“No one wanted to pay attention to the implications of a world four degrees warmer… It's too horrendous to think about. And no one talked about it. Then a few scientists said let's have a conference and actually talk about it. They held this conference in Oxford and I went along. As the conference started, there was a kind of suppressed emotional intensity, except in the coffee breaks. It was then that I would buttonhole a couple of scientists and say: 'Well, you know we're speculating about this. But what do you really think is the situation?' And one of them just looked at me and said: 'We're f--ked.'" – Clive Hamilton
As human caused greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, the toll from heat waves is expected to rise as a result, to the detriment of all. “Temperatures will smash records as carbon dioxide, methane and other gases continue warming the planet. Heat waves will be longer, hotter and more frequent in the future.”
“Beyond deaths, researchers are documenting that heat robs us of sleep, of smarts and of healthy births.” Every living thing on earth will experience its effect at some point in the future (and that includes the world’s wildlife, agricultural crops, fish, livestock and fresh water).
And yet despite all of the evidence around us of dying forests, tundra thawing, grasslands being turned to agricultural land, the world’s great ice sheets fracturing and melting, increasing rates of drought, floods, wildfire and storms that we are on the edge of the abyss and yet, we ignore all the flashing warning signs of biosphere collapse.
NOAA’s new analysis of heat wave patterns in the continental United States.
A new analysis of heat wave patterns appearing today in Nature Climate Change concludes that climate change driven by the buildup of human-caused greenhouse gases will overtake natural variability as the main cause of heat waves in the western United States by the late 2020s and by the mid-2030s in the Great Lakes region.
“These are the years that climate change outweighs natural variability as the cause of heat waves in these regions,” said Hosmay Lopez, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory and the University of MiamiCooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, and lead author of the study. “Without human influence, half of the extreme heat waves projected to occur in the future wouldn’t happen.”
The research also found that climate change would replace natural variability as the main cause of heat waves in the northern and southern Plains in the 2050s and 2070s, respectively. Researchers defined heat waves as three or more consecutive days when temperatures rose to levels among the top five hottest days of the year for a region.
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Extreme heat has been the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States for the past 30 years, according to US natural hazard statistics.
This map shows when climate change, driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, is predicted to be the dominant cause of heat waves in four regions, according to new NOAA and University of Miami research.