Cordoba airport
I saw a cruise ship heading from Puget Sound into Elliott Bay this morning for the first time this year. I saw another one at a pier a few days ago. April to October they ply to and fro, burning up their 80 thousand gallons of fuel per day.
Meanwhile Spain is hot.
Spain recorded its hottest ever temperature for April on Thursday, hitting 38.8C according to the country’s meteorological service.
Seattle got that hot two years ago, but not in April.
The record figure was reached in Cordoba airport in southern Spain just after 15:00 local time (14:00 BST). For days a blistering heatwave has hit the country with temperatures 10-15C warmer than expected for April. It’s been driven by a mass of very hot air from Africa, coupled with a slow moving weather system.
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The high temperatures come on top of long running drought in many parts of Spain. Reservoirs in the Guadalquivir basin are only at 25% of capacity. This combination is raising the prospect of early forest fires, with the national weather service warning that large swathes of the country would be at risk. Spain saw the most land burned of any country in Europe in 2022.
Climate change is very likely playing a role in this heatwave, according to experts in the field.
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This heatwave in Spain is not an isolated event – all across the world high temperatures in the first few months of this year have shattered records.
Oh well. Book a cruise to take your mind off it.
A few months back (2? 4?) I saw an article about heat stress in India. It was accompanied by a heat map. The article, and map, showed that significant portions of India’s interior were nudging 42 C wet bulb temperature. That’s significant as wet bulb conditions like that mean you can’t cool down adequately by sweating. Further, 42 C body temperature is regarded as the point where irreversible brain damage begins to occur as proteins begin to denature. Death or various degrees of brain damage result.
Not a problem if you’re lucky enough to have an air-conditioned refuge* and other people to fetch or carry for you, but that is not the case for vast numbers of India’s population. The article was warning that if current trends continued huge areas of India and potentially other countries would become uninhabitable.
* Heat rejected to atmosphere will of course just make it worse for everyone outside…
The Himalayan glaciers are the sources of the water feeding into many of the great rivers of Asia, including the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Pearl, Yellow and Yangtse. They bring fresh water to probably around 2 billion of the world’s ~ 8 billion population. Never mind their total loss; severe diminution would likely produce refugee crises unprecedented in all of human history.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2019/0215/Nearly-2-billion-people-depend-on-Himalayan-glaciers.-What-if-they-melt#:~:text=The%20glaciers%20of%20the%20Hindu,benefit%20indirectly%20from%20their%20outflows.
India? It’s about to get a whole lot worse.
Unless we can find a way to reduce world population by 75% we may as well keep doing what we’re doing because it ain’t gonna get better any time soon.
https://i.postimg.cc/J7DNdKzz/india.png