Wednesday, July 20, 2016

40 billion tons


For those of us living in the UK we're experiencing a hot spell at the moment, temperatures are running into the early 30s which is highly unusual for us. Even so, weather isn't the same thing as climate, a hot or cold day here and there isn't indicative of any particular trend, what you need to do to establish trends is to look back over a much longer time period and calculate the averages, if those move up or down then chances are that you have a proper trend. The chart above shows average temperatures for June just passed, it shows that in some of the higher latitude countries average temperatures were nudging between 6-8 degrees centigrade above seasonal norms; in fact many records were broken and it's reasonable to say that no human being alive today has ever lived through a warmer June. The data that the trends are upward isn't disputable, the facts are the facts, deniers can prevaricate as much as they like, personally I'm still waiting for a good account from them as to why dumping 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year definitely wouldn't make a difference to our climate; suffice to say it's going to be another 'annus horribilis' for polar bears.

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