A heat wave that has stifled the southern tier of the U.S. for weeks has expanded into the Plains, Midwest and now the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Thursday, triggering heat alerts for over 227 million people, according to the National Weather Service.
I’ve been sad because I know I’ll never be able to retire, no matter how hard I work, but now I’m realizing I can stop being sad about that because there will be no world or civilization around by the time I’m old enough to retire. The earth and humanity will still exist but I highly doubt things will still resemble what they do today. One way or another, it seems like things are going to drastically change. We can’t sustain this for another 40 years
🔥🔥🔥 🐶 🔥 🔥🔥
This is fine
I’ve been having to start taking showers in the morning because I wake up sweating, and I’ve only been going outside when I absolutely have to. These triple digits are suffocating me. Like I know I should expect it due to the area I live in, but jesus christ, I can’t wait until September.
I had someone earlier today tell me, “Don’t worry! We’ll be in the low 90s by the end of August!” I don’t think that’s any better T-T
“It’s 1°C. That’s not a lot.”
It’s 1°C on average. That means every molecule of air has AT LEAST 1°C extra thermal energy. And I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, there’s a lot of air molecules. So while taking one cubic centimeter of air and increasing it by 1°C isn’t a ton of energy. Do that for roughly all 109 tredecitillion molecules and you get about 2.2 zettajoules of energy. Annual US energy consumption is just 0.094 zettajoules. So one degree increase is equal to more energy than the US uses in 23½ years. The biggest nuclear bomb humans ever made, that pulls in at about 0.00021 zettajoules. So one degree is roughly 10,500 Tasr Bombas going off and then the resulting heat just never leaving.
All of that energy. It has to go somewhere. Sometimes it makes ice turn to water, sometimes it increases the speed at which some wind is moving, sometimes it increases the surface temperature of land, sometimes it evaporates water leaving an area very dry. But it has to go somewhere. And it cannot just radiate back out into space, it hits a CO₂ molecule, bounces off of it, and flies right back down to Earth. And the more CO₂ molecules we put out there, the more often that happens.
Huh this is the first thing I’ve read that puts it into a sort of understandable perspective (eternally recovering from my conservative raised childhood, maybe sane people explain it better in general)
If you want a feeling for how your local temperatures will change you can extrapolate the peaks linearly. So if we look at London Uk as an Example https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0394/production/_125961900_optimised-max_temp_uk-nc-002.png.webp
With a global mean temperature increase of 1 C since 1970 there was an increase in peak temperatures (avg) of about 2 C. So till 2050 it will be somewhere around 3 C for the average peak in summer. If we look at the ramp up since 2008 we can expect more like 5-6 C higher temperature records than today. So in the 2050s there will be some summers with 45 C records and the average hottest day every year around 35-37 C
Edit: and not to forget that this is only talking about how high the peaks every year are. The length of heatwaves will also increase by a few days. So where it was maybe 32 for three days and then 35 for one day, followed by a cooling thunderstorm it will be more like five days of 35 followed by a day of 37 and then a much more intense thunderstorm than what we know today.
According to weather.gov the record here was 102 in 1911…
It is indeed
according to weather.gov it was 46 F on 7/28 here in 1946…that’s the record low; 102 F was the record high on 7/28 in 1911
