DAILY TRIFECTA: It's Not Just The Heat, It's The Stupidity
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TITLE: Copernicus: March 2024 is the tenth month in a row to be the hottest on record
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-march-2024-tenth-month-row-be-hottest-record
EXCERPT: The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission with funding from the EU, routinely publishes monthly climate bulletins reporting on the changes observed in global surface air and sea temperatures, sea ice cover and hydrological variables. All the reported findings are based on computer-generated analyses and according to ERA5 dataset, using billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.
Surface air temperature and sea surface temperature highlights
· March 2024 was warmer globally than any previous March in the data record, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 14.14°C, 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average for March and 0.10°C above the previous high set in March 2016.
· This is the tenth month in a row that is the warmest on record for the respective month of the year.
· The month was 1.68°C warmer than an estimate of the March average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period.
· The global-average temperature for the past twelve months (April 2023 – March 2024) is the highest on record, at 0.70°C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.58°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
· The average European temperature for March 2024 was 2.12°C above the 1991-2020 average for March, making the month the second warmest March on record for the continent, only a marginal 0.02°C cooler than March 2014. Temperatures were most above average in central and eastern regions.
· Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over eastern North America, Greenland, eastern Russia, Central America, parts of South America, many parts of Africa, southern Australia, and parts of Antarctica.
· The El Niño continued to weaken in the eastern equatorial Pacific, but marine air temperatures in general remained at an unusually high level.
· The global sea surface temperature averaged for March over 60°S–60°N was 21.07°C, the highest monthly value on record, marginally above the 21.06°C recorded for February.
TITLE: UC Irvine scientist helps link climate change to Madagascar’s megadrought
https://news.uci.edu/2024/04/09/uc-irvine-scientist-helps-link-climate-change-to-madagascars-megadrought/
EXCERPT: “Using remotely sensed observations and climate models, we could see evidence that climate change is affecting the hydrological cycle in southern Madagascar, and it’s likely going to have big implications for the people that live there and how they grow their food,” said Angela Rigden, assistant professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine and study lead author. “Their rainy season is getting shorter, with a delayed onset of those seasons.”
What helped the Rigden team make the connection between the drought and climate change was a multi-year satellite record of vegetation greenness which shows shifts in southern Madagascar that indicate changes in water availability. “We’ve taken satellite-based remote sensing data of plants and related it to how much water is available in the soils,” she said.
The team then compared the shift in the rainy season window to what some climate models report would happen in the absence of human-driven climate change, and that is when they noticed the narrowing rainy season window. “That’s the fingerprint of climate change, the change in seasonality,” Rigden said.
Another key was the multi-year nature of the satellite record, which stretches back to the early 1980s. Such long observational records, especially for less developed and poverty-stricken places like southern Madagascar, are only available from satellites.
“We finally have a record long enough that we can see changes that are attributable to climate change,” Rigden said. “And there’s clear agreement between these observations and climate models that point to changes in seasonality.”
Christopher Golden, an associate professor of nutrition and planetary health at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a study co-author, has been doing fieldwork in Madagascar for the past 25 years. He explained how southern Madagascar is an arid part of the world even without drought conditions, and that local people have borne witness to changes in rainfall patterns over the decades.
Colleagues at Catholic Relief Services and the USAID Mission to Madagascar, who are key stakeholders in the study, alerted Golden to the issues facing the country. For Rigden, the road to the study came after the United Nations announced that southern Madagascar was in a state of famine as a result of climate change in 2021. She wanted to see what satellite data might reveal about the situation.
“Our study shows that this phenomenon is entirely driven by climate change,” said Golden, who added that the study will help scientists provide more confident recommendations to policymakers who make decisions about where to send relief aid in the world. “The picture is that this is going to be recurrent into the future,” Golden said, which is information that can help officials justify the financing of relief efforts.
TITLE: ‘The View’ Host Gets Schooled for Tying Eclipse to Climate Change
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-view-host-sunny-hostin-gets-schooled-for-tying-eclipse-to-climate-change
EXCERPT: Alyssa Farah Griffin, the program’s resident conservative panelist, noted that “people are having all sorts of conspiracies about the end of the world” following last week’s earthquake in New York and the eclipse, seemingly referring to MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Then I read online that the earthquake epicenter was actually at Bedminster in New Jersey. Fun fact! So it originated with Trump,” Griffin quipped.
Sharing an anecdote about one of the show’s makeup artists running out of the building during the earthquake, [Sunny] Hostin quipped that the confluence of recent natural events could mean “the Rapture is here.” She also added that she’d just learned that cicadas would soon be emerging, prompting co-host Whoopi Goldberg to point out this happens “every 17 years.” (17-year and 13-year cicadas are both set to emerge this spring in a rare “double cicada” event.)
“Let’s say, all those things together would maybe lead one to believe that either climate change exists, or something is really going on,” Hostin confidently declared. Her colleagues, though, quickly jumped in to set her straight.
“Earthquakes are not at the mercy of climate change,” host Joy Behar flatly stated. “It’s underground.”
Meanwhile, Goldberg pointed out that “they’ve known about the eclipse coming because eclipses happen and they actually can say when these things are going to happen,” adding that she also doesn’t believe these events are a “sign from God.” Goldberg also reiterated that periodical cicadas consistently surface during the same cycle, regardless of the climate.
Quickly moving the conversation past Hostin’s embarrassing assertion, co-host Sara Haines said it is “great to see the coverage on news of something that everyone can get excited about” regarding the eclipse.
Needless to say, Hostin claiming that climate change was behind the moon blocking out the sun and tectonic shifts sparked widespread mockery across the political spectrum.