We may have just seen the world's highest recorded temperature ever. Has that sunk in? / After two years of school strikes, the world is still in a state of climate crisis denial

 

We may have just seen the world's highest recorded temperature ever. Has that sunk in?

 

Death Valley’s forbidding landscape registered a preliminary high temperature of 129.9F on 16 August. Don’t look away

 

Bob Henson

Wed 19 Aug 2020 09.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 19 Aug 2020 22.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/19/highest-recorded-temperature-ever-death-valley

 

How hot was it at the Furnace Creek visitor center at Death Valley national park on 16 August 2020? It was so hot that the huge electronic temperature display (which serves as a ubiquitous selfie backdrop) went on the fritz. Parts of the blocky digital display malfunctioned, resulting in numbers even higher than the actual mind-melting high on what turned out to be a landmark day.

 

An automated weather station at the visitor center recorded a preliminary high of 129.9F (54.4C) at 3.41pm PDT on Sunday. Even for heat-favored landscapes such as Death Valley, it is remarkable for temperatures to inch into such territory so late in the summer, when the sun is considerably lower in the sky than at the summer solstice in late June. According to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, the previous global record high for August is 127.9F (53.3C), recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait, in 2011.

 

If Sunday’s high at Death Valley is confirmed, it will be the planet’s highest temperature in almost a century and its third-highest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Owing to the fact that the two higher readings are in question, it may, in fact, be the hottest air temperature ever recorded on Earth.

 

The 130F afternoon in Death Valley fits snugly in the “what next?” narrative of life in 2020. But because human-caused climate change is such a ubiquitous yet gradual process, it’s rarely at the top of the news. A surging societal issue will typically bump climate from the headlines. There’s been no lack of such US events in 2020, from the coronavirus pandemic to police brutality and the state of the US Postal Service ahead of the November elections.

 

Climate science, and common sense, warn that it would be unwise, however, to skip over what has just happened in the California desert.

 

While competing events jostle for our attention, the machinery driving the climate crisis lumbers onward. Even in a year when global carbon emissions are on track to dip by a few percent, thanks largely to reduced travel and shuttered workplaces, the total amount of carbon dioxide concentrated in the atmosphere will once again reach its highest value in millions of years, about half a percent more than in 2019.

 

The effects are perceptible. The Arctic experienced its first 100F day on record on 17 June when the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 100.4F (38C). July 2020 was the hottest single month in more than a century of recordkeeping at such far-flung US locations as Phoenix; Miami; and Portland, Maine.

 

How can we be sure that the 130F reading really is the record-setter it appears to be? Even higher temperatures often make the rounds in newspapers or social media. However, these are typically drawn from thermometers exposed to the sun, which leads to readings higher than the actual air temperature, as was the case with the 145F (63C) reported from Kuwait in 2019. Official temperatures are collected from shaded instrument shelters, designed and outfitted under strict protocols established by the WMO (part of the United Nations).

 

The WMO, which also serves as the global arbiter of major weather records, plans to investigate the Death Valley report. Such post-mortems typically involve double-checking the temperature sensor’s performance, evaluating the station and its landscape, and assessing nearby observations to make sure they support the case.

 

The only readings hotter than Sunday’s that are recognized by WMO are 134F (56.7C) at Death Valley on 10 July 1913, and 131F (55C) at Death Valley on 13 July 1913, and at Kebili, Tunisia, in July 1931.

 

Questions swirl around those early 20th century values, though. For decades, the world’s all-time record high was believed to be the 136.4F (58C) reported from Al Azizia, Libya, on 13 September 1922. Weather historian Christopher Burt was skeptical: the value didn’t comport with nearby stations, and the thermometer design made it easy to misread the temperature.

 

Burt’s work with colleagues led to an overturning of the Al Azizia record by WMO in 2012, a saga documented in the Weather Underground film Dead Heat. Burt and Herrera have called out similar issues with the Death Valley and Kebili readings from the 1910s and 1930s. Thus far the WMO has not re-evaluated those.

 

Parsing the planet’s highest temperature by degrees, or tenths of degrees, may seem like a pedantic task in the face of a global climate crisis with vast consequences. Yet without careful, consistent measurement, it will be all the more difficult to keep track of a changing climate as it careens through our lives.

 

Death Valley is already a forbidding landscape, one where heat and dryness rule and few people spend more than a day or two. A warming planet is unlikely to yield more Death Valleys in our lifetimes. However, it is pushing saline water into the delicate freshwater landscape of the Everglades, attacking the namesake ice of Glacier national park, and triggering an onslaught of changes both subtle and profound to ecosystems across the continent.

 

With all this in mind, perhaps we should linger over a 130-degree afternoon a little longer.

After two years of school strikes, the world is still in a state of climate crisis denial

 

We can have as many meetings as we like, but the will to change is nowhere in sight. Society must start treating this as a crisis

 

• Report: Vital time being lost to climate inertia, say activists

 

Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Anuna De Wever and Adélaïde Charlier

Wed 19 Aug 2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 19 Aug 2020 12.02 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/19/climate-crisis-leaders-greta-thunberg

 

On Thursday 20 August, it will be exactly two years since the first school strike for the climate took place. Looking back, a lot has happened. Many millions have taken to the streets to join the decades-long fight for climate and environmental justice. And on 28 November 2019, the European parliament declared a “climate and environmental emergency”.

 

But over these past two years, the world has also emitted more than 80 gigatonnes of CO2. We have seen continuous natural disasters taking place across the globe: wildfires, heatwaves, flooding, hurricanes, storms, thawing of permafrost and collapsing of glaciers and whole ecosystems. Many lives and livelihoods have been lost. And this is only the very beginning.

 

Today, leaders all over the world are speaking of an “existential crisis”. The climate emergency is discussed on countless panels and summits. Commitments are being made, big speeches are given. Yet, when it comes to action we are still in a state of denial. The climate and ecological crisis has never once been treated as a crisis. The gap between what we need to do and what’s actually being done is widening by the minute. Effectively, we have lost another two crucial years to political inaction.

 

Last month, just ahead of the European council summit, we published an open letter with demands to EU and world leaders. Since then, more than 125,000 people have signed this letter. Tomorrow we will meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and deliver the letter and demands, as well as the signatures.

 

We will tell Merkel that she must face up to the climate emergency – especially as Germany now holds the presidency of the European council. Europe has a responsibility to act. The EU and the United Kingdom are accountable for 22% of historic accumulative global emissions, second only to the United States. It is immoral that the countries that have done the least to cause the problem are suffering first and worst. The EU must act now, as it has signed up to do in the Paris agreement.

 

Our demands include halting all fossil fuel investments and subsidies, divesting from fossil fuels, making ecocide an international crime, designing policies that protect workers and the most vulnerable, safeguarding democracy and establishing annual, binding carbon budgets based on the best available science.

 

We understand the world is complicated and that what we are asking for may not be easy or may seem unrealistic. But it is much more unrealistic to believe that our societies would be able to survive the global heating we’re heading for – as well as other disastrous ecological consequences of today’s business as usual. We are inevitably going to have to fundamentally change, one way or another. The question is, will the changes be on our terms, or on nature’s terms?

 

In the Paris agreement, world leaders committed themselves to keeping the global average temperature rise to well below 2C, and aiming for 1.5C. Our demands demonstrate what that commitment means. Yet this is just the very minimum of what needs to be done to deliver on those promises.

 

So if leaders are not willing to do this, they’ll have to start explaining why they’re giving up on the Paris agreement. Giving up on their promises. Giving up on the people living in the most affected areas. Giving up on the chances of handing over a safe future for their children. Giving up without even trying.

 

Science doesn’t tell anyone what to do, it merely collects and presents verified information. It is up to us to study and connect the dots. When you read the IPCC SR1.5 report and the UNEP production gap report, as well as what leaders have actually signed up for in the Paris agreement, you see that the climate and ecological crisis can no longer be solved within today’s systems. Even a child can see that policies of today don’t add up with the current best available science.

 

We need to end the ongoing wrecking, exploitation and destruction of our life support systems and move towards a fully decarbonised economy that is centred on the wellbeing of all people, democracy and the natural world.

 

If we are to have a chance of staying below 1.5C of warming, our emissions need to immediately start reducing rapidly towards zero and then on to negative figures. That’s a fact. And since we don’t have all the technical solutions we need to achieve that, we have to work with what we have at hand today. And this has to include stopping doing certain things. That’s also a fact. However, it’s a fact that most people refuse to accept. Just the thought of being in a crisis that we cannot buy, build or invest our way out of seems to create some kind of collective mental short circuit.

 

This mix of ignorance, denial and unawareness is at the very heart of the problem. As it is now, we can have as many meetings and climate conferences as we want. They will not lead to sufficient changes, because the willingness to act and the level of awareness needed are still nowhere in sight. The only way forward is for society to start treating the crisis like a crisis.

 

We still have the future in our own hands. But time is rapidly slipping through our fingers. We can still avoid the worst consequences. But to do that, we have to face the climate emergency and change our ways. And that is the uncomfortable truth we cannot escape.

 

• Greta Thunberg is a 17-year-old environmental campaigner from Sweden. This article was co-written with youth climate activists Luisa Neubauer from Germany, Anuna de Wever from Belgium, and Adélaïde Charlier from Belgium