Attention to the Unseen

Eric Holthaus writes: July 2019 is now the hottest month in recorded history, the U.N. confirmed on Thursday. At a press conference in New York, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres announced that the month of July had reached 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a figure that “at least equaled if not surpassed the hottest month in recorded history,” according to data released by the World Meteorological Organization. Temperature information from July is still streaming in, but preliminary data show…

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Eric Holthaus reports: Amid an ongoing heat wave, new data show the Greenland ice sheet is in the middle of its biggest melt season in recorded history. It’s the latest worrying signal climate change is accelerating far beyond the worst fears of even climate scientists. The record-setting heat wave that sweltered northern Europe last week has moved north over the critically vulnerable Greenland ice sheet, triggering temperatures this week that are as much as 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer…

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The Washington Post reports: Steve Perrins didn’t see the lightning, but he couldn’t miss the smoke that followed. It was around dinnertime on July 23 at Alaska’s oldest hunting lodge, nestled in the wilderness more than 100 miles northwest of Anchorage. What began as a quiet evening at the Rainy Pass Lodge soon turned frantic as Alaska’s latest wildfire spread fast. The Alaska National Guard soon evacuated 26 people and two dogs by helicopter from the lodge, which serves as…

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The New York Times reports: In many coastal states, flood-prone areas have seen the highest rates of home construction since 2010, a study found, suggesting that the risks of climate change have yet to fundamentally change people’s behavior. The study, by Climate Central, a New Jersey research group, looked at the 10-year flood risk zone — the area with a 10 percent chance of flooding in any given year — and estimated the zone’s size in 2050. Then the group…

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Bob Henson writes: Even a seemingly minor change in average temperature, such as the 1°C rise observed globally over the last century, makes the most extreme heat events much more probable—and the greater the extreme, the bigger the proportional change, as shown in the illustration embedded below. The good ol' small-increases-in-the-mean-lead-to-large-increases-in-extremes bit. Works everytime, everywhere. https://t.co/ZUgmI1TBzz pic.twitter.com/nhqUzPLVFJ — Gernot Wagner (@GernotWagner) July 25, 2019 There’s bitter irony in the fact that the birthplace of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on…

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The Guardian reports: Leading architects and engineers are calling for all-glass skyscrapers to be banned because they are too difficult and expensive to cool. “If you’re building a greenhouse in a climate emergency, it’s a pretty odd thing to do to say the least,” said Simon Sturgis, an adviser to the government and the Greater London Authority, as well as chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects sustainability group. “If you’re using standard glass facades you need a lot…

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BBC News reports: Wildfires are ravaging the Arctic, with areas of northern Siberia, northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Greenland engulfed in flames. Lightning frequently triggers fires in the region but this year they have been worsened by summer temperatures that are higher than average because of climate change. Plumes of smoke from the fires can be seen from space. Mark Parrington, a wildfires expert at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams), described them as “unprecedented”. There are hundreds of fires covering…

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The Washington Post reports: A historic heat wave has toppled numerous long-standing temperature records with astonishing ease. On Wednesday and Thursday, new national heat records were set in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and temperatures rose to record highs in major cities such as Paris, which soared to 109 degrees. This is the hottest Paris has been in recorded history. The heat wave, caused by a massive area of high pressure extending into the upper atmosphere, also known as a…

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