Essay by Eric Worrall
As Britain endures extreme cold and near miss blackouts, apparently now is the right time for an English scientist to tell everyone how hot it is.
My new dark red climate stripe for 2024 shows it’s the hottest year yet
Published: January 10, 2025 10.00pm AEDT
Ed Hawkins
Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading…
These “warming stripes”, adopted around the world as a symbol of climate awareness, action and ambition, have just been updated to include a new dark red stripe for 2024. It was a colour that I had to add for the first time last year when 2023 shattered the previous records.
No one experiences the global average temperature directly. But we can use the same approach to represent how we have lived through our own climate experience, locally. The UK had it’s fourth-warmest year on record. Other countries, such as Germany, had their warmest year on record.
…
Well done humanity. For it is us who have caused this rapid warming of the planet, and the devastating consequences for people and ecosystems that are so visible today and every day. Many extreme weather events have been made even worse by our reliance on burning fossil fuels, causing misery around the world.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/my-new-dark-red-climate-stripe-for-2024-shows-its-the-hottest-year-yet-246914
The article goes into all the bad things Ed Hawkins thinks global warming has caused, such as the Los Angeles fire. Strangely Ed forgot to include Britain’s current extreme cold snap in his list of climate disasters.
Given a choice between affordable home heating or climate action, I’m guessing most Brits right now would choose the affordable home heating option.
If an extreme cold snap with near zero wind and solar can occur at 1.5C global warming, it can obviously occur at 2C global warming or even 3C global warming. In fact, if Ed’s prediction of more extreme weather is correct, that could make cold snaps such as Britain is currently enduring more likely or more extreme.
Of course, given the failure of climate models to predict the current bump in global temperature, there are clearly substantial climate forcings which have not been captured by the models. So it is anyone’s guess where global temperature will go next.
Let us hope Britain doesn’t vote their way out of a survivable future, by embracing so much global warming action they all freeze to death. Because Britain’s ongoing effort to sabotage their own industrial competitiveness and energy affordability is having no impact on India and China’s determination to lift their people out of grinding poverty, by providing low cost fossil fuel electricity as quickly as they can build the coal plants.
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