Extreme Temperature Diary- Saturday November 18th, 2023/Main Topic: Vast Majority of Earth’s Population Is Starting to Feel Climate Crisis Heat

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The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉

Main Topic: Vast Majority of Earth’s Population Is Starting to Feel Climate Crisis Heat

Dear Diary. My title for today’s main subject might be somewhat misleading, but I do have a point. At about +1.3°C above preindustrial conditions overall for the globe, practically the entirety of Earth’s population has felt climate change influenced temperatures at one point or another during the past year. For those living across mid latitudes southward towards the equator, climate change influenced temperatures have become a health crisis. Those living in polar climates may feel like they are getting a break from bitter cold, but thawing tundra, more frequent wildfires, and wildlife changes threaten people there also. For example:

We see that the +1.3°C above preindustrial global average has influenced record reports in the last year, skewing them highly towards record heat. Using NCEI’s record counting and recording tool, as of 11/18/2023 we find in the last year 62,732 daily high maxes vs. 25,058 daily low min records among all global reports:

Daily Weather Records | Data Tools | Climate Data Online (CDO) | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) (noaa.gov)

That’s more than a 2 to 1 ratio folks, which I have noticed for every year of this century, leading to two scientific studies by Dr. Gerald Meehl. In a climate that is staying stable, we should find a 1 to 1 ratio using the NCEI program. Many of these episodes of record heat during the warm season are life threatening for those having to do outside activities.

For more, here is a new Nature article from this week on the influence of global warming on temperatures affecting all of us:

Earth just had its hottest year on record — climate change is to blame (nature.com)

  • NEWS
  • 10 November 2023

Earth just had its hottest year on record — climate change is to blame

Around 7.3 billion people faced temperatures strongly influenced by global warming over the past year.

Extreme-heat events affected places including Texas in the past year. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty

The past 12 months were the hottest on record. Some 7.3 billion people worldwide were exposed, for at least 10 days, to temperatures that were heavily influenced by global warming, with one-quarter of people facing dangerous levels of extreme heat over the past 12 months, according to a report by the non-profit organization Climate Central, based in Princeton, New Jersey.

“These impacts are only going to grow as long as we continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas,” says Andrew Pershing, vice-president for science at Climate Central.

Related:

Cities must protect people from extreme heat

Researchers have previously estimated the influence of climate change on specific extreme weather events, a process known as climate attribution. Now, scientists have calculated the impact of human-induced climate change on daily air temperatures in 175 countries and 920 cities from November 2022 to the start of October 2023.

They found that the average global temperature over the past 12 months was 1.32 ºC above that during the pre-industrial baseline period of 1850 to 1900, surpassing the previous record of 1.29 ºC that was set from October 2015 to September 2016 (see ‘Heating planet’). The finding comes as the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service predicted that 2023 will be the hottest calendar year on record, with the average temperature up to October being 1.43 ºC above the pre-industrial average.

Source: Climate Central

“This is the hottest temperature that our planet has experienced in something like 125,000 years,” says Pershing.

Most of this warming, about 1.28 ºC, results from human-induced climate change, with natural variation caused by processes such as the current ocean-warming El Niño event contributing much less, says climate researcher Friederike Otto at Imperial College London.

By analysing daily air-temperature data and using computational models, the team calculated the effect of climate change on temperatures worldwide using a measure called the Climate Shift Index (CSI). The CSI scale runs from −5 to 5; a value of zero means there is no detectable influence of human-caused climate change on daily temperatures, whereas a positive value indicates how much more likely climate change made the observed temperature. A negative value means climate change made the observed temperature less likely.

Related:

Earth’s hottest month: these charts show what happened in July and what comes next

The researchers found that 7.3 billion people worldwide were exposed, for at least 10 days, to temperatures that were strongly affected by climate change. In the first half of the past 12 months, tropical regions across South America, Africa and southeast Asia experienced the most days with temperatures that were strongly attributable to climate change, defined as having a CSI value of 3 or higher. These effects were felt even more strongly in the second half of the year-long period.

In Jamaica, the country where global warming was found to have had the greatest impact on daily temperatures, people experienced temperatures that were made over 4.5 times more likely by climate change. Guatemala and Rwanda also experienced temperatures that were made more than four times more likely by climate change.

The researchers also estimated the extent to which 700 cities with populations of at least one million experienced extreme heat over the past 12 months, defined as daily temperatures that are expected to occur less than 1% of the time in that location. They did this by comparing recent temperature data with data collected over a reference period of 1991–2020.

Source: Climate Central

The team found that 156 cities in 37 countries experienced five or more consecutive days of extreme heat, with 144 cities experiencing temperatures that were made at least 2 times more likely by climate change. Houston, Texas, had the longest heat streak of 22 days. The next most-affected cities were Jakarta; New Orleans, Louisiana; Tangerang, Indonesia; and Qujing in China, all of whose inhabitants faced at least 16 days of extreme heat in a row (see ‘Unbroken heat’). Worldwide, 1.9 billion people, or 24% of the population, endured five consecutive days of extreme heat.

Extreme heat, along with flooding and droughts, is often deadly and displaces thousands of people. “By continuing to burn fossil fuels the way we do, it’s a massive violation of the really basic human rights of the vast majority of the planet,” says Otto.

El Niño, which is projected to last until at least April 2024, will push temperatures even higher next year, says Pershing.

Related:

Extreme heat harms health — what is the human body’s limit?

The study clearly provides robust evidence for the science of climate-change attribution, says climate researcher Cecilia Conde at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

“This is a really appreciated effort,” says climate researcher Karsten Haustein at Leipzig University in Germany. “It’s great in that this approach can provide continuous updates on the hottest 12 months, not just the hottest [calendar] year, so that hopefully helps to raise awareness of climate change’s impacts each month.”

Joyce Kimutai, a meteorologist at Kenya Meteorological Department in Nairobi, says the analysis underscores the urgent need for countries to take action. She adds that at the United Nations COP28 climate summit later this month, the world needs to make progress on phasing out fossil fuels and implementing the ‘loss and damage’ fund through which rich countries have agreed to help low-income countries cope with the social and physical devastation caused by climate change.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03523-3

Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:

Here is some more new October and November 2023 climatology:

Here is More Climate and Weather News from Saturday:

(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)

Today’s News on Sustainable Energy, Traditional Polluting Energy from Fossil Fuel, and the Green Revolution:

More from the Weather Department:

More on the Environment and Nature:

More on Other Science and the Beauty of Earth and this Universe:

If you like these posts and my work on record temperature ratios, please contribute via my PayPal widget on this site. Thanks in advance for any support. 

Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy”

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