But I'll Bet You Knew That, Didn't You?

The numbers are in. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded.  It was the month that Canada learned how to make an entire town disappear in a day. Here today, erased tomorrow.

The global land and ocean surface temperature last month was one degree Celsius, 0.9C (1.6F), hotter than the 20th-century average of 15.8C (60.4F), making it the hottest month since modern record keeping began 142 years ago.

“In this case, first place is the worst place to be,” said Rick Spinrad, the administrator of Noaa. “July is typically the world’s warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded. This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe.”

Meanwhile I'm hunkered down, my windows shuttered. It's Day 2 of Heat Dome 2 on the left coast.  The political commentariat is saying we're just days away from an election call. There is a solid consensus that this will be an election fought on one issue, the Covid pandemic. I've yet to hear any party leader even mention the existential threat closing in on Canada. That's understandable. If they were put under scrutiny we'd see that all of them - O'Toole, Trudeau and Singh are manifestly unfit for office.


Comments

  1. TrailblazerAugust 13, 2021 at 7:26 PM

    Apparently if we reached zero carbon emissions tomorrow the heat would still build and for many years.
    The solution is to have less population!
    How will we achieve that?

    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibAugust 14, 2021 at 11:16 AM

      How will we achieve that? We won't. The very idea of co-operatively cutting our numbers down to size opens a can of worms the West won't touch. In other words, the political will doesn't exist because it inevitably raises questions we don't want to answer such as resource equity, decarbonization, on and on.

      The developed nations won't commit economic and social suicide which means we need to continue taking the lion's share of global resources and emitting the lion's share of greenhouse gases, etc. That we're passing a death sentence on perhaps billions of poorer and vulnerable people is something we'll probably avoid discussing until after the fact when most of us will be ready to swallow any denialist crap.

      Delete

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