrasse Tyson schooled former vice-chairman of General Motors Bob Lutz on the reality of climate change during Friday night’s edition of Real Time with Bill Maher.
After being baited by Maher on the subject of global warming, the unfortunately-named Lutz insisted that climate change was a “total crock of shit.”
As one would expect, deGrasse Tyson countered his argument with facts.
“You take all the scientists who author these papers, get them to pool their money and invest in companies that would benefit from global warming. And take all the people who are in denial of global warming, take all their money and invest in companies that would presume there is no global warming. And I would predict… you will all go broke in the next 50 years,” deGrasse Tyson said.
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming
An excellent resource for refuting overused, false arguments against global warming.
(Source: thedismembermentflan)
The Great Carbon Bubble
If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.
[…]
Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40 percent over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.
And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journalpublished an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned outmostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.
Engineers have found a way to cut the CO2 and energy footprint of cement by 97 percent - and the recipe's much cheaper, too.
A Drexel University team has created an alkali-activated cement based on an industrial byproduct, slag, and simple limestone, and which doesn’t require heating to produce.
[…]
In contrast to ordinary Portland cement, Drexel’s cement is made of up to 68 percent unfired limestone, a plentiful, cheap, and low-carbon dioxide resource. To this base, a small amount of commercial alkali chemical is added along with the iron slag byproduct.
In Portland cement the substitute for this mixture, called clinker, is produced by firing a number of ingredients in a kiln, thus requiring more energy and generating more carbon dioxide.
“Our results and the literature confirm that it performs as well or better than OPC,” says Dr Michel W Barsoum.
This seems too good to be true.
We’ll see what happens.
Climate Change Killing Yellow Cedar Trees In Alaska
U.S. Forest Service researchers have confirmed what has long been suspected about a valuable tree in Alaska’s Panhandle: Climate warming is killing off yellow cedar.
The mighty trees can live more than 1,000 years, resisting bugs and rot and even defending themselves against injury, but their shallow roots are vulnerable to freezing if soil is not insulated by snow. And for more than a century, with less snow on the ground, frozen roots have killed yellow cedar on nearly a half-million acres in southeast Alaska, plus another 123,000 acres in adjacent British Columbia.
But Santorum said climate change is a hoax!
Because science won’t save us if biodiversity fails, a global effort is underway to collect and cache the genetic resources contained in seeds.
By now you’ve probably heard about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. While it was under construction, and then as it opened in February 2008, the media couldn’t get enough of the “Doomsday” seed bank. We learned that the bomb-proof concrete bunker was encased in permafrost, 130 meters-deep inside the sandstone of a Norwegian mountain. It would store copies of seeds currently housed in the more than 1,400 gene banks worldwide, so that should calamity strike any of those gene banks, Svalbard’s seeds would save the collections—and thus humanity—from the jaws of famine.
Maybe it was the nickname “Doomsday” vault. Or maybe it was the remote location, north of the Arctic Circle where no trees grow. Whatever the reason, people have tended to associate Svalbard with some catastrophic scenario—one unlucky summer when locusts tear across the Midwest, an airborne fungus rains over Africa, and China’s soybeans succumb to asteroid strike or nuclear war. But Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and intellectual father of the Svalbard Seed Vault, believes that apocalypse has already crept on us. “By the end of the century, average temperatures during growing seasons in many regions will probably be higher than the very hottest temperatures now,” he says, citing a recent paper in Science. “By 2030, we could see a 30 percent drop in maize production in Southern Africa; 2030 is only two crop generations away. We’re not talking about some time in the distant future when we all expect to be dead. We certainly can’t wake up in 2029 and decide to do something.” The millions of seed samples in gene banks worldwide will be invaluable for plant geneticists and breeders looking for new traits to develop the crops of 2030, Fowler says.
Those national and international banks, however, are vulnerable to floods, fires, earthquakes, and other natural hazards, as well as war and civil strife. Surprisingly, the most pervasive danger is plain old poor maintenance. “Conditions are pretty dismal in many of these places,” said Fowler. “Most seed banks simply don’t have the resources or manpower to maintain their stocks.” Once a sample falls below an 85 percent germination rate, the genes within those seeds are in danger of being lost forever. Fowler estimates that 50 percent of the world’s seed stores currently fail the test.
(Source: sunrec)
I don’t care much for the rest of this article, but this picture is badass.
The effect of global warming on the statue of liberty.
A hotter planet means disappearing glaciers and ice, especially in the Arctic.
Ice in the Arctic continues to thin and disappear, even faster than anticipated. Arctic sea ice extent during September 2011 (the month when ice is at a minimum) was nearly 35 percent below the 1979-2000 average — the second smallest September Arctic sea ice extent since precise records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. And it wasn’t just September: overall, 2011 Arctic ice extent (that bottom blue line) was far below the long-term average for every single month.
![anticapitalist:
(highres)
Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple),Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange). This has been added to the SkS Climate Graphics Page.
A Comprehensive Review of the Causes of Global Warming
As we know, human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions warm the planet by increasing the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thus increasing the greenhouse effect.
Solar activity also warms or cools the planet by increasing or decreasing the amount of radiation reaching the Earth’s atmosphere and surface.
Volcanic activity generally cools the planet over short timeframes by releasing sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, which block sunlight and reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface. However, unlike many greenhouse gases, aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere quickly, mostly after just 1-2 years. Thus the main volcanic impact on long-term temperature changes occur when there is an extended period of particularly high or low volcanic activity.
Human aerosol emissions (primarily sulfur dioxide [SO2]) also tend to cool the planet. The main difference is that unlike volcanoes, humans are constantly pumping large quantities of aerosols in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and biomatter. This allows human aerosol emissions to have a long-term impact on temperatures, as long as we keep burning these fuels. However, because aerosols have a number of different effects (including directly by blocking sunlight, and indirectly by seeding clouds, which both block sunlight and increase the greenhouse effect), the magnitude of their cooling effect is one of the biggest remaining uncertainties in climate science.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an oceanic cycle which alternates between El Niño and La Niña phases. El Niño tends to shift heat from the oceans to the air, causing surface warming (but ocean cooling), whereas La Niña acts in the opposite manner. As we’ll see, a few studies have begun examining whether ENSO has had a long-term impact on global surface temperatures. Because it’s a cycle/oscillation, it tends to have little impact on long-term temperature changes, with the effects of La Niña canceling out those of El Niño.
There are other effects, but GHGs and SO2 are the two largest human influences, and solar and volcanic activity and ENSO are the dominant natural influences on global temperature.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly4rrdac1y1qfa5xpo1_500.png)
Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple),Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange). This has been added to the SkS Climate Graphics Page.
A Comprehensive Review of the Causes of Global Warming
As we know, human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions warm the planet by increasing the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thus increasing the greenhouse effect.
Solar activity also warms or cools the planet by increasing or decreasing the amount of radiation reaching the Earth’s atmosphere and surface.
Volcanic activity generally cools the planet over short timeframes by releasing sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, which block sunlight and reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface. However, unlike many greenhouse gases, aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere quickly, mostly after just 1-2 years. Thus the main volcanic impact on long-term temperature changes occur when there is an extended period of particularly high or low volcanic activity.
Human aerosol emissions (primarily sulfur dioxide [SO2]) also tend to cool the planet. The main difference is that unlike volcanoes, humans are constantly pumping large quantities of aerosols in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and biomatter. This allows human aerosol emissions to have a long-term impact on temperatures, as long as we keep burning these fuels. However, because aerosols have a number of different effects (including directly by blocking sunlight, and indirectly by seeding clouds, which both block sunlight and increase the greenhouse effect), the magnitude of their cooling effect is one of the biggest remaining uncertainties in climate science.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an oceanic cycle which alternates between El Niño and La Niña phases. El Niño tends to shift heat from the oceans to the air, causing surface warming (but ocean cooling), whereas La Niña acts in the opposite manner. As we’ll see, a few studies have begun examining whether ENSO has had a long-term impact on global surface temperatures. Because it’s a cycle/oscillation, it tends to have little impact on long-term temperature changes, with the effects of La Niña canceling out those of El Niño.
There are other effects, but GHGs and SO2 are the two largest human influences, and solar and volcanic activity and ENSO are the dominant natural influences on global temperature.
Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple),Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange). This has been added to the SkS Climate Graphics Page.
A Comprehensive Review of the Causes of Global Warming
As we know, human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions warm the planet by increasing the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thus increasing the greenhouse effect.
Solar activity also warms or cools the planet by increasing or decreasing the amount of radiation reaching the Earth’s atmosphere and surface.
Volcanic activity generally cools the planet over short timeframes by releasing sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, which block sunlight and reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface. However, unlike many greenhouse gases, aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere quickly, mostly after just 1-2 years. Thus the main volcanic impact on long-term temperature changes occur when there is an extended period of particularly high or low volcanic activity.
Human aerosol emissions (primarily sulfur dioxide [SO2]) also tend to cool the planet. The main difference is that unlike volcanoes, humans are constantly pumping large quantities of aerosols in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and biomatter. This allows human aerosol emissions to have a long-term impact on temperatures, as long as we keep burning these fuels. However, because aerosols have a number of different effects (including directly by blocking sunlight, and indirectly by seeding clouds, which both block sunlight and increase the greenhouse effect), the magnitude of their cooling effect is one of the biggest remaining uncertainties in climate science.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an oceanic cycle which alternates between El Niño and La Niña phases. El Niño tends to shift heat from the oceans to the air, causing surface warming (but ocean cooling), whereas La Niña acts in the opposite manner. As we’ll see, a few studies have begun examining whether ENSO has had a long-term impact on global surface temperatures. Because it’s a cycle/oscillation, it tends to have little impact on long-term temperature changes, with the effects of La Niña canceling out those of El Niño.
There are other effects, but GHGs and SO2 are the two largest human influences, and solar and volcanic activity and ENSO are the dominant natural influences on global temperature.
