Links tagged “heatwave”

“In a way, global warming is leading to higher demand for fossil fuels,” says Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at Stockholm-based SEB Bank. “Which is kind of uncomfortable.”

The reason why AP decided to hide the data prior to 1958 becomes immediately obvious. Hot records were far more common not only in the 1930s, but 1950s as well. We also see far fewer cold records since around 1990. It is that lack of cold records which has skewed the ratio of hot/cold, and not an increase in the hot ones.

According to Guy Walton: “You are getting more extremes. Your chances for getting more dangerous extremes are going up with time.”

In fact, the opposite is true. The number of extremes, hot and cold added together, have been getting fewer in recent years...Borenstein claims that we are seeing more and more “record breaking heat” and “more extremes”. The opposite is true. Hot records are less common than in the past, and cold records have become even rarer. As a result, we are seeing a reduction in extreme temperatures.

Bjorn Lomborg: 'Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does.'

But even this report revealed: “Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”

Report also found: On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic [human] influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”

CNN’s headline, screaming that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page. Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today....So, even a 5 percent reduction in the size of the American economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.

The well-reported idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10 percent disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damages of the worst-case temperatures the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.

Conjecturing that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous.

Times climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis suggested Federer’s comments about the hot, humid weather after his defeat made him “an unwitting spokesman for the effects of climate change.” “Under climate change, overall temperatures are rising — 2018 is on track to be the fourth-warmest year on record — but the warming is not happening evenly,” Pierre-Louis wrote on Tuesday.

Atlantic Mag: The suffering caused by a warming and more temperamental environment is already happening, and it isn’t distributed equally, nor will it be...Communities and activists see the road trip—along the 3,000 miles between Miami and San Francisco—as an opportunity to showcase ongoing disasters ahead of next year’s UN climate meeting...a recent study indicated that the virtually all-Latino population of farmworkers in the area faces regular heat-related illnesses'