Just as the U.S. Senate gave up on meaningful plans to do anything about climate change, today became the hottest day in history in the U.K. It’s a clarion call if there ever was one, but it seems that important people are not listening.
Yet that is not even the most worrisome part. It’s not about what has happened so far, but rather about what happens next.
After all, records can be broken. And so can planets.
I think I would be a bit cautious to mention climate change based on a few hot days. Climate change so far is just 0.1 average Celsius degree change in the whole world. Later this effect will be exponential, that will be too late. But the climate and weather are different. It is like depression or a bad day. One bad day doesn’t mean I am in depression. Depression is a longer and worse problem. I see the climate change is our future danger, but I also see danger when people don’t see the difference what is scientist saying and what we observe in the daily life with our skin. I am afraid that people misunderstand that a few hot days means global warming. Since the same people see a few cold days means no global warming. Just a few years ago, the former president said that the new york had a few days of cold wave, he mentioned that we don’t have global warming. This only means these people just don’t understand the problem, what is climate change.
But this is a subtle problem and many important problems has this subtleness. I just hope people would be a bit more cautious and not just jump to the conclusion what they just feel (feeling or temperature) in one day.
Best,
Hitoshi
Fair point, but note that I didn’t (and certainly wouldn’t) say that one day’s record temperature was the evidence for climate change. I assume that my readers are aware of the overwhelming evidence of climate change, and are receiving my poetic analogy in that spirit.
In general, I assume that my readers keep themselves reasonably informed about the very large body of scientific evidence available to them. If they don’t, then I don’t think that anything that I say on related subjects would be meaningful to them.