We Are Headed For Hothouse Earth? Huffington Post Article.

[TheMastersNemesis]

What if the climate scientists are wrong and global warming (climate change) models are wrong. These latest huge heat waves and they ARE huge heat waves are precursors to a much faster "heating planet". The heat waves this year look worse than last year. And it looks like they have lasted longer.

There are signs all over the planet mostly ignored by the MSM that really are alarming. And in the US you NEVER hear even hear the term climate change mentioned in relation to our weather disasters. And you never hear ANYONE challenging a denier or GOP lawmaker or official on the issue.

And you hear little kick back as Trump keeps eliminating federal efforts to address the issue. To even say the words "climate change" is verboten and it sends and GOPPER into a ballistic rage. Yet we are probably in the first phase of "climate heating" not warming or change in reality.

How long are we going to allow GOP obstruction and obfuscation on this matter before we challenge them publicly and aggressively.

[cilla4progress]

1. Earth is clearly off-balance

I am in the West. The entire West is on fire. This is hugely impacting lives of every form and species. It is observedly a self-perpetuating escalating cycle.

Our time here is coming to an end - the time we have known. The earth we grew up with.

[Javaman]

2. once we hit negative feedback, it will go into high gear.

the best we can hope for, right now, is to not let it get much worse. That, however, would require leadership of a special kind. which, last I checked, we are grossly lacking.

In summation: we're fucked.

[smirkymonkey]

3. Wonder what hurricane season is going to look like. I would expect after this extremely hot summer

that we will see a lot of hurricane activity and probably a lot of damage along the coasts. That might wake some people up.

[dalton99a]

4. No worries. Jesus will bring out a spare planet for us to inhabit

[Hortensis]

5. I see reporting on climate change frequently. It would be

every day if I looked for it every day, and I could probably routinely spend a couple hours on it.

The U.S. is in high summer right now, and what's happening is what many, many sources, including MSM, reported would. It IS getting very badly, disastrously worse, as we are frequently informed.

Here's a link to the front page of the NYT's climate section. The lead articles aren't reporting the big news that climate change is happening because that's not news. But an article last week did report on this summer heat effects. Grim. Articles in many journals have discussed expected migrations as people are forced to leave unsustainable environments by the tens and ultimately perhaps hundreds of millions. Other articles discuss what is being done to create new sustainability so people can remain.

How Record Heat Wreaked Havoc on Four Continents: We talked to people who found themselves on the front lines of climate change this year. Here are their stories.


Expect more. That’s the verdict of climate scientists to the record-high temperatures this spring and summer in vastly different climate zones. The contiguous United States had its hottest month of May and the third-hottest month of June. Japan was walloped by record triple-digit temperatures, killing at least 86 people in what its meteorological agency bluntly called a “disaster.” And weather stations logged record-high temperatures on the edge of the Sahara and above the Arctic Circle. What was it like to be in these really different places on these really hot days? We asked people. Here’s what we learned.

Ouargla, Algeria: 124°F on July 5: At 3 p.m. on the first Thursday of July, on the edge of the vast Sahara, the Algerian oil town of Ouargla recorded a high of 124 degrees Fahrenheit. Even for this hot country, it was a record, according to Algeria’s national meteorological service. Abdelmalek Ibek Ag Sahli was at work in a petroleum plant on the outskirts of Ouargla that day. He and the rest of his crew had heard it would be hot. They had to be at work by 7 a.m., part of a regular 12-hour daily shift. “We couldn’t keep up,” he recalled. “It was impossible to do the work. It was hell.” By 11 a.m., he and his colleagues walked off the job. But when they got back to the workers’ dorms, things weren’t much better. The power had gone out. There was no air conditioning, no fans. He dunked his blue cotton scarf in water, wrung it out, and wrapped it around his head. He drank water. He bathed 5 times. “At the end of the day I had a headache,” he said by phone. “I was tired.” Ouargla’s older residents told him they’d never seen a day so hot.

Hong Kong: Over 91°F for 16 straight days. In this city of skyscrapers on the edge of the South China Sea, temperatures soared past 91 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 consecutive days in the second half of May. Not since Hong Kong started keeping track in 1884 had a heat wave of that intensity lasted so long in May. Swimming pools overflowed with people. Office air-conditioners purred. But from morning to night, some of the city’s most essential laborers went about their outdoor work, hauling goods, guarding construction sites, picking up trash. One blistering morning, a 55-year-old woman named Lin gripped the hot metal handles of her handcart. She pushed it up a busy road, glancing over her shoulder for oncoming cars. She had fresh leafy greens to deliver to neighborhood restaurants in the morning, trash to haul in the evening. Some days, she had a headache. Other days, she vomited. “It’s very hot and I sweat a lot,” said Lin, who would only give her first name before rushing off on her rounds. “But there’s no choice, I have to make a living.” Poon Siu-sing, a 58 year-old trash collector, tossed garbage bags into a mounting pile. Sweat plastered the shirt onto his back. “I don’t feel anything,” he maintained. “I’m a robot used to the heat of the sun and rain.”

Nawabshah, Pakistan: 122°F on April 30
Nawabshah is in the heart of Pakistan’s cotton country. But no amount of cotton could provide comfort on the last day of April, when temperatures soared past 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 degrees Celsius. Even by the standards of this blisteringly hot place, it was a record. The streets were deserted that day, a local journalist named Zulfiqar Kaskheli said. Shops didn’t bother to open. Taxi drivers kept off the streets to avoid the blazing sun. And so, Riaz Soomro had to scour his neighborhood for a cab that could take his ailing 62-year-old father to a clinic. The government hospital was packed. In the hallways sat worn-out heatstroke victims like his father. Many of them had been working outdoors as day laborers, Mr. Soomro said. Throughout the area, hospitals and clinics were swamped. There weren’t enough beds. There weren’t enough medical staff. The power failed repeatedly throughout the day, adding to the chaos. “We tried our best to provide medical treatment,” said Raees Jamali, a paramedic in Daur, a village on the outskirts of Nawabshah. “But because of severity of the heat, there was unexpected rush and it was really difficult for us to deal with all patients.” Every day that week, the high temperature in Nawabshah was no less than 113 degrees, according to AccuWeather.

Oslo: Over 86°F for 16 consecutive days. “Warning! We remind you about the total ban on fires and barbecuing near the forest and on the islands.” This was the text message that Oslo residents got from city officials on a Friday afternoon in June. May had been the warmest in 100 years. June was hot, too. By mid-July, a village south of Oslo recorded 19 days when the temperature shot up past 86 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 Celsius, according to MET Norway. Spring rains were paltry, which meant that grass had turned brown dry and farmers were having trouble feeding their livestock. Forests had turned to tinder. And city officials put a stop to one of the most popular Norwegian summer pastimes: heading out to the woods with a disposable barbecue. “People not being used to this heat, they’re used to leaving a barbecue and nothing happens, Marianne Kjosnes, a spokeswoman for the Oslo Fire Department, said. “Now if a little spark catches the grass, you have a grass fire going.” Public parks are off limits to barbecuing. So are the islands in the nearby fjord. The Oslo Fire Department’s Facebook page is trying to get the word out. Per Evenson, a fire watchman posted in the tower on Linnekleppen, a rocky hill southeast of Oslo, counted 11 separate forest fires in one day in early July. Here and there, white smoke rose in the distance. By July 19, the civil protection department had tallied 1,551 forest fires, more than the numbers of fires in all of 2016 and 2017. The department said 22 helicopters were simultaneously fighting fires. Wildfires were also erupting in Sweden. And one Swedish village just above the Arctic Circle, hit an all time record high, peaking above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. “This is really frightening if this is the new normal,” Thina Margrethe Saltvedt, an energy industry analyst who lives in Oslo, wrote in an email. Ms. Zurkow, an artist, has long been grappling with climate change in her work. But she was still surprised when a day of extreme weather impacted one of her projects in a big way.

https://www.nytimes.com/section/climate?action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=navbar&module=collectionsnav&pagetype=sectionfront&pgtype=sectionfront