My guess is yes.
The last time we had a year of extremes quite like this was 2012, which I think will go down in history as the hinge year when polls in the US began to swing from climate apathy or denial to concern.
I completed the video above, one of my favorites, in early July of 2012, in the midst of a severe drought in Southwestern Michigan, where I was attending a conference at Michigan State’s agricultural research station near Kalamazoo. The rivers nearby were running at a few percent of normal at the time, and everywhere you stepped was crunchy dry. I suspect as the summer goes on we will accumulate yet more viral videos of the odd, the unusual, and the extreme in weather and climate events.
A Google News search for “heat waves” turns up droves; this week, there’s the “unusual” one sweeping Western Europe, the one “scorching” the Bay Area with triple digit temperatures, the “brutal” one in Pakistan that left 1250 dead, and the one that “shattered” records in the Pacific Northwest.
That’s just right now, at the time of writing; together, they’re a snapshot of a heat waving world. But there’s little we should consider unusual about these brutal scorchers shattering records; they’ve become fairly routine on our 400 ppm planet. Just weeks before, a heat wave that hit India killed more than 2,300 people; it was one of the five worst in recorded history. That another came along and did comparable damage to its next-door neighbor just weeks later pretty powerfully elucidates the scope of the coming crisis.
As if cued by the tragedy, the United Nations also proposed its first-ever heat wave warning system this week. The Heat-Health Warning System, as outlined in a 100+ page document, recommends nations take a number of actions to warn their populations of heat waves and brace them for their impacts, including forecasting for high temps that may include humidity, determining their regions’ heat-stress thresholds, creating a system of alerts for notifying the public of incipient heat, and building “real time public health surveillance systems.”
The World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization, the UN agencies behind the report, have essentially concluded that climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of the heat waves—a phenomenon it says doesn’t get as much attention as other more destructive weather events—and that action is becoming urgent.
The UK has seen the hottest July day on record, with temperatures hitting 36.7C (98F).
The Met Office said the reading had been registered at Heathrow – breaking the previous record set in 2006.
A level 3 “heatwave action” heat-health alert has been declared for all parts of England.
Yeah, this is one of your better efforts. Lots of good info, and nicely edited, although it may have had a couple too many “we’ll adapt to that” comments from that moron Tillerson (unless of course, you were trying to enrage folks like me—if so, you succeeded).
I agree that 2015 is likely to be as memorable as 2012, and that extreme weather events coupled with the Pope’s Encyclical and the results of the Paris talks are likely to swing opinion even more in the right direction. Just in time for the 2016 elections—–we shall then see who owns the country and whether there is any hope for dealing with AGW in time.
You say “…we will accumulate yet more viral videos of the odd, the unusual, and the extreme in weather and climate events”. The heat wave and derecho in 2012 were quite the events here in the Mid-Atlantic. We haven’t seen anything as extreme since, but “the odd and unusual” is getting to be the new normal.
We had July temps in May and early June and now we’re in an almost daily rain pattern—June was a record month for rain. The humidity is so high that I have mushrooms in greater quantity and of more varieties growing in the lawn and mulch beds than I have seen in 40+ years in this house. I have NEVER seen blue mushrooms before—I now have many dozens.
We’re having an extreme heat-wave in Switzerland right now, as hot as in the fatal 2003 heat-wave. That latter one lasted quite a long time and tens of thousands of people in Europe died as a result – mostly elderly people. It is sweltering hot here and I have to limit my time on the computer which overheats rapidly despite my laptop cooler (I must admit, though, that I most likely need to have my laptop cleaned, it must be full of dust by now).