Hot mess
As T.S. Eliot once wrote, “April is the cruelest month.” You know what he didn’t write? He didn’t write, “April is the coolest month” — and Eliot died long before the latest National Climate Data Center (NCDC, part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) report.
The globally averaged temperature for April 2014 tied with 2010 as the highest since record keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA scientists. It also marked the 38th consecutive April and 350th consecutive month with a global temperature at or above the 20th century average.
The last worldwide below-average April was during the Ford administration, and the last time any month wasn’t above average was February 1985.
Residents of the Northeastern U.S. might argue, and they’d be right, in that entirely self-centered way — that part of the country was one of the few regions on earth that was actually cooler than average last month. But across the globe, many areas were well above the norm, like Siberia, which saw temperatures 9 degrees warmer than its 30-year average.
Besides more dire news for Australia, which has been one of the most visible victims of the building climate catastrophe, and data that shows warming in every major ocean basin, the NCDC report says there is a 65-percent chance of El Niño conditions developing later this year.
El Niños — a warming in the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean — have been largely absent since the late 1990s, and this is thought to have slowed the rate of global warming a bit during that time. But the return of El Niño could spell real trouble in the form of worsening droughts in Australia and torrential storms along the California coast. And perhaps even worse, it would likely fuel global warming at a faster pace, exacerbating the dangerous consequences predicted in so many recent reports.
The New York Times’ data-driven blog The Upshot details a good many of the potential horrors that await an El Niño-ed planet, and then makes sure to ask their really important question: How will this affect the 2016 presidential race?
I guess it is hard to appreciate the global, uh, waste land that awaits without understanding how that might help or harm Marco Rubio, so here goes: As long as there is an industry that profits wildly from ignoring climate science, as long as folks like the Kochs have the wherewithal and the legal cover to reward and punish the political class, until campaign finance laws are changed and the until government stops underwriting hydrocarbon production, El Ninos and the havoc they bring will not be a campaign issue. Certainly not for the GOP, but probably not for many Democrats, either.
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