Episode
Ok this is scary. Antarctica is hot:
The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.
That’s no good. It’s bad in itself, and scientists weren’t expecting it, so what else could happen that scientists aren’t expecting and that could cook us like so many eggs in a pot? You don’t want temperatures soaring 90 degrees. That=being cooked.
Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. Helikened the event to the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.
Yes but that wasn’t 70 or 90 degrees above normal! Not even close! It was maybe 30 degrees above normal, or 33 or so. The hottest was 108F and normal for late June is I think 75ish. 90 degrees above normal is fucking terrifying.
The historically high temperatures in Antarctica followa pulse of exceptional warmth on the planet’s opposite end. On Wednesday, temperatures near the North Pole catapulted 50 degrees above normal, close to the melting point.
Great great great. Awesome.
Yikes!!
We, by which I mean all of us on the whole planet, are in completely uncharted territory here; coal shills, renewableistas, the lot.
That’s truly frightening, and I feel a sense of existential dread over this sort of news.
Maybe Antarctica should just identify as cold?
This is difficult for an environmental science instructor in an era where we are not supposed to upset or offend the students. I try to be honest, without sending them into existential dread, but my region is full of as many global warming deniers as it is vaccination deniers, and they line up rather neatly (not quite a circular Venn diagram, but close) with evolution deniers.
iknklast,
You could try a pitch like… say…. “But God will protect us, as some believe he has done on the odd occasion in the past and despite evidence to the contrary…” and take it from there. Worth a try, surely. ;-)
Reminds me of the “dark gods” in The Expanse changing universal constants to try to kill off humanity. Models we have don’t explain this sort of thing, but unlike the hothouse earth this is an immediate danger that we really can’t do anything about (unless we can establish discrete linkage to something changeable).
How many coal mines does God have an interest in.?
So I see it has now been reported that sometime in the week of 15th March (the time of the heatwave mentioned above), the East Antarctic Conger ice shelf completely collapsed. All 1200km2 of it. Ice shelf collapses in East Antartica are considered very bad. Much worse than previous collapses in West Antarctica because if all the ice in West Antartica melted sea levels would rise by a bit over 3m, East Antartica loosing all its ice would raise sea levels around 55m.
Holy shit. I saw about the Conger ice shelf, didn’t know about the different impacts.
Looking for some information about this, I found this site that may be of interest to others:
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is mostly grounded well below sea level, and has an area of about 2 million square kilometers. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is mostly grounded above sea level, and has an area of about 27 million square kilometers.
Oy.