2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #30

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 21, 2024 thru Sat, July 27, 2024.

Story of the week

In a week crammed with news of the Paris Olympics and another passing of an entirely different torch in Washington, D.C., USA— on top of the usual high noise level— came an inflection point, and our Story of the Week.

Earlier this month the Copernicus Climate Change Service alerted the world that as of June we'd seen 12 contiguous months of Earth surface temperature exceeding 1.5 °C over the pre-industrial reference period. Only a month later (this past week) came more news of temperature excursions. On July 21st the average temperature of the entire globe exceeded any previous measurement reaching back to 1940.  This new record did not stand long; the very next day brought a new high. 

This comes on top of global ocean temperature continuing to run at record highs, with the ocean's heat capacity dwarfing that of the atmosphere.

This toasty situation is as entirely expected as it is thoroughly undesirable. Thanks to our accidental (at first) tampering with our atmosphere we're now accumulating a lot excess energy that otherwise would find an easier path back into the cold dark of space. With the atmosphere now effectively acting as a more efficient insulator, the Earth needs to heat up in order to radiate that energy back into space. It would be best if we slowed down our rate of warming, because heating up enough to dump excess energy accumulated thanks to our accident means the planet needs to become too warm too fast.

Given Skeptical Science's mission, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that getting this situation under control will be easier to accomplish without interested parties concertedly engaging in deceit so as to prolong their outmoded and increasingly lethal business plans.

As a technical matter it shouldn't be necessary to suffer through an object lesson of planetary scale but here we are, living exactly that tutelage. Decades of deception leading to prevarication and procrastination find us living in an undesirable future we could easily see long ago. Our climate is changing in accordance with projections we've had to hand for many years, with upward wiggles trumping downward bumps. It's obviously high time to retire doubt and dismissal of our influence on Earth's climate.

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before July 21

July 21

July 22

July 23

July 24

July 25

July 26

July 27

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

Posted by BaerbelW on Sunday, 28 July, 2024

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