Up here in Minnesota it’s been unseasonably warm until the last couple of days. But how’s the rest of the world doing? From ClimateReanalyzer.org this is the 2M Temperature Anomaly, which I believe measures substantial deviations from historical averages temperature:
Yeah, it looks like Australia’s experiencing brutal highs. From The Guardian:
It was 48.9C [120F] last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.
Unpleasant. More accurately, getting close to inimical to human life. Especially if you’re a climate change denier. The penguins have yet to register a complaint in Antarctica from that nasty spot I see, but perhaps they’re enjoying the respite, eh?
