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Scorching 129 Degree (F) Temps Hit Iran; Severe June European Heatwave Attributed to Climate Change; Satellite Data Confirms Rapid Global Warming
30
June, 2017
In
a slew of climate change related news this week, Iran’s city of
Ahvaz saw temperatures hit near the highest readings ever recorded on
Earth, a new scientific model study has found that climate change
made the recent heatwave that hit Europe this June two
to ten times more likely,
and climate change deniers lost a major cherry-picked talking point
as the most recent satellite data now confirms the rapid global
temperature rise that ground stations have been reporting all along.
129
F in Iran — Near Record for Globe, But Not a 35 C Wet Bulb Reading
On
Thursday, in Ahvaz, Iran, temperatures hit a blazing 53.7 degrees
Celsius or 128.66 degrees Fahrenheit. These temperatures were just
shy of the 54 C (129.2 F) global records in Mitribah, Kuwait on July
21, 2016 and in California’s Death Valley on July 30, 2013
identified by Chris
C Burt of Weather Underground.
The reading was also the
hottest temperature ever recorded in Asia.
This
very severe high temperature came just one day after the thermometer
struck 52.9 C (127.2 F) on Wednesday and is the strongest temperature
spike of a broader Middle Eastern heatwave that has been baking the
near-Persian-Gulf-region for many days. Such severe heat did not,
however, tip wet bulb readings above the 35 C human self-cooling
threshold despite an extremely hazardous heat index near 142 F. A
combined dew point of 72 F, a 129 F temperature, and 995 hPa pressure
resulted in wet bulb readings of around 30.2 C for the city — quite
dangerous, but not beyond the human limit for temperature
self-regulation.
June
European Heatwave Attributed to Climate Change
As
the Middle East was testing new all-time high temperature records for
planet Earth,Europe
was also sweltering under combined severe heat and drought.
Throughout June, dry weather and high temperatures have plagued
Europe. Extreme record heat sweltered the UK, France, Switzerland,
the Netherlands, and Belgium — setting
off heat emergencies and forcing some regions to ration water.
Belgium as a country saw its highest night-time temperature readings
on record. England
endured its hottest day since 1976.
Meanwhile, the heat and extreme dryness set off wildfires that
resulted in the tragic loss of 64 lives in Portugal while
1,500 were forced to evacuate from similar extreme blazes in Spain.
(June
heat set off a rash of extreme conditions across Europe. World
Weather Attribution has linked this extreme event to climate change.
Image source: Climate
Central.)
This
kind of heat is becoming more typical around the world as global
temperatures have increased, on average by around 1.2 C since the
1880s. And a recent climate change model attribution study has
confirmed that this particular heat wave was a lot worse than it
otherwise would have been without the added kick provided by
human-forced warming. For a study by World
Weather Attribution found “clear
and strong links between June’s record warmth and human-caused
climate change.”
“These high temperatures are no longer rare in the current climate, occurring roughly every 10 to 30 years depending on the country. The team found that climate change made the intensity and frequency of such extreme heat at least twice as likely in Belgium, at least four times as likely in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and central England and at least 10 times as likely in Portugal and Spain.”
Satellite
Data Confirms Rapid Global Warming
In
another climate science related development, remote
sensing researchers at the University of California have
significantly revised their lower troposphere temperature record. The
revision corrected for orbital decay in satellites that caused the
world to appear to warm more slowly than actual trends. As a result
of these revisions, a significant subset of the satellite data now
largely confirms the more accurate land based temperature record
showing significant global warming over the past few decades.
(Satellite
data revised to correct for orbital decay now basically confirms
land-based observations of global temperature increase. Image
source: Carbon
Brief.
Data Scource: RSS and NASA.)
Dr
Carl Mears, a co-author of the new findings, in
a statement to Carbon Brief noted:
By correctly accounting for the changes in satellite measurement times, the new satellite data are in better agreement with the surface data.
Unlike the satellite temperature record, where only a few satellites are measuring temperatures at any given point of time, there is a large amount of redundancy in surface temperature observations, with multiple independent sets of data producing consistent results. Therefore, it is not too surprising that corrections to problems with satellite data would move them closer to surface records.
Climate
change deniers (self-labeled skeptics), have long pointed to
satellite data showing the Earth warming at a slower rate than
land-based measures. These ‘skeptics’ have then gone on to
falsely claim that such data throws the whole issue of human-caused
climate change into doubt. But this same group has failed to
acknowledge the fact that orbital decay,as
pointed out by the very researchers that run the satellite sensors,
tends to result in artificially cool readings.
The
recent reworking of satellite data to account for orbital decay along
with researchers’ direct acknowledgement of the higher accuracy of
land-based data removes the rational scientific basis for this line
of ‘climate skeptic’ argumentation and renders past assertions in
this vein mostly moot.
Links:
Hat
tip to wili
Hat
tip to bostonblurp
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