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Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”

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« Reply #1350 on: January 13, 2020, 07:36:52 pm »



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« Reply #1351 on: January 13, 2020, 07:37:58 pm »


from The Washington Post…

In Australia, the air poses a threat; people are
rushing to hospitals in cities choked by smoke


“It's sort of like medicine meets ‘Mad Max’,” said one doctor.

By DARRYL FEARS and BRADY DENNIS | 4:28PM EST — Sunday, January 12, 2020

Amid an early-morning smoky haze, a man cleans the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on January 5. — Photograph: Lukas Coch/Reuters.
Amid an early-morning smoky haze, a man cleans the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on January 5.
 — Photograph: Lukas Coch/Reuters.


JENNY EDWARDS didn't want to go back home to Canberra, the Australian capital. She added seven days to a five-day family vacation “specifically to stay out of the smoke.” But it didn't matter.

Within a day of returning, her eyes were irritated, her chest felt tight, her head hurt and a small but persistent cough couldn't clear a tickle in her throat. Three massive fires were still burning about 60 miles away, and even though the heaviest smoke had momentarily lifted, the misery of living in a brownish haze remained. Air quality in Canberra on New Year's Day was among the worst of any major city in the world.

Australia's bush fires have blanketed parts of the continent with pollution, affecting hundreds of thousands of people who are not in immediate danger from the flames. Government agencies and medical officials say distress calls, ambulance runs and hospital emergency room visits have surged. Even some federal departments in the capital had to temporarily shutter offices and tell non-essential staff to stay away.

Stores have seen an overwhelming demand for smoke filtration masks, and in recent days government officials have begun rationing them to particularly vulnerable people, including pregnant women, the elderly and those with chronic heart and lung conditions. On Facebook, residents have posted pictures of doors and windows sealed with thick tape in an effort to keep smoke out their houses. And 7News Sydney posted a “Ciggie Index” — the equivalent number of cigarettes each resident consumes daily from inhaling smoke. In east Sydney, it's 19.

A key question lingers as the fires that began last year continue to burn, in some cases merging into megafires: What are the long-term health implications of so many people exposed to thick smoke for so long?


This photo taken on January 7 by the Royal Australian Air Force shows smoke and haze over mountains in Cooma in New South Wales. — Photograph: Murray Staff/Royal Australian Air Force/Agence France-Presse.
This photo taken on January 7 by the Royal Australian Air Force shows smoke and haze over mountains in Cooma in New South Wales.
 — Photograph: Murray Staff/Royal Australian Air Force/Agence France-Presse.


Wildfire smoke that lingers for weeks doesn't just get into people's eyes and the pores of their skin, researchers say. It enters their minds, settles in their thoughts and affects their mental health. That was a finding from studies following the deadly Black Saturday fires in Victoria in 2009, when both firefighters and residents suffered from post-traumatic stress.

“I'm predicting that the effect is going to be far greater than before because the fires have been burning for such a long time,” said Mirella Di Benedetto, a researcher and clinical psychologist at RMIT University in Melbourne. The 2009 fires were isolated to Victoria, but the current fires are burning nationwide, near Australia's largest cities. “Even where there are no fires, smoke is moving down to these areas,” Di Benedetto said. “The air quality is really bad in Sydney. I think the mental health and physical health impact will be huge in the months to come.”

Little research exists about the long-term consequences of exposure to wildfire smoke, but Kari Nadeau and Mary Prunicki, scientists at Stanford University, are working to change that.

They're closely following hundreds of people affected by devastating wildfires in California, taking blood samples and asking them about everything from their use of air filters to their psychological responses to the experience. Earlier research has linked air pollution from wildfires to a range of acute conditions, including asthma, heart ailments and strokes, but Nadeau and Prunicki hope to solve a deeper mystery.

“Are there irreversible consequences over time?” said Nadeau, director of Stanford's Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research.

The work is urgent, Prunicki said, not only because existing research is limited, but also because the rapidly warming climate is likely to make the unprecedented fires in Australia only more common there and elsewhere around the globe.

“They are not going to go away,” she said.


A man wears a face mask as Bondi Beach in Sydney is shrouded in haze on January 8. — Photograph: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg News.
A man wears a face mask as Bondi Beach in Sydney is shrouded in haze on January 8. — Photograph: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg News.

In Australia, the smoke is affecting cities in unexpected ways. At one of Canberra's public hospitals, workers kept the hospital's exterior doors shut to keep smoke from clouding the hallways and patient rooms, said David Caldicott, an emergency room physician.

Some nurses wore breathing masks, and the smoke temporarily incapacitated some local MRI machines, he said. At his own house, the smoke detector kept blaring one day until Caldicott finally muffled it with a towel at 3 a.m.

In an arid country where residents are accustomed to a wildfire season, he said, the past weeks have been unlike any he has experienced. “It's sort of like medicine meets ‘Mad Max’,” Caldicott said, referring to the vintage Australian action movie about a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future.

In the state of New South Wales, home to Sydney, health officials said emergency room visits for asthma and breathing problems increased more than 34 percent in the period from December 30 to January 5 compared to a year earlier. Ambulance calls for respiratory issues were also higher, about 2,500 compared to the five-year average of about 1,900. Similarly, hospital admissions increased to more than 430, surpassing the five-year average of 361.

Four of Australia's five largest population centers are experiencing the effects of the fires. At least 25 people have died, nearly 2,000 homes have been destroyed and more than 14 million acres have burned. So much smoke has been produced, there's evidence that some is circumnavigating the planet and has reached South America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.


Pedestrians wear masks as smoke shrouds Canberra on January 2. — Photograph: Mark Baker/Associated Press.
Pedestrians wear masks as smoke shrouds Canberra on January 2. — Photograph: Mark Baker/Associated Press.

Bush fires are a known trigger for asthma attacks, said Bruce Thompson, dean of the School of Health Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. “This is a very significant health concern. Here in Australia, we're making sure people are moving themselves from the outdoors as best they can,” Thompson said.

Inside bush-fire smoke, water vapor intermingles with tiny particles measured in micrometers. It also contains gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. Wood dust from exploded trees and chemicals from melted tires and scorched steel also hitch a ride.

Particles as large as 5 micrometers “stick in your nose; you wake up with a runny nose and itchy eyes,” Thompson said. Particles as small as 2.5 micrometers — known by researchers as PM 2.5 — are scarier, he said. “They can get to the very edges of the lungs,” Thompson said. “We had a coal mine fire a few years ago and it's been demonstrated that four years after, children close to the plume had worse lung function. So this is bad.”

Smaller particles in smoke can hinder cardiac function in adults. Thompson said the developing lungs of children can be permanently damaged in varying degrees.

“The lung becomes inflamed, and you cough as the lung tries to adjust,” Thompson said. “The lung is bad at repairing itself. It tries to get rid of particles by making you cough, but it produces scar tissue, and you don't want that in the lung because it changes the efficiency of the lung.”


A woman wearing a face mask sits near the Sydney Opera House shrouded in haze on January 8. — Photograph: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg News.
A woman wearing a face mask sits near the Sydney Opera House shrouded in haze on January 8. — Photograph: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg News.

Fay Johnston, an environmental health professor at the University of Tasmania's Menzies Institute for Medical Research, said most people exposed to the smoke won't be harmed — as long as the fires end soon.

“If the smoke goes away, a healthy person can withstand it,” said Johnston, who specializes in the health effects of bush-fire smoke. “Healthy people will come through it without any long-term harm.”

But relief from the yearly rainy season isn't expected until February. Like other researchers, Johnston worries about what will happen if the fires continue, particularly for old and young asthma sufferers. “What's the long-term legacy of it?” she said. “We really don't know.”

Few studies have delved into the consequences of long-term exposure to bush fires. Johnston and other researchers conducted the study Thompson referenced, on health impacts on children and mothers in the wake of a 2014 fire at a Victoria coal mine that burned for more than a month, blanketing the nearby town of Morwell with smoke.

Young children exposed to the smoke were more likely to get an antibiotic prescription in the year after the fire, and pregnant women were more likely to develop gestational diabetes, Johnston said.

Bin Jalaludin, a professor at the University of New South Wales and chief investigator at the Centre for Air Pollution, Energy and Health Research, said government officials and academics in Australia already have been brainstorming ways to study the long-term health implications of the “truly unprecedented” fires.

“What we want to look at is things like ER visits, deaths, hospitalizations, ambulance call-outs for respiratory problems, birth outcomes — do women who are pregnant and exposed to high levels of smoke, does it have an impact on the newborn?” he said. “It will take time, although we are trying to expedite it and get some of this work done quickly.”


A kangaroo stands in bushland surrounded by an early-morning smoky haze in Canberra on January 5. — Photograph: Lukas Coch/Reuters.
A kangaroo stands in bushland surrounded by an early-morning smoky haze in Canberra on January 5. — Photograph: Lukas Coch/Reuters.

Meanwhile, south of Sydney in Bowral, Peggy Stone said she's fighting off feelings of depression. “We haven't seen the sun for weeks,” she said. The sky is sometimes fiery orange, sometimes smoky gray. The day she spoke, she said, “The sun is trying to penetrate the smoke. Occasionally it might try to get through and we get a little ray.”

Farther south in Canberra, Jenny Edwards, who has asthma, made an appointment to see a doctor.

“I'm quite worried about the next couple of months,” Edwards said. “Air quality is so hard to predict with so many large fires in our region and the possibility of new ones starting.”

She's thinking of leaving Canberra — again. But she knows that option is also risky because it's hard to escape the reach of the fires.

“I am considering returning to stay with my mother-in-law near Lake Macquarie,” she said. “Mind you, there are big fires inland from there, and while staying there last week we had three small fires break out within 10 kilometers of us.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Darryl Fears joined The Washington Post as a general assignment reporter on the Metro staff in 1999. He went on the cover race, demographics and immigration on the national desk, and, for a brief time, urban affairs in the District of Columbia. Before joining The Washington Post, he was a staff writer for the Detroit Free Press, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Los Angeles Times. Darryl has profesional affiliations with the National Association of Black Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists. He speaks conversational Spanish (fading for lack of practice).

Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues. He previously spent years covering the nation's economy. Dennis was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crisis. Before that, he was a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times (Florida).

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Australia sees worst wildfires in decades


https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/01/12/australia-air-poses-threat-people-are-rushing-hospitals-cities-choked-by-smoke
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« Reply #1352 on: January 14, 2020, 07:57:08 pm »



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« Reply #1353 on: January 23, 2020, 06:29:45 am »

https://banned.video/watch?id=5da4ca3b9329370013a6fff5
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« Reply #1354 on: January 23, 2020, 08:42:33 pm »


I'm not even going to click on that, 'cause I KNOW it will be stupid stuff.
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« Reply #1355 on: January 24, 2020, 11:39:30 am »

i dont expect you to look at it so please dont
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« Reply #1356 on: April 22, 2020, 02:56:11 pm »


from The Washington Post…

This year is on track to be Earth's warmest on record,
beating 2016, NOAA says


The U.S. oceans and atmosphere agency puts the odds of a new record at 75 percent.

By ANDREW FREEDMAN | 12:37PM EDT — Tuesday, April 21, 2020

A man looks up as police and fire personnel move in to remove climate activists outside a E.U. summit meeting in Brussels on December 12. — Photograph: Francisco Seco/Associated Press.
A man looks up as police and fire personnel move in to remove climate activists outside a E.U. summit meeting in Brussels on December 12.
 — Photograph: Francisco Seco/Associated Press.


THERE IS a 75 percent chance 2020 will set a record for the warmest year since instrument records began in 1880, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration is projecting, beating out 2016 for the distinction.

This is somewhat unexpected, since there is no declared El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which tends to provide a natural boost to global temperatures that are already elevated due to the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The NOAA projection, made late last week, is based on statistical modeling now that the first quarter of 2020 is off to a near-record warm start, coming in as the second-warmest January through March period since instrument records began in 1880.

Both Europe and Asia had their warmest first quarter of the year. Only 2016 was warmer during this period, and that year featured an unusually intense El Niño event.

Remarkably, the global temperature differences from average in February and March were among the largest of any of the 1,680 months in the agency's records. March had the second largest anomaly of any month, said Derek Arndt, the head of climate monitoring at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina, during a news conference call.

February and March were the warmest two non-El Niño months in NOAA’s temperature database, Arndt said.

He said March was also the 44th straight March and 423rd straight month that had global average temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average. March has warmed by 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.7 degrees Celsius) since 1991, he said.


More on the 2020 prediction

Despite the lack of an officially-declared El Niño, in which temperatures in the tropical Pacific must rise above a particular threshold, ocean temperatures have nevertheless been running above average in recent months, Arndt said, contributing to the warm start to 2020.

He said that in 2016, the anomalous warmth was front loaded due to El Niño conditions that peaked early in the year, before easing as the El Niño diminished later. The first quarter of this year has run neck and neck with 2016's temperatures so that if monthly global average temperatures remain relatively steady during the rest of the year, 2020 will move into the top spot, he said.


Year-to-date global temperatures for 2020 compared with the top 10 warmest years. — National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
Year-to-date global temperatures for 2020 compared with the top 10 warmest years. — National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

The oceans and atmosphere agency also found there is a 99.9 percent chance 2020 will end up being a top 5-warmest year.

“A lot of that has to do with the fact that the year 2016 became the warmest year on record largely because it was very, very warm in the first half of the year, and it was actually not nearly as impressively warm in the second half of the year,” Arndt said. “So the way this might play out is, by staying close to 2016 early on, it does look like a better than half probability that we will finish the year warmest on record.”

The NOAA is not just making a guess at the final temperature ranking for the year. Instead, scientists are using a statistical model that takes monthly temperatures during the past four decades and generates about 10,000 potential outcomes. With March data included, about three-quarters of the model runs showed 2020 would at least nominally beat 2016.

This model does not incorporate El Niño or La Niña conditions, the latter of which can dampen global average temperatures, so if either of these phenomena develop, the projection may be off target.

Separately, Gavin Schmidt, who leads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, puts the odds of a record this year at closer to 60 percent, based on NASA's data set, which has slightly different rankings than has NOAA. However, he said that when applying NOAA's methods to NASA’s monthly data, the odds would increase to 67 percent.

Other temperature monitoring agencies such as the U.K. Met Office have forecast 2020 will be one of the top 5 warmest years on record.

In any case, climate scientists do not place too much emphasis in annual rankings for monitoring and attributing global climate change, but rather focus more on long-term trends in greenhouse gas emissions, air and sea temperatures and climate indicators such as melting glaciers, sea level rise and changes in precipitation patterns.

The land and oceans respond to the amount of greenhouse gases in the air, rather than emissions rates, which means the sudden cut in carbon emissions related to the coronavirus pandemic will not affect global average surface temperatures in the near future.


__________________________________________________________________________

Andrew Freedman is an editor for the Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post. He has long covered science research and policy, with a focus on climate change, extreme weather and the environment. He was among the first reporters to popularize the term “polar vortex” during the infamous East Coast winter of 2013 to 2014. He joined The Washington Post in 2019, having worked as an editor and reporter for Axios, Mashable, Climate Central and other publications. Andrew holds a B.A. in political science from Tufts University; a M.A. in climate and society from Columbia University; and a M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/04/21/earth-warmest-year-likely-2020
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« Reply #1357 on: July 04, 2020, 08:24:27 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists

The Arctic region is enduring its own summer of discontent, with record-breaking temperatures,
raging wildfires, thawing permafrost, crumbling infrastructure and vanishing sea ice.
It was 100 degrees in Siberia on June 20, hotter than Dallas or Houston.


By ISABELLE KHURSHUDYAN, ANDREW FREEDMAN and BRADY DENNIS | 5:56PM EDT — Friday, July 03, 2020

A wildfire in the village of Melnichnaya Pad in Russia's Irkutsk region is seen on May 27, 2019; volunteers managed to stop the fire from spreading to a summer camp for children. — Photograph: Kirill Shipitsin/Tass/Getty Images.
A wildfire in the village of Melnichnaya Pad in Russia's Irkutsk region is seen on May 27, 2019; volunteers managed to stop the fire from spreading
to a summer camp for children. — Photograph: Kirill Shipitsin/Tass/Getty Images.


ALEXANDER DEYEV can still taste the smoke from last year's wildfires that blanketed the towns near his home in southeastern Siberia, and he is dreading their return.

“It just felt like you couldn't breathe at all,” said Deyev, 32, who lives in Irkutsk, a Siberian region along Lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border.

But already this year, fires in the spring arrived earlier and with more ferocity, government officials have said. In the territory where Deyev lives, fires were three times as large this April as the year before. And the hot, dry summer lies ahead.

Much of the world remains consumed with the deadly novel coronavirus. The United States, crippled by the pandemic, is in the throes of a divisive presidential campaign and protests over racial inequality. But at the top of the globe, the Arctic is enduring its own summer of discontent.

Wildfires are raging amid ­record-breaking temperatures. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.


An aerial view shows floodwaters after the ice-choked Lena River spilled its banks in remote settlements in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Russia, on May 13. — Photograph: Andrey Sorokin/Sputnik/Associated Press.
An aerial view shows floodwaters after the ice-choked Lena River spilled its banks in remote settlements in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Russia, on May 13.
 — Photograph: Andrey Sorokin/Sputnik/Associated Press.


In Siberia and across much of the Arctic, profound changes are unfolding more rapidly than scientists anticipated only a few years ago. Shifts that once seemed decades away are happening now, with potentially global implications.

“We always expected the Arctic to change faster than the rest of the globe,” said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But I don't think anyone expected the changes to happen as fast as we are seeing them happen.”

Vladimir Romanovsky, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said the pace, severity and extent of the changes are surprising even to many researchers who study the region for a living. Predictions for how quickly the Arctic would warm that once seemed extreme “underestimate what is going on in reality,” he said. The temperatures occurring in the High Arctic during the past 15 years were not predicted to occur for 70 more years, he said.

Neither Dallas nor Houston has hit 100 degrees yet this year, but in one of the coldest regions of the world, Siberia's “Pole of Cold,” the mercury climbed to 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) on June 20.

If confirmed, the record-breaker in the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, about 3,000 miles east of Moscow, would stand as the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885.




The triple-digit record was not a freak event, either, but instead part of a searing heat wave. Verkhoyansk saw 11 straight days with a high temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) or above, according to Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The average June high at that location is just 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius).

This week, Ust'-Olenek, Russia, about 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 93.7 degrees Fahrenheit (34.3 degrees Celsius), about 40 degrees above average for the date. On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit — about 46 degrees above normal.

Much of Siberia experienced an exceptionally mild winter, followed by a warmer-than-average spring, and it has been among the most unusually warm regions of the world during 2020. During May, parts of Siberia saw an average monthly temperature that was a staggering 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) above average for the month, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“To me, these are kind of the key ingredients of things you expect in a warming climate,” Freja Vamborg, a senior scientist at Copernicus, said of the recent heat records, coupled with prolonged months of higher-than-average temperatures.

The persistent warmth has helped to fuel wildfires, eviscerate sea ice and destabilize homes and other buildings constructed on thawing permafrost. It allegedly even contributed to a massive fuel spill in Norilsk in late May that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency in the environmentally sensitive region.

Already, sea ice in the vicinity of Siberia is running at record-low levels for any year since reliable satellite monitoring began in 1979.

Scientists have long maintained that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. But in reality, the region is now warming at nearly three times the global average. Data from NASA shows that since 1970, the Arctic has warmed by an average of 5.3 degrees Fahrenheit (2.94 degrees Celsius), compared with the global average of 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit (0.95 degrees Celsius) during the same period. Scientists refer to the phenomenon as “Arctic amplification.”


Amid an unprecedented heat wave, children play in Krugloe Lake outside Verkhoyansk in Russia's Sakha Republic on June 21. — Photograph: Olga Burtseva/Associated Press.
Amid an unprecedented heat wave, children play in Krugloe Lake outside Verkhoyansk in Russia's Sakha Republic on June 21.
 — Photograph: Olga Burtseva/Associated Press.


Employees of Russia’s state-owned oil pipeline monopoly Transneft take part in a cleanup operation on June 10, following a massive oil spill in the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk. — Photograph: Irina Yarinskaya/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
Employees of Russia’s state-owned oil pipeline monopoly Transneft take part in a cleanup operation on June 10, following a massive oil spill
in the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk. — Photograph: Irina Yarinskaya/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


The melting of snow and ice earlier in the spring exposes darker land surfaces and ocean waters. This switches these areas from being net reflectors of incoming solar radiation to heat absorbers, which further increases land and sea temperatures. That means more warmth in the air, more melting of snow and ice, and drying of vegetation in a way that creates more fuel for wildfires.

What happens in the Arctic matters for the rest of the globe. Greenland ice melt is already the biggest contributor to sea-level rise worldwide, studies show. The loss of Arctic sea ice is also thought to be leading to more-extreme weather patterns far outside the Arctic, in a complex series of ripple effects that may be partly responsible for extreme heat and precipitation events that have claimed thousands of lives in recent years.

The fires that have erupted in Siberia this summer have been massive, sending out plumes of smoke that have covered a swath of land spanning about 1,000 miles at times. While much of the fire activity has occurred in the Sakha Republic, known for such blazes, scientists are observing more fires farther north, above the Arctic Circle, in peatlands and tundra.

“This seems to be a new pattern,” said Jessica McCarty, a researcher at Miami University in Ohio. In past years, fires “were sparse if not unheard of in these regions.”

One concern is that such fires could be destabilizing peatlands and permafrost — the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's land mass, stretching across large parts of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said fires in Siberia are burning “in areas where we expect permafrost to be more vulnerable.” Typically, these fires would break out in July and August, but this year they spiked in May, a sign of the unusual heat and early snow melt.

Turetsky said the fires are removing the blanket of vegetation that covers permafrost, making it more vulnerable to melting.


An aerial view on April 23 of the ruins of a summer house destroyed by a fire in a dacha community in Moshkovo district, in Novosibirsk in southern Siberia. The region is experiencing hundreds of fires believed to have been caused by burning old grass. — Photograph: Kirill Kukhmar/Tass/Getty Images.
An aerial view on April 23 of the ruins of a summer house destroyed by a fire in a dacha community in Moshkovo district, in Novosibirsk in southern Siberia.
The region is experiencing hundreds of fires believed to have been caused by burning old grass. — Photograph: Kirill Kukhmar/Tass/Getty Images.


A forest fire in the central Sakha Republic on June 2. — Photograph: Yevgeny Sofroneyev/Tass/Getty Images.
A forest fire in the central Sakha Republic on June 2. — Photograph: Yevgeny Sofroneyev/Tass/Getty Images.

Satellite observations of Arctic wildfires in June also showed that fires this year are emitting more greenhouse gases than the record Arctic fires in 2019, according to Mark Parrington, who tracks wildfires around the world with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Some of these blazes appear to be what are known as “zombie fires,” which survive the winter season smoldering underground only to erupt again once snow and ice melts the following spring. Similar fires have been observed in Alaska this summer.

Ted Schuur, a professor at Northern Arizona University who researches permafrost emissions, said the rapid warming is turning the Arctic into a net emitter of greenhouse gases — a disconcerting shift that threatens to dramatically hasten global warming. The unusually mild conditions in Siberia are particularly worrisome, as the region is home to the largest zone of continuous permafrost in the world.

There has long been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, from Russia to Alaska to Canada, could be released as the permafrost melts. That is almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere. Recent research by Schuur and others shows that warmer temperatures allow microbes within the soil to convert permafrost carbon into carbon dioxide and methane.

A report late last year that Schuur co-authored found that permafrost ecosystems could be releasing as much as 1.1 billion to 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year — nearly as much as the annual emissions of Japan and Russia in 2018, respectively.

“A decade ago we thought more of the permafrost would be resistant to change,” said Schuur. The more scientists look for destabilizing permafrost and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the more they find such evidence.

Rapid warming has altered their calculations. “We're basically setting records in the Arctic year after year,” Schuur said. “These emissions are now adding to our climate change problem. What happens in Siberia is going to affect everything through the global climate system.”


Permafrost, seen at the top of a cliff, melts into the Kolyma River in eastern Siberia on July 6, 2019. — Photograph: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post.
Permafrost, seen at the top of a cliff, melts into the Kolyma River in eastern Siberia on July 6, 2019.
 — Photograph: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post.


Cranes tower over a coal station in the Siberian town of Zyryanka on the Kolyma River on July 9, 2019. — Photograph: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post.
Cranes tower over a coal station in the Siberian town of Zyryanka on the Kolyma River on July 9, 2019.
 — Photograph: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post.


Researchers have watched as the changes sweeping the Arctic threaten major infrastructure, including homes and cities in the region.

“Will roads, buildings, oil and gas pipelines be able to survive without emergency [interventions], due to permafrost degradation?” Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk, said in an email. “One must live on stable lands. In Siberia and the Arctic, many settlements and infrastructure were built before global warming, before there were problems. The main thing is not to be late with the solutions, because many villages are located in dangerous and vulnerable areas.”

For all the disconcerting signals coming out of the Arctic right now, the potential for troubling events remains high in the coming months, Meier said.

Sea ice typically reaches its minimum in September, he noted. Ice melt accelerates in Greenland during June and July. Wildfires have the potential to worsen as summer drags on. Intense summer storms can cause permafrost degradation and worsen coastal erosion.

“Certainly, 2020 is a strange year all around, for a lot of reasons beyond climate,” Meier said. “But it's certainly setting up to be an extreme year in the Arctic.”

That might seem like a distant problem to the rest of the world. But those who study the Arctic insist the rest of us should pay close attention.

“When we develop a fever, it's a sign. It's a warning sign that something is wrong and we stop and we take note,” Turetsky said. “Literally, the Arctic is on fire. It has a fever right now, and so it's a good warning sign that we need to stop, take note and figure out what's going on.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Isabelle Khurshudyan reported from Moscow. Olga Massov in Washington D.C. contributed to this report.

Isabelle Khurshudyan is a foreign correspondent based in Moscow. A University of South Carolina graduate, she has worked at The Washington Post since 2014, previously as a sports reporter covering the Washington Capitals, high school sports and local colleges.

Andrew Freedman is an editor for the Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post. He has long covered science research and policy, with a focus on climate change, extreme weather and the environment. He was among the first reporters to popularize the term “polar vortex” during the infamous East Coast winter of 2013 to 2014. He joined The Washington Post in 2019, having worked as an editor and reporter for Axios, Mashable, Climate Central and other publications. Andrew was educated at Tufts University, where he earned a B.A. in political science; at Columbia University, where he earned a M.A. in Climate and Society; and he holds a M.A. from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment. He previously has covered food and drug issues, public health crises such as the Ebola epidemic, and the nation's economy, including the global financial crisis that began in 2008. He worked for the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times and The Seattle Times prior to coming to The Washington Post. Brady was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

 • Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground


https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/rapid-arctic-meltdown-in-siberia-alarms-scientists/2020/07/03/4c1bd6a6-bbaa-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html
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« Reply #1358 on: July 05, 2020, 10:04:40 am »



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« Reply #1359 on: July 10, 2021, 04:30:20 pm »

Loony left hysteria based activism continuously beaten up by the braindead media for clicks and thus profit. You know you're soaking in it? Grin
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« Reply #1360 on: July 21, 2022, 01:05:31 pm »

Tried warning you all way back when it would have made a difference.
No one listened and now it's too late.

 Huh
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« Reply #1361 on: July 22, 2022, 10:36:05 am »

https://twitter.com/Lidotajs/status/1549439524354269186?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1549439524354269186%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.stuff.co.nz%2Fenvironment%2Fclimate-news%2F300643407%2Fa-uk-meteorologist-warned-of-deadly-heat-then-he-was-told-to-cheer-up
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« Reply #1362 on: July 23, 2022, 10:51:04 pm »

Tried warning you all way back when it would have made a difference.
No one listened and now it's too late.


 Huh


Yeah, and now the stupid fuckheads expect the taxpayers or ratepayers to cough-up to fix their homes which are destroyed by extreme weather which was predicted by scientists a long, long time ago.

Or in the case of stupid, religious-right American fuckheads, they think they can destroy the planet and the son of their god will come flying over the horizon to fix everything and take them on a naked flight into outer-space.

In a way I'm kinda glad I don't have any kids to pass this fucked-up world onto.

How's it going, Dazza. I just had major open-heart surgery in Wellington on Tuesday. I'll be in hospital for a wee while yet, but they are going to fly me over the hill to Wairarapa in a couple of weeks and transfer me into Wairarapa Hospital for a couple of weeks of final recovery closer to home. On Tuesday night, I had more than sixty tubes, wires, cables, drains and other stuff connecting me up to all sorts of machines. Tonight, I'm down to just seven in total and another one will come out tomorrow. I've got a wee way to go yet, but the body is healing up fast.

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« Reply #1363 on: September 01, 2022, 05:16:52 pm »

Still playing with yourself on here I see  Grin

Hope you get well from the heart issues quickly.

Fun fact for you hysterical eco-bullshit worshippers; Looking at ice core records, the previous interglacial period was warmer than the current one (in case you don't know, that was approx 120,000 years ago). Also there is nothing "unprecedented" about the current fires, floods, droughts, sea level rise, rate of sea level rise, rate of temp increase etc etc. Try not to have a mental meltdown. Eventually you'll get it!
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« Reply #1364 on: September 02, 2022, 09:28:30 pm »


Oh dear, another stupid climate-change denier.

I guess you'll rail against your insurance company when they ramp-up your premiums through the roof because of global warming.

Talk about a fucking idiot, eh?

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« Reply #1365 on: September 28, 2022, 02:39:30 pm »



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« Reply #1366 on: October 27, 2023, 10:08:56 pm »


from The Washington Post…

For New Zealand's Māori communities, climate change is already hurting

Indigenous communities along New Zealand's long coastline are feeling the double whammy
of climate change and colonialism as extreme weather makes marginal land uninhabitable.


By RACHEL PANNETT | 12:01AM EDT — Friday, October 27, 2023

Eight months after a destructive cyclone hit New Zealand, Maori communities such as this one in the Tangoio Valley are still clearing away piles of silt from ruined fields. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
Eight months after a destructive cyclone hit New Zealand, Maori communities such as this one in the Tangoio Valley are still clearing away piles of silt
from ruined fields. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


TANGOIO, NEW ZEALAND — The wharenui, or meeting house, stood forlorn. Usually the hub of this remote Māori community, it had been stripped of its wooden carvings. The bare cinder block shell gave the building an unclothed appearance. Wind whistled through holes bashed out by floodwaters.

An official red notice prohibited entry to the adjacent dining hall, where the walls were askew, jammed with twigs and debris. The preschool was shuttered, the children gone. Down the valley, dump trucks whirred as they hauled silt from ruined fields.

Eight months have passed since a powerful cyclone struck northern New Zealand, killing 11 people and displacing more than 10,000. The storm's path across the Hawke's Bay region was indiscriminate: it pummeled low-rent housing alongside million-dollar homes, wineries, orchards and factories. But the barriers to recovery here highlight the double whammy dealt to Indigenous communities by climate change, as extreme weather events exacerbate already high rates of homelessness and economic disadvantage.

In parts of Hawke's Bay, February's cyclone is in the rear-view. Streets have been tidied up. Insurance claims lodged. Levees repaired. Meanwhile, communities like Tangoio face painful choices about their future after authorities declared their land too risky to reinhabit.


The dining hall at Tangoio was deemed uninhabitable by authorities after the February cyclone. Shared meals are a big part of Māori community life. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
The dining hall at Tangoio was deemed uninhabitable by authorities after the February cyclone. Shared meals are a big part of Māori community life.
 — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


Tangoio and dozens of Māori communities are on the front lines of climate change, a dark legacy of British colonization which saw Indigenous people consigned to inhospitable land. Many are on flood plains or near the sea. Historically, tribes moved between coastal villages and fortified hilltop settlements when they faced bad weather or enemy attacks. Colonial land confiscations changed that.

“Some of these marae don't have any other land if you take them off that flood plain,” said ​Bayden Barber, chairman of Ngāti Kahungunu, the main Māori tribe in the region. (The marae is a sacred Maori meeting ground for tribal gatherings, encompassing a wharenui, dining hall and urupa, or burial grounds.)

“They used to own that whole region. That in itself is a travesty. And now climate change is pushing our people off the last little bit of whenua [land] that they actually own,” Barber said.


Twisted railway lines near the east coast city of Napier pay grim tribute to the February storm's ferocity. — Photograph: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images.
Twisted railway lines near the east coast city of Napier pay grim tribute to the February storm's ferocity. — Photograph: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images.

The government has agreed to split with local authorities the cost of buying out homeowners affected the most to get them to relocate. But the plan doesn't account for Māori communities' deep spiritual connection to ancestral land, or for shared land ownership. Nor does it consider previous legal settlements the government has signed with Indigenous groups guaranteeing access to tribal land and resources, including seafood. The government has been compensating tribes across the country since the late 1980s as redress for colonial wrongs.

In 2013, officials came to Tangoio to apologize for a brutal history of military attacks and land confiscations that had left them “virtually landless”, according to the government minister in charge at the time.


The meeting house at Waipatu Marae near Hastings, which became an evacuation center for displaced cyclone survivors. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
The meeting house at Waipatu Marae near Hastings, which became an evacuation center for displaced cyclone survivors.
 — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


Although the buyout plan is voluntary, categorizing land as uninhabitable has made it problematic to insure against future disasters.

“We don't want to build a marae, which is priceless, on a piece of land where the insurers won't touch us,” said Hori Reti, chairman of Tangoio marae, which counts 6,373 people in its community.

Relocated by force during colonial times, climate change is forcing another kind of relocation on Tangoio. Experts call it “managed retreat.”


The eroding coastline at Tangoio beach. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
The eroding coastline at Tangoio beach. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.

‘They call me Moses’

When the storm struck Tangoio in February, Reti was trapped as a wall of water approached like a freight train. He huddled with his wife in the pitch dark. Somehow, trees uprooted by the storm piled up like a dam behind their home, parting the floodwaters around them.

“They call me Moses,” Reti said wryly.

For Reti, 44, the cyclone is a reminder of historic loss: firstly through colonial land confiscations, and later the Public Works Act, which allowed land to be claimed for roads.

He pointed toward a vacant plot where his great-grandmother's house once stood. Authorities plowed a road right through her front garden, Reti said with exasperation. Similarly, a coastal highway that curves into the valley, away from the Pacific, cut so deeply into the hillside that a historic home atop it had to be demolished.

When municipal valuers visited after the cyclone, Reti said he couldn't fathom their language. They spoke of assets: a bridge and the state highway. For Reti, value is in the spot in the river where his ancestors gave birth and the sacred ground where they're buried.

“How will we get that mirror effect on another piece of land?” he said.

Reti is set on restoring the Tangoio marae for its people to return to. But they've weathered six big floods since they were hemmed onto this plain. With their land-holdings reduced from around 275,000 acres to a mere four acres, Reti asks, where can they go?


The Māori community at Waipatu became an evacuation center for people displaced by the cyclone. Tane Tomoana works inside a storage container filled with donations for families in need. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
The Māori community at Waipatu became an evacuation center for people displaced by the cyclone. Tane Tomoana works inside a storage container filled with
donations for families in need. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


Climate warriors

Tangoio's struggles highlight the difficult issues around managed retreat: Who decides when to retreat and on what basis, and how do you pay for it?

It foreshadows the troubles that could befall other low-lying communities as storms intensify and seas rise. In the United States, the Biden administration last year gave a number of Native American tribes money to help them relocate away from rivers and coastlines.

This 200-mile stretch of coastline has one of the highest rates of erosion and sea level rise in New Zealand. Tens of thousands of people are expected to have to move out of harm's way around the country in coming decades. So far, New Zealand's only case of managed retreat — after a massive landslide — took nearly two decades to resolve.


A local sports club was repurposed to house displaced cyclone survivors. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
A local sports club was repurposed to house displaced cyclone survivors. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.

“Are we going to be courageous enough, as the elected leaders, to say we'll do something different, or will we just be another footnote in history?” said Nigel Bickle, the chief executive of Hawke's Bay District Council. “What is going to mark out the countries globally are those that are going to be prepared to deal with this.”

Bickle, who has clashed with tribal officials over relocation proposals, understands the quandary. “We've come in and said there's an intolerable risk to life and you shouldn't be living there,” he said. “And they're saying: ‘Who is going to help us find a piece of land that is safe?’”


Hiria Tumoana, a Māori elder, was rescued from head-high waters that inundated her home. She has been living in temporary accommodation since February in a Māori community that avoided the deluge. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
Hiria Tumoana, a Māori elder, was rescued from head-high waters that inundated her home.
She has been living in temporary accommodation since February in a Māori community that
avoided the deluge. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


or years, the Tangoio community has been exploring ways to protect the settlement from climate change — including relocating to higher ground. They approached several landowners about repurchasing land within their traditional borders. All three declined.

Before the cyclone, the community was preparing to redevelop the meeting house on a raised platform. Those plans are now in doubt. Even before local authorities ruled the area unsafe, some were questioning the merits of rebuilding in a flood zone. They're seeking regulatory support to purchase “resilient land”.

The previous center-left Labour administration was looking to include Indigenous knowledge in its climate change planning to avoid a repeat of past wrongs. But Tom Fitzgerald, a climate expert, said officials are “building the plane as they are flying it,” combining their disaster response with climate plans still under development. A national election in October that moved New Zealand sharply to the right adds to the uncertainty.


Children's rain boots sit outside a destroyed Kohanga Reo (Māori Language preschool) at Tangoio. Some community members worry the children won't return to the area. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
Children's rain boots sit outside a destroyed Kohanga Reo (Māori Language preschool) at Tangoio. Some community members worry the children won't return
to the area. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


Hilltop fortresses

For many Māori communities, relocation is not an unfamiliar concept.

There is evidence of managed retreat occurring as far back as the 1800s, when a volcanic eruption forced Māori communities to relocate, said Akuhata Bailey-Winiata, an Indigenous scholar at Waikato University. Other tribes offered land to those whose settlements were buried in tons of ash and debris.




About 35 miles south of Tangoio, the Omahu marae community is planning a 10-year retreat to a historic hilltop fort after the cyclone inundated their meeting house and burial grounds, exposing human bones. North of Tangoio, plans are afoot to move the community — and possibly the entire town of Te Karaka — to higher ground.

For some Māori, the cyclone underscored their resilience. At Omahu, around 1,200 people came to help. Within days they were providing meals and shelter to families displaced by floodwaters.


Hiria Tumoana in her temporary shared sleeping quarters at Waipatu Marae. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
Hiria Tumoana in her temporary shared sleeping quarters at Waipatu Marae. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.

At nearby Waipatu marae, Tane Tomoana had just completed civil defense training when an army truck carrying 120 flood survivors turned up. That training was no longer academic. “We remembered who we were meant to be. It's a really good reset. Māori, catering for everybody, with joy and gusto,” he said.

Eight months on, some flood survivors are still living at Waipatu, including 69-year-old Hiria Tumoana, whose home was inundated by head-high waters. She was rescued by a neighbor who saw her candle flickering and found her clinging to an upturned bed.

Returning to Māori village life felt like a home-coming, she said. At night, she sleeps in a communal space with other families. That companionship helps, she said, especially when it rains — a sound many survivors find triggering.


Carvings from the damaged meeting house at Tangoio were recently removed to restore them for the day they return to sacred ground. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
Carvings from the damaged meeting house at Tangoio were recently removed to restore them for the day they return to sacred ground.
 — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


Uneven hand

For others, the recovery is not so easy because they have so little land left.

At Petane marae, just south of Tangoio, the community had just renovated their dining hall and were about to build a new meeting house when the storm hit. Now, like Tangoio, they've been zoned uninhabitable.

“We are unable to build our wharenui for our people to come back to us,” community chairwoman Rose Hiha said one recent afternoon, wiping away tears.

Some members want to fortify the area with levees. Others are afraid to return. Twisted railway lines pay grim tribute to the storm's ferocity. Wrecked cars are frozen in time where they washed up. A Māori school is half-buried in debris.


Joe Taylor, the master carver of Tangoio Marae, restores a carving in a temporary workshop in Napier. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.
Joe Taylor, the master carver of Tangoio Marae, restores a carving in a temporary workshop
in Napier. — Photograph: Te Aho Jordan/for The Washington Post.


At a Napier warehouse one afternoon, Joe Taylor, a Tangoio elder, chiseled away at a limestone sculpture, beginning a restoration project he predicted will outlive him.

Under the 82-year-old's guidance, the remaining artifacts were recently removed from Tangoio to preserve them for the day they return to sacred ground.


__________________________________________________________________________

Rachel Pannett writes about global news for The Washington Post. She started as a journalist in her home country New Zealand, and has reported from around the world including Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Vietnam, East Timor and Papua New Guinea. She has covered wildfires and terrorist attacks, elections and political upheavals, and traced the journeys of Myanmar Rohingya refugees and Afghan migrants seeking a better life abroad. On a less-serious note, she has also written about beer-can boat races, Elvis impersonators in the Outback and Australia's ‘Route 66’. She joined The Washington Post's foreign desk in 2021 after more than a decade with The Wall Street Journal, where she was deputy bureau chief for Australia and New Zealand. Rachel was educated at Massey University in NZ, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology and Journalism. In addition to English, she also speaks fluent Norwegian. | Honors and Awards: Asia 2000 annual travel award for journalists reporting in the Asia-Pacific.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/27/new-zealand-maori-climate-change-indigenous
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« Reply #1367 on: November 12, 2023, 01:28:48 am »



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« Reply #1368 on: January 02, 2024, 12:03:17 am »


from The Washington Post…

The climate future arrived in 2023. It left scars across the planet.

The year will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era
 — an age of “global boiling”, as the U.N. Secretary General called it.


By CHICO HARLAN | 6:00AM EST — Sunday, December 31, 2023

Residents watch a fire near Alexandroupolis, Greece, on August 21, 2023. Wildfires in the country charred several islands over the summer. — Photograph: Achilleas Chiras/Associated Press.
Residents watch a fire near Alexandroupolis, Greece, on August 21, 2023. Wildfires in the country charred several islands over the summer.
 — Photograph: Achilleas Chiras/Associated Press.


AVAS, GREECE — By the time the flames were barreling down the slope, heading for 40 miles of parched forest, the fire chief said he already knew: This was the big one.

His part of Greece had gone two months without rain. A record heat wave had baked the area for weeks. Within hours, the fire had sprinted through acres of pines, hissing and spouting 120-foot flames, reaching the brink of a village where a single home — belonging to Kostas Dinas, a retired attorney — was perched on the hillside outskirts.

Dinas, 66, had figured he'd live in that home until they “carried me out flat.”

But then came the hottest year humanity had ever seen.

It had been a year that had started with merely very hot temperatures and then intensified mid-way. What made the subsequent months stand out wasn't so much any single record but rather the heat's all-consuming relentlessness. It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared.

“It felt like the earth was about to explode,” Dinas said.

Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of “global boiling”, as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, November 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels.

Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records.

In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it “mind-boggling”. The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600.

In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce.

In the Antarctic, winter-time sea ice was at an all-time low. An unprecedented marine heat wave upended coral ecosystems. At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub.


Scorched land and charred trees are seen following a wildfire, near Avantas, Greece, in August. — Photograph: Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters.
Scorched land and charred trees are seen following a wildfire, near Avantas, Greece, in August. — Photograph: Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters.

And in Greece, in the wake of extreme heat, fires broke out on many fronts — none bigger than the blaze that arrived on August 21 in Avas, a village of 400 people with a taverna, a tidy cluster of stone homes, including one high above the others, at the end of a winding road overlooking the town.

Dinas had bought that house from a friend in 2012, seeking a way to move from a nearby city back to his home village. He'd poured his savings into a renovation. He'd stocked the home with his books and vinyl records. From his window, he could see the mountains, the sea six miles away, and squirrels playing in his front yard. In the evenings, he'd tucker down the hill to a bar, right off the town square, where he'd play cards with friends he'd known since high school.

On the night of August 21, he was in that square again, looking up as the fire raged across the hillside. Volunteers and firefighters had spread out across the lower part of the village, having dug trenches, armed with hoses and water buckets, to defend the other properties. But nobody could save Dinas's home. The fire consumed it in minutes, and Dinas gulped thinking about everything going up in flames. His books of poetry, handwritten notes in the margin. His degrees. Photos of his daughter.

“My whole life,” he said.

When the fire stopped, he looked up at the hill. His house had no door, no roof. Even the windows had melted.

“It must have been so, so hot,” Dinas said.


Anomalies ‘off the charts’

The sun shines on coral showing signs of bleaching at Cheeca Rocks off the coast of Islamorada, Florida. Scientists saw devastating effects from prolonged hot water surrounding Florida. — Photograph: Andrew Ibarra/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Associated Press.
The sun shines on coral showing signs of bleaching at Cheeca Rocks off the coast of Islamorada, Florida. Scientists saw devastating effects from
prolonged hot water surrounding Florida. — Photograph: Andrew Ibarra/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Associated Press.


One explanation for 2023's extreme heat is El Niño — a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year's heat — amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels — is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there's not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat.

That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame.

This year, then, will wind up as the first — and almost surely not the last — in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid. Though different climate tracking groups wind up with slightly different measurements of the global temperatures, most are within the same margin of error.

“All data sets tell us that we are uncomfortably close to 1.5 already,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Buontempo said on December 21 that 2023 had been so warm that even an immediate deep planetary freeze wouldn't stop the year from breaking the all-time annual heat record.

“You'd need an asteroid hitting the planet, and even so I don't know if you'd manage,” he said. “The anomalies this year are just that much off the charts.”


Phoenix firefighters assist a resident having trouble breathing during a heat wave in Phoenix. The unrelenting heat in surrounding Maricopa County caused at least 600 deaths. — Photograph: Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg News.
Phoenix firefighters assist a resident having trouble breathing during a heat wave in Phoenix. The unrelenting heat in surrounding Maricopa County
caused at least 600 deaths. — Photograph: Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg News.


The heat was so sustained that it set records day after day. The University of Maine's Climate Change Institute logs daily global temperatures going back to 1940. From this July on, almost without fail, every daily temperature in 2023 topped the daily temperature from the same date in any of the prior 83 years.

On October 7 — yes, the hottest since at least 1940 — Matthias Huss, a glaciologist, shared video on social media from western Switzerland of melting glaciers dripping onto rocks as if it were a rainstorm. Normally, in October, the melting had stopped, replaced by a thick level of snow.

“It's very sad,” said Huss, who'd seen Switzerland's glaciers lose 10 percent of their mass over the past two years. “We are witnessing this transition into a new world.”


Severe drought hit the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon in Brazil. The river reached historic lows this year, causing several problems in the region. — Photograph: Andre Coelho/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/Shutterstock.
Severe drought hit the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon in Brazil. The river reached historic lows this year, causing several problems
in the region. — Photograph: Andre Coelho/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/Shutterstock.


Nine days later in Brazil, the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon's main tributaries, fell to its lowest level since record keeping began more than a century earlier. A victim of Brazil's historic drought, that sapped waterway up-ended lives across the region, including in the city of Manaus, an industrial hub that suddenly couldn't receive shipments from huge vessels. Some factories were forced to shut down, unable to receive raw materials. Supermarkets rationed beans and rice. Many of the goods that did arrive had to be ferried in from nearly 1,000 miles away, a trip that required six or seven days.

“The rivers are like our roads,” said Geyce Ferreira, who lives in Manaus and handles logistics for a retail company. “Your normal life, your day-by-day life, is seeing the river. And then one day you can't see it anymore. Everything stopped.”

“When you imagine that this is your future, how can you live here?”

Then, on October 25, halfway across the world, a Category 5 cyclone made landfall in the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Hurricanes and cyclones are increasingly supercharged by warmer ocean temperatures, and this one — Lola — was one of the most intense off-season cyclones ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. The cyclone obliterated several remote islands, uprooting vegetation, blowing away homes, destroying schools. Kelly Pabi, a regional official in the hardest-hit area, said by phone that two months later most children in the disaster zone still hadn't returned to school.

“Until today, people still don't even have access to safe drinking water,” Pabi said.


Refugees caught in the flames

Dadia National Park was once popular with hikers. It was torched by a fire that lasted for three weeks and created a 1,000-mile smoke plume that flew into Tunisia. — Photograph: Chico Harlan/The Washington Post.
Dadia National Park was once popular with hikers. It was torched by a fire that lasted for three weeks and created a 1,000-mile smoke plume
that flew into Tunisia. — Photograph: Chico Harlan/The Washington Post.


Greece's northeastern fire was the largest recorded in Europe since at least the turn of the century, with a smoke plume stretching 1,000 miles to Tunisia. But by the standards of an off-the-charts year, such a blaze did not even qualify as massive. Greece lost one percent of its land to the August wildfire. Canada, meantime, lost an area the size of Greece.

Still, even within that one percent of razed Greek land, months after the smoke cleared, one can find deep scars left by the hottest year.

Loggers are working their way through the decimated Dadia National Park, cutting down the charred remains of trees, some 200 or 300 years old. They find the carcasses of fox and deer along paths once used by hikers.

“An entire ecosystem is shaken,” said Kristos Dmitrescu, 49, one of the loggers.

The firefighters, who battled flames for three weeks, are still stunned by the scale of what they saw and how unstoppable it was. Working 24-hour shifts, and with the help of crews rushed in from other parts of Europe, they saved most of the area's village homes. But even now the regional fire chief, Spyros Koutras, scrolls through his phone, looking at photos of the fury. Horizons lit raging orange. Spires of twirling fire. Crews marching toward fronts resembling movie explosions. And then, later in the scrolling: Photos of the blackened aftermath.

“You know, it's your place. You want to defend it,” Koutras said. “The damage was so big. That hurts.”


Pavlos Pavlidis, a Greek coroner, standing at the hospital where he works in front of one of the freezer trailers holding the remains of un-documented immigrants killed in the country's wildfires. — Photograph: Chico Harlan/The Washington Post.
Pavlos Pavlidis, a Greek coroner, standing at the hospital where he works in front of one of the freezer trailers holding the remains of un-documented
immigrants killed in the country's wildfires. — Photograph: Chico Harlan/The Washington Post.


Twenty people died in the fire. They were undocumented immigrants, on a journey farther north into Europe, moving along a forested path that had long been a common route. A shepherd had found the first of the bodies just after the fire roared through, and then police arrived to find more. The remains, so charred and reduced, scarcely resembled human form, and the fire had done away with any tattoos, surgical scars, or jewelry. Police took DNA samples. A few Syrian families eventually provided matches and claimed the remains. But the 18 others have become the responsibility of a chain-smoking local coroner, Pavlos Pavlidis, who still has folders for each case on his computer, and who has stored the bodies in two freezer trailers behind the hospital where he works.

“They're right outside my office window,” he said.

He said he would keep the bodies for as long as he had space for them, or until they are claimed by relatives. On his office wall he has a map of the region, separated from Turkey by a river. Being a coroner in this part of Greece means dealing with immigrant deaths, and over decades he's handled hundreds of cases — drownings, traffic accidents, train accidents, plus one of the most common causes of death: hypothermia.

“This was the first year nobody died of the cold,” Pavlidis said.

Dinas, the retired attorney, lived just miles away from where the bodies were discovered, and said those deaths left him shaken.

“A house can be rebuilt. But life?” he said.

The skeleton of his home still straddles the hillside, its interior nothing more than a bed of fragments from shingles that once made his roof. Dinas said it's taken months to fully realize what has been lost, even into winter, his favorite season, when he'd typically gather at his home with friends, drinking around the fireplace, watching the snow outside. Of course this year there's no fireplace. And no snow.

Dinas said he feels depressed, unmoored. He's waiting on government compensation, but it probably won't be enough to rebuild.


The remains of the home of retired attorney Kostas Dinas. He had bought and renovated the home in 2012, thinking it would be the last house he ever lived in. — Photograph: Chico Harlan/The Washington Post.
The remains of the home of retired attorney Kostas Dinas. He had bought and renovated the home in 2012, thinking it would be the last house
he ever lived in. — Photograph: Chico Harlan/The Washington Post.


“At a certain point, it's a lonely path,” he said.

For months, he's been living with a friend in a nearby coastal city. Almost every evening, he returns to his old village by car, walking into his old bar, playing cards with his friends. For a while, during those games, it feels like he still has a home in Avas.

Then the game ends and he heads back out of town.


__________________________________________________________________________

Elinda Labropoulou contributed to this report.

Chico Harlan is The Washington Post's global climate correspondent. He joined The Washington Post in 2008, first covering the Washington Nationals baseball team and then spending four years as the paper's East Asia bureau chief, focusing on Japan and the Korean Peninsula. He moved to Europe in 2018 as Rome bureau chief, where he covered migration, the pandemic, and wrote several defining investigative stories about the Catholic Church's abuse crisis. Previously, Harlan covered economic issues and spent a year on The Washington Post's national enterprise team. Harlan worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Daily Telegraph, in Sydney, prior to coming to The Washington Post. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chico was educated at Syracuse University. | Honors and Awards: Gerald Loeb Award, finalist, beat reporting, 2017; Gerald Loeb Award, finalist, feature writing, 2016; Madeline Dane Ross Award, Overseas Press Club, “Disaster in Japan”, 2011.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/31/2023-record-heat-temperatures
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