Did Earth Just Experience Its Two Hottest Days In 125,000 Years? We Break Down The News And Hype

 UPDATE

That supposed world record high temperature set on July 4 was tied on Wednesday and broken on Thursday. 

According to the Associated Press, the estimated worldwide average temperature Thursday was 63 degrees.

Few climatologist will be surprised if Thursday's new record is exceeded within days, or at least sometime this summer. 

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

At least by one measure, the world as a whole experienced its hottest day since at least 1979. 

By some estimates, it might have been the hottest two days in 125,000 years, but that's speculation. 

Here's what happened, as explained by the Washington Post:

"Tuesday's global average temperature was calculated by a model that uses data from weather stations, ships, ocean buoys and satellites, Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London's Grantham Institute. The modeling system has been used to estimate daily average  temperatures starting in 1979."

So, if the model is supremely accurate, we know that July 4 was the Earth's hottest day since 1979, with a worldwide average temperature for the day of 62.92 degrees F.

The previous world record high was 62.62 degrees set on Monday. Yes, the day before yesterday. 

We also know the world has been warming since we got into the Industrial Age more than 100 years ago, and the pace of warming has increased in the past several decades. That increases the chances that you have to go back tens of thousands of centuries to get a warmer global day than Tuesday. But it's not a slam dunk fact.

Still, the news is disturbing as it's yet another example of a firehose of data that all suggests that the world is warming fast. 

It's coming into stark relief now because El Nino has started. El Nino tends to warm the Earth's climate. Before Monday, the world's hottest day was on August 14, 2016, with a reading of 62.46 degrees. That record was set smack dab in the middle of the last El Nino cycle we had. 

 El Nino working in concert with climate change is helping to cause all kinds of warm records - big and small - to break. It wouldn't surprise me if the world's hottest temperature record is broken again either today, or in coming days or weeks. 

Early evidence suggests that June globally was the hottest on record, at least according to European computer model data called ERA-5.

More complete data on the world's climate in June will be available by mid-month. 

HEAT WAVES

We do know there are some pretty intense heat waves going on in different places in the world right now.  (Yeah, it's hot herein Vermont, too, but so far the current heat wave isn't quite breaking any records). 

Way up in the tippy top northwest corner of Canada, along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, in Inuvik, it was 91 degrees, breaking their all time record high of 90, set just last year. Bit of a trend there, huh?

We also have what is surely bad news regarding those wildfires in Quebec, and the smoke that keeps blowing across the border into Vermont and much of the rest of the United States. It was in the low to mid 90s in most of the province yesterday. 

The northern edge of Quebec is so far north that it's basically in the Arctic. In the delightfully spelled town of Kuujjuaq, Quebec, (pronounced "KOO-ju-ack") the normal high temperature in July is just 60 degrees. Yesterday, they set their record for  all time hottest temperature with a whopping 94 degrees. 

Rivierre Aux Feulles, Quebec, in the far northwest corner of the province hit an all-time record high of 90 degrees.

In Argentina, where it's winter, temperatures have been well into the 80s this week. In Antarctica (also winter!) temperatures along large swaths of the coastlines were above freezing this week, interfering with the normal production of sea ice.

TIPPING POINT?

With the latest news recited above, and the fact that the world's oceans, especially the North Atlantic, are at record warm levels, and global sea ice is at near record lows, some people are talking about a climate tipping point. 

A tipping point is the idea that gradually increasing warmth in the Earth's climate reach a threshold where suddenly large, irreversible catastrophic changes occur. 

I'm seeing some rather panicked posts on line about how a tipping point might be underway, introducing a new and even much more dangerous phase to climate change.

Like this quote from Inside Climate News, usually a fairly reputable publication, but not in this case:

"June, 2023 may be remembered as the start of a big change in the climate system, with many key global indicators flashing red warning lights amid signs that some systems are tipping toward a new state from which they may not recover."

In general though, sober minds are putting the current spate of records in perspective. 

Michael Mann, one of the world's leading climate change experts, tweeted the following, which to me makes a ton of sense:

"The current weather extremes really don't indicate any tipping point behavior. They are consistent with steady human-caused warming plus El Nino. The truth is bad enough."

And so it goes.

While El Nino is super charging an atmosphere already amped up by climate change, remember, we were seeing a lot of weird stuff in the past three years when we were in the supposedly calmer La Nina phase. 

Climate, and individual weather events are just getting more extreme and weirder. We're noticing it more now. Perhaps because what we thought of as weird weather a few decades ago is now commonplace. 

Which isn't really a comforting thought.