#increasing temperatures

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this article from The New Yorker, written by Bill McKibben:

Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows.

As 2024 began, we’d just finished the most remarkable year in the planet’s modern climate history—2023 had shattered every global record for temperature, with researchers firm in the conviction that our planet had seen its hottest average temperatures in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. But, even as they watched the mercury soar, they weren’t completely sure why: temperatures seemed to be rising even before an El Niño warming in the Pacific fully kicked in. In a remarkably candid essay this March in Nature, NASA’s chief climatologist, Gavin Schmidt, said, “The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.” If temperatures hadn’t settled back to something more like a consistent rise by late summer 2024, he noted, that would imply “that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”

In the event, this August was the warmest August on record, and most of the other months of 2024 also broke records; it now seems certain that, when meteorological officials announce their results early in January, this will again have been the hottest year ever measured. Scientists still can’t explain what’s causing the spike, which sits atop the steady ramp in temperature over the past few decades. As Schmidt said in an October interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, “it’s still pretty much, I would say, amateur hour in terms of assessing” what’s going on. The proffered explanations—the eruption of a submarine volcano in the South Pacific that put a lot of heat-trapping water vapor into the air, the phase-out of high-sulfur fuels in oceangoing ships that reduced heat-reflecting pollution—don’t seem large enough to account for what the thermometers are measuring; it’s possible that we may have tripped some switches we don’t understand in the global climate system.

What we do understand is bad enough. In September, Hurricane Helene swept across the Gulf of Mexico, turning from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane in barely more than a day—the kind of “rapid intensification” that researchers increasingly see as a hallmark of a warming ocean. It moved so fast that it carried the freight of rain that it picked up over the record-hot waters of the Gulf far inland; in the mountains just north of Asheville, radar estimates suggested rainfall totals of up to forty inches. That water inundated the cricks and hollows of southern Appalachia—the death toll from the storm sits at two hundred and forty-one (making it the deadliest to hit the U.S. since Maria devastated Puerto Rico, in 2017), and the economic damage is nearing a hundred billion dollars, making it one of the costliest storms since Katrina. But the pictures from a ravaged North Carolina looked an awful lot like pictures from devastated parts of southern Europe or northern Africa or Brazil or Southeast Asia—if you look on YouTube, you can find a near-daily flood of flood pictures, with floating cars careening down the streets of mountain towns.

There seems to be just one way left to even start to slow down that torrent, and that’s to rapidly replace coal, gas, and oil with sun, wind, and batteries—and if you’re trying to avoid existential despair, there are stories and numbers this year worth focussing on. Solar power expanded so rapidly in 2023 (eighty-six per cent up on 2022 worldwide) that some wondered whether the charge could continue this year; it did, with the best guess being we will see a further growth of nearly thirty per cent this year. We’ve clearly moved into the steep part of the S-curve of clean-energy expansion, where even the most optimistic forecasts are consistently surpassed, and at the moment we appear to be installing a gigawatt’s worth of photovoltaic panels (roughly the size of a nuclear power plant) every eighteen hours or so.

[mapledrawsarts]

Headcanon Leafy design 🍃

[pillowfort-social]

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[barksbog]

my girls!!

[cowboymbeepbop]

(As requested) Harvey being extra kissy around his favorite farmer 💋. Of course, he should expect the same treatment 🩺🩹

[t00thpasteface]

i wanna go on T just to get a handlebar mustache so people stop thinking i'm 19. i want literally no other side effects. well i wouldn't say no to a voice deep enough to shout the high king apart

[pinacoladamatata]

You know I absolutely did not have "reawakening of solavellan hyperfixation" on my 2024 bingo card but now that we're here... I love it. It feels so familiar. I missed y'all

[daisychainsandbowties]

maybe playing The Video Game instead of sleeping will fix me

[disagigglebilities]

Doing dumb shit that won't get me anywhere but you never know.

Gonna ask if I can get a reasonable accommodation for a window a/c unit because they turn the air conditioning off in the building when it still gets to 80° daily.

I can't handle temps this high with my pots. It's making me miserable and triggering my tachycardia when it shouldn't be

I won't get it because the landlord sucks ass but man fuck it can't hurt to try

[saisons-en-enfer]

Out of curiosity I asked ChatGPT how much longer earth will be habitable… and one of the human factors was and I kid you not

“AI and biotechnology - if not controlled and regulated will lead to existential crises”

An AI said this

I just asked because people kept asking me why I don’t want children along with my reasoning for when I say humanity will be extinct in 50 years

[reneefangirlsoverstuff]

boredom so bad im writing fanfiction in the notepad on my laptop

[splonkblonk]

knees are warm. surely that's normal, I will continue to ignore as usual

[seraristuff]

Speed of ants??

[lixenn]

It's fucking snowing.

Why.

WHY IS IT SNOWING???

IT'S FUCKING APRIL WEATHER GODS, HELL IT'S NEARLY MAY GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND GIVE ME SPRING YOUR SEASONALLY CHALLENGED DIPSHITS

[nihils-trolls]

It's fun to think about psionics for me sometimes, because it's literally like if magic was part of your inherent biology instead of some outside force.

It's an organ in you that produces this wild effect from something special- "psionic energy." And brains are notorious for doing weird shit sometimes in humans. How is it affected by your emotions? By injury? By disease? What triggers them outside of your intentional use?

[braindamagedrizz]

Wildfire Whisper. Discovered or created by Ruxiz Loi, it appeared shortly after his initial corruption. At first it presented itself as a unusual but non-fatal concentrations of heat in the upper respiratory region, breathing, understandably, became difficult as a charged ability caused plumes of smoke to follow each exhale. Wildfire Whisper has two variants, though the only version actually seen in action has been the use of firebreathing. Or Uproar of Smoulder, as he calls it.

Some characteristics of this Solar usage is the ability to fire a directional shot of flame wherever the user is facing, temperature limit has varied between different Guardians.

A select few who've used this ability after thorough training have presented different types of flame, some more molten than others, like spitting out lava than true Solar flame. Perhaps it has something to do with something biologically intertwined, however, there's been no connection found between each who have this deviancy.

Old thing in my drafts, I've since kind of changed around these abilities and moved everything to another site, but hey, Ruxiz's firebreathing has some sort of explanation