World Surprisingly Had Its Hottest January On Record This Year

Red hot world again. January was the warmest on record for
the Earth as a whole, with very few places on the
chilly side and many at record heat. 

Scientists got a surprise from the latest snapshot of global temperatures. It turns out January was unexpectedly the warmest on record for the world as a whole. 

Sure, the continental United States was chilly, as I reported in an earlier post on Monday,  but that was very much the exception

The National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI states: 

"The new January global record is particularly notable for having occurred during a La Nina episode, the cold phase El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Global temperatures tend to be cooler during periods of La Nina in comparison to periods with an El Nino present."

Not this time. 

 The three previous world record warm Januaries all occurred during the opposite El Nino, which tends to boost global temperatures. 

As always the NCEI data was sound, as other scientific organizations agreed with the assessment. The European Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Berkeley Earth both measured the Earth as having its hottest January on record. 

Almost the whole world was warm, with the hottest places relative to average in the Arctic, Alaska, northwestern and northeastern Canada, most of central and eastern Europe, southern South America and western Australia. 

The few cold spots were quite a bit chillier than you'd expect. Those rather small cold places were the as-mentioned central and southeastern United States, a good chunk of Greenland, far eastern Russia and a weird, very small area of southern Africa. 

NCEI still says there's only a 7 percent chance that 2025 will be the hottest year on record. 

The warm trend has been happening for long time, but is now accelerating. If you are under the age of 49, you've never seen a global January that was cooler than the 20th century average. 

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

 It's true that this warm January occurred during an El Nino, but it is a weak one, so it might not be having as much an effect on the world's temperature as a stronger one would. 

But I wonder if that fully explains why January was so warm. Snow cover was well below normal in the northern hemisphere. Snow reflect heat back to space, so if there's less snow, the Earth has an opportunity to warm up a little more than it otherwise would. 

But that still might not explain everything. 

One compelling explanation is clouds. Or more precisely, a lack thereof. 

Cloud cover on Earth was below normal in January, and in fact, clouds have been lacking for the past two years. Those two years have shown an alarming acceleration in the how fast the world is warming up. 

High, thin clouds tend to have an overall warming effect on the world. Low stratus or billowy cumulus clouds tend to cool us off a bit. It's those low clouds that have been lacking, explains the Washington Post. 

From above, these low clouds are shimmering white, which reflects the sun's heat back up into space much like that snow cover does. 

The next question is why there are fewer clouds. WaPo explains:

"Researchers are still unsure exactly what accounts for this decrease. Some believe the it could be due to less air pollution: When particulates are in the air, it can make it easier for water droplets to stick to them and form clouds.

Another possibility (Helge) Goesling said, is a feedback loop from warming temperatures. Clouds require moisture to form and moist stratocumulus clouds sit just underneath a dry layer of air about one mile high. If temperatures warm, hot air from below can disturb that dry layer, mixing with it and making it harder for wet clouds to form."

Goessling is a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and is the author of one of the studies that looked at why the Earth was reflecting less heat back to space.  

Feedback loops are dangerous because they feed off each other.  If the cloud theories are correct, fewer low clouds will accelerate global heating. That accelerating heat destroys even more low clouds, which begets even more heat and so on and so on. 

Despite the temporarily chill we've been feeling here in Vermont this year, the unexpected global heat in January, plus these new studies, suggest we have more record-shattering heat in our not so distant future. 

Not just here in Vermont but throughout the entire world. 

Think it's been hot in recent years? You ain't seen nothin' yet. 

 

Why Didn't The World Cool Down As Expected In 2024?

Earth was supposed a tiny bit cooler in 2024 than in
2023 but that ain't happening. Scientists are pondering
an apparent recent acceleration in the pace of
global warming. 

 Roughly at this time last year, I told you that 2023 would be the world's warmest year on record, due in large part to climate change, but 2024 would probably be slightly cooler.  

So much for that idea.

The final figures aren't in yet, but 2024 will certainly beat out last year as the world's warmest.

The Washington Post took a deep dive into what happened, and some scientists are worried we might have entered new, worse phase of climate change. But opinions are sharply divided on this idea.

 This year was supposed to be a tiny bit cooler than 2023 overall because an El Nino atmospheric and oceanic pattern ended. 

El Nino tends to boost global temperatures, so that El Nino teamed up with climate change to make 2023 especially torrid. 

One major factor is the oceans, which pretty much didn't cool off at all in 2024. That helped impart added warmth on land,

Scientists don't know whether this warmer ocean system is just a fluke that will correct itself in a few month or whether it's a still-poorly understood phenomenon that would make climate change even worse that thought.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, told WaPo that it's possible ocean temperatures could still crater in the next few months, and this whole year of hot oceans is just some weird natural variability. But, he added, "I think signs are certainly pointing toward fairly persistent warmth."

More often than not, the globe heating El Nino is followed by the world-cooling La Nina, an oceanic and atmospheric patter roughly the opposite of El Nino. But the expected La Nina phase, which should have been in full force by now, has sputtered.

Again, we don't know whether that's because of natural cycle or whether climate change is messing things up. 

Per WaPo:

"Whatever the mix of factors or how long they last, scientists say they lack of a clear explanation lowers their confidence that climate change will follow the established pattern that models have predicted.

'We can't real out eventually much bigger changes,' Hausfather said. 'The more we research climate change, the more we learn that uncertainty isn't our friend.'"

There's one major additional factor explaining the unexpected heat of 2023 and 2024 that scientists are paying close attention to: Clouds, Or rather the lack thereof .

New scientific research reveals that Earth has gotten less cloudy than it once was. Especially in the last couple of years. Fewer clouds, more solar radiation, more heat for you and me.

Once again, this question arises: Is the lack of cloud cover just a weird blip that will go away? Or is climate change evaporating some of Earth's clouds. If it's the latter, then climate change will continue to accelerate faster than most scientists expect. 

Or there's a third possibility, as NBC News reports. New pollution control in recent years means far less sulfur emissions from ships. Scientists has previous said that these new pollution controls did reduce particles in the atmosphere, which had a very minor warming effect the atmosphere. 

Now, says NBC and numerous other news outlets,  the lack of sulfur particles in the atmosphere is reducing the amount of low cloud cover over the oceans. That cloud cover help prevent the oceans from warming too fast. With some of those clouds gone, perhaps the ocean is now able to heat up faster. 

Which in turn could produce warmer, and sometimes wetter air currents making landfall on continents and extending well inland. 

In any event, the expected cooling after El Nino ended hasn't materialized. If that trend continues, the next El Nino could really make the hot global years of 2023 and 2024 seem downright chilly.

 

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (From The Political Spin Reaction To Canadian Wildfires)

Wildfire smoke from Canada casts a brassy hue on 
St. Albans Bay, Vermont on June 5. Wildfire smoke
from Canada has also gotten political.

 Wildfire smoke from basically all of Canada's provinces continues to drift through much of that nation and the United States, though the fumes are noticeably thinner than the choking pollution we saw in the Northeast last week. 

Now, inevitably, we're choking on the political and climate debate/unpleasantness in the wake of the smoke attack. 

Social media and the "news" stations we deal with amplify and distort what's going on with the fires. 

First of all, few people are saying that climate change "caused" the big fires in Canada, but you'd have a solid argument in saying a warming world made the conditions that created those fires much more likely. 

And no, climate activists or governments or other bad actors didn't spend the first Saturday in June setting the Quebec fires to fuel their anti-fossil fuel activism and supposed contempt for the general population. 

Yes, that conspiracy theory has been going around, along with more outlandish ones like heat causing missiles, or, I don't know, Jewish space lasers setting Quebec ablaze in early June. 

I'll never convince the hard core conspiracy theorists that their creative ideas are wrong, but let's get some of the facts straight on what's been happening.  Yes, some of this is my opinion, some of the facts and causes are open to a little interpretation and second guessing, but the basics are pretty clear.

QUEBEC FIRES

Although fires have been burning in much of Canada all spring and spreading smoke into the United States since at least early May, the thick smoke this month really got people's attention.  Especially since the worst of it hit the nation's media, political and government epicenters, namely New York and Washington DC.

The suddenness of the fires and the severity of the pollution really had people talking. And guessing wrong. 

The Quebec fires really did seem to erupt suddenly, giving rise to those conspiracy theories. One Facebook page that said the Quebec fires were a terrorist attack had more than one million views.  

For the most part, the "terrorist" in Quebec was lightning. 

A strong, but relatively dry cold front swept southward through Quebec on June 2.  This cold front generated lots of thunderstorms.  The downpours associated with the storms were very localized, and really didn't produce all that much rain. Many areas in dry Quebec saw no rain, or only a trace.

But those lightning strikes set countless small fires in trees and underbrush throughout central and western Quebec.

Those fires smoldered overnight Friday.  Then on Saturday, a big gush of very dry, strong north winds swept through Quebec. Those little smoldering fires quickly became raging blazes.

Conspiracy theorists focused on the satellite loop in this link, showing fires seemingly erupting simultaneously in Quebec, as if in a coordinated attack.  But the loop is speeded up, covering nearly a 12 hour period. That's plenty of time for fires to spread and grow. 

This might not be visible on some devices, but here's the loop. If you can't see the image, click on the above link. Then I have more after this. 

IS IT CLIMATE?

The endless debate on what climate had to do with this mess is full of distortions and oversimplifications. 

Climate skeptics note that Canada sees fewer fire starts in recent decades than it did earlier in the 20th century. 

That's actually true. 

According to CBC, the 1980s saw more than 80,000 wildfires start in Canada. Since then, the number each decade has declined, to about 60,000 between 2010 and 2019.

But note we're talking about fire starts, not the size of the blazes. I think the decline is due mainly to public service warnings. We'll never know how many fires didn't begin because somebody made sure all the embers were cold as they left their campsite, or decided not to set their brush pile alight, or concluded it was too dry and windy to set off fireworks. 

The problem is, the fires that are starting tend to be larger. The CBC report notes that acreage burned in Canadian wildfires has slowly increased since the 1970s. 

A warmer world is often a drier world. Sure, there's more intense rain storms. But when the rain stops, evaporation is usually more efficient when it's hotter out. Things dry out more quickly, leading to the conditions that can create out of control wildfires. 

Haze from Canadian wildfire smoke on May 23 obscures a 
Lake Champlain view from South Burlington, Vermont.

Canadian environmental officials also say that climate change is leading to more lightning strikes across much of that nation. That's precisely the problem that started the chaos this month that originated in Quebec. 

Climate change skeptics also point out there used to be epic fires -  much bigger than current blazes - in Canada and the U.S. a century ago. That's also true. But a century ago, you didn't have armies of firefighters and flocks of planes and helicopters dropping tons of water and fire retardant on those wildfires.

To repeat: Climate change did not directly cause the onslaught of fires in Canada. Lightning, human error and probably a few arsonists started the blazes.  There probably would have been a bunch of wildfires in Canada this year with or without climate change.

But the warming world probably made a hot, dry Canadian spring hotter and drier than it otherwise would have been. Which means the fires were probably worse than they otherwise would have been.

It's pretty much impossible to measure how much worse the fires became because of climate change. But the trend line is bad, since we're only going to get hotter. And weather extremes will keep getting more extreme.

ATTENTION GRABBER

As noted, the smoke really captured a lot of attention. It was the first time in memory that so much of the eastern United States was choking on smoke. 

The Washington Post went with this in a June 10 article:

"The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era or - a Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University calls it - the "Pyrocene."

That assessment is a little melodramatic, in my opinion. But it does point to the fact that different parts of the nation - and the world for that matter - have increasingly seen a lot more of these smoky days in recent years. 

With Canadian fires not expected to end until at least this fall, we can look forward to more smoky days, too.

But will this change anything? 

I doubt it. 

That millions of people in the eastern U.S. endured dangerous wildfire smoke was the talk of the town. And probably made climate change hit home for more people. But politics is stalemated in a way I can't recall in my 60 years.

It's tribal. It's the "religion" on one side to stop climate change now, or at least mitigate it, by, I don't know, walking out onto highways and blocking traffic. The "religion" on the other side is that climate change activists and experts are trying to take away all our "freedoms," whatever that means. 

The sensible group is probably the minority. We do need to shift away from fossil fuel consumption now if not sooner. If only entrenched interests and lobbyists in certain industries, oil and gas chief among them would get out of the way, we could probably make more progress.

But we don't live in that world, unfortunately.  Which leaves for the younger generation a worse future than there needs to be.