I noticed the other day on the TV news that there’s a new category of weather to go with “extreme weather” and “severe weather”: “severe heat.” The West has been ablaze, as everyone knows. Heat records are being broken, as are fire records. It’s staggering. These new TV weather categories are clearly meant to update the weather for climate change, while ensuring that climate change itself remains on the shelf (along with the burning of fossil fuels, the giant oil companies, etc., etc., etc). So you can hear about the eye-ball-gluing nightmare of what’s happening in the West without ever quite running into the sort of material that the BBC ran the other day under the headline “Climate extremes are ‘unprecedented.’” Here are just a few paragraphs that should make anyone stop and think about the particular form of potential weather suicide that humanity may be involved in. via TomDispatch “The Earth experienced unprecedented recorded climate extremes during the decade 2001-2010, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Its new report says more national temperature records were reported broken than in previous decades. “The decade was the warmest for both hemispheres and for both land and ocean surface temperatures. The record warmth was accompanied by a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, and accelerating loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and from glaciers. “Global mean sea levels rose about 3mm per year - about double the observed 20th century trend of 1.6mm per year. Global sea level averaged over the decade was about 20cm higher than in 1880.” bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23154073
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 22:23:44 +0000
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