Saturday, June 11, 2016

Global Weirding


It was 71F in New York City on Thursday. Nothing particularly notable in that.

It was 74F in Nuuk on Thursday, something that's very notable.

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland and 74F (23.2C) is the highest June temperature ever recorded in that Arctic country. Highest, warmest, hottest - call it what you like.

Thursday’s toasty reading in Nuuk marks the second exceptionally warm temperature recorded in southwest Greenland since April, when the ice melt season began about a month prematurely.

7 comments:

Toby said...

This cannot end well. One wonders why all seven billion of us aren't in a panic, why only a few of us even notice.

The Mound of Sound said...

I regularly question if there's really any point in bothering with this any longer. When people are not directly and immediately affected, these events are consigned to the Memory Hole. Even the most significant matters rarely survive more than a week.

As I mentioned to friend, Lorne, a few days ago, I'll stay my decision until 2020 when "climate departure" is predicted to set in. This is when a new climate takes over in which every year is hotter than the hottest year on record from the pre-departure era.

The Caribbean is one of the areas identified to be affected first. How will they cope with a permanently hotter climate. Ditto for Central America where the people are already reeling. How will the U.S. respond to a refugee influx that could match or exceed what Europe has experienced from Syria? We'll know soon enough.

Anonymous said...

Wierd? Eye before eeehh! except after double U.

Lorne said...

I saw a report last night on Global News, Mound, that shows what we could do in terms of eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels. What we could do and what we will do, of course, are two separate issues. The report in question starts at the nine-minute mark:

http://globalnews.ca/news/2756299/snake-falls-from-cars-dashboard-onto-arkansas-drivers-feet/?utm_source=Other&utm_medium=MostPopular&utm_campaign=2014

The Mound of Sound said...

Anon 5:01 - got it, thanks. Therein lies the lesson of always proofreading before posting.

The Mound of Sound said...

Lorne, I couldn't get past the item about the lady who bought the cheap, used freezer only to find a human foot in it. I much preferred the earlier item about the rat snake that slithered out of the lady's dashboard as she was motoring down the highway. Why is Global running these stories? Why?

The Mound of Sound said...

Hi, Lorne. I tracked down the item. Yes we could be a clean energy nation by 2050 if only we and the world had the luxury of that much time. Yet if we were to adopt a target date, and no Canadian government has done that, there would be no point in constructing new hazmat dilbit pipelines to "tidewater" or Christy Clark's LNG fantasy. The pathology of governance of any petrostate is an inability to resist the low-hanging fruit where, for a couple of okays, foreign companies come in and handle the extraction and transportation of your resources and, every now and then mail you a nice juicy cheque.

Yes we can, yes we could, yes we should, but there's no sign of the political will and public demand to do it.