Earth sets unofficial heat record

AP:

Earth’s average temperature set a new unofficial record high on Thursday, the third such milestone in a week that already rated as the hottest on record and what one prominent scientist says could be the hottest in 120,000 years.

But it’s also a record with some legitimate scientific questions and caveats, so much so that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has distanced itself from it. It’s grabbed global attention, even as the number – 63 degrees Fahrenheit (17.23 degrees Celsius) – doesn’t look that hot because it averages temperatures from around the globe.

Still, scientists say the daily drumbeat of records – official or not – is a symptom of a larger problem where the precise digits aren’t as important as what’s causing them.

“Records grab attention, but we need to make sure to connect them with the things that actually matter,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of the Imperial College of London said in an email. “So I don’t think it’s crucial how ‘official’ the numbers are, what matters is that they are huge and dangerous and wouldn’t have happened without climate change.”

Thursday’s planetary average surpassed the 62.9-degree mark (17.18-degree mark) set Tuesday and equalled Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition. Until Monday, no day had passed the 17-degree Celsius mark (62.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the tool’s 44 years of records.

Now, the entire week that ended Thursday averaged that much.

63-DEGREE MARK

Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, called the 63-degree mark “an exceptional outlier” that is nearly six degrees warmer than the average of the last 12,000 years. Rockstrom said it will “with high likelihood translate to even more severe extremes in the form of floods, droughts, heat waves and storms.”

“It is certainly plausible that the past couple days and past week were the warmest days globally in 120,000 years,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said. He cited a 2021 study that says Earth is the warmest since the last age ended, and said Earth likely hasn’t been as warm dating all the way to the ice age before that some 120,000 years ago.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth temperature monitoring group said he wouldn’t be surprised if it is the warmest in 120,000 years. But he said long-term proxy measurements like tree rings aren’t precise.

This week’s average includes places that are sweltering under dangerous heat – like Jingxing, China, which checked in almost 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) – and the merely unusually warm, like Antarctica, where temperatures across much of the continent were as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) above normal this week.

Temperatures were so brutally hot Thursday in Adrar, Algeria, that the overnight low dropped only to 103.3 degrees (39.6 degrees Celsius ). That was an all-time nighttime low for Africa, according to weather historian and climatologist Maximiliano Herrera.

The temperature is ramping up across Europe this week, too. Germany’s weather agency, DWD, has predicted highs of 37 degrees C (99 degrees F) on Sunday and the health ministry has issued a warning to vulnerable people.