This summer? This winter was insane as well! (at least in my area). Two weeks of actually below zero, and virtually no snow outside of those two weeks this entire summer. The average temperature, once you exclude those two weeks, was like +5-10! It felt like we were living a good 20 degrees further south or something this winter.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It’s been a wild ride,” said Danny Blair, co-director of the Prairie Climate Centre at the University of Winnipeg.
In British Columbia, once the “wet coast,” 28 out of 34 river basins were at the province’s top two drought levels.
Ranchers were selling cattle that they couldn’t grow enough hay to feed, and low streamflows were threatening salmon runs.
There were also fires that spread smoke across the continent and into Europe, where “Canadian wildfires” made headlines from the New York Times to Germany’s nightly news.
Tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes, hundreds of houses were destroyed and four firefighters have been killed.
“But the frequency of it and the severity of it and the coinciding of it with enormous extremes of weather in the U.S. and across the world is suggesting to a lot of people that something’s changed.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If we gotta have scientists tell us that, we have serious issues. The time for scientist warnings was like fifty years ago, when people could pretend not to see the future badness. And those warnings were there, ignored by many, especially by people in power.
They published this in Popular Mechanics in 1912, we’ve been ignoring this for a long time:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” the article reads. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
Also, this Wikipedia article has a good summary on the overall arc of our understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
Something’s changed, but if we close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears we can continue business as usual
This Hank green video has an interesting take on this https://youtu.be/dk8pwE3IByg
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/dk8pwE3IByg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Almost like we’ve entered this El Niño thing huh.
