Vocal Voices

In real world temperatures.

This is the temperature for the 18th march in Narsarsuaq, Greenland. If you look at the weekly and monthly there has been a 3 day warm period starting on the 17th and running to the 19th.

It's still winter in Greenland. -11 would not particularly cause comment. -20 would not really be a record. What is more striking is that the daily average Max temperature for June (the hottest month), is 15C and the daily low is 8C.

They just experience May/June temperatures in Winter and not just one day but 3 days in a row.

This is the world we are heading for. Full throttle, pedal to the floor.

Perhaps our children would be best moving to northern Canada? Where they can clear the trees and grow wheat..... Of course this will make climate change worse, but, hey, it's already so bad that little we do now will change more than the numbers who are going to die. It's already telephone numbers, a few digits on the end are not going to make that much of a difference.

Ah but it is a localised freak weather event, you see, and freak weather events have always happened.

Just like the Mongolian 'dzud', drought in summer followed by a more severe winter, is also a localised freak weather event.

Or so the arguments will go. Except that these two events are a long way off the scale.

Dzuds are not unknown and are cyclic in a similar way as El Ninos/La Ninas are, but most times the nomads cope. One record event was in 1944-45 where 7 million head of livestock were lost. Then came three in a row from 1999 - 2002 with 11 million head lost. Then in 2010 another killed over 2 million head. Now this one has killed 350,000 goats, sheep and cattle, so far, and 25,000 Mongolian families are at risk.

These events are also becoming more freakish, more extreme and closer together. It will not be long before once in 100 year events become once in 25 year events then once in a decade events. All bets will be off long before they become 'normal', which they eventually will.

Personally, at my age, I don't think it is worth me worrying about.

The "powers that be" certainly don't seem to be concerned about global warming.

It's the young people who should be worried, but I don't suppose they are, as long
as they have their electronic gadgets to concentrate on.

What a crazy world we live in.

Yep they are all "isolated events" to those who don't want to hear. But the number of those isolated events in any one year are growing...

We see the air temperatures above 80N which is totally in the ice cap and beyond any land, sitting at the highest average start for any year on the satellite record.



Then we have the lowest average ice area for any starting year (yellow line)



Driven by the lack of ice around the Atlantic side of the Arctic and the extremely low ice in the Bering sea.



And whilst I remember, virtually no ice in the Great Lakes this year all winter....


Then there are other indicators.

The Barrow (Alaska), sea ice mass balance monitoring. Normally when they put the instruments out on the ice in January it's about 1M thick growing to about 1.5M thick before it starts to melt. This year it was just 0.5M thick when they put the instruments out and has only grown to 0.75M now. This is despite temperatures down to -20C or -25C over a long period.



It's all starting to come together and the picture it makes is not very pretty.

Looks like I wont be able to build a snow man this year!!

More a case that pretty soon the only time you will be able to ever build a snowman is on the coldest of cold winters, once every 25-100 years.

Which is a thought when you think about the ability to farm and produce food.