June – Record Breaking Heat?

Boy, last week, which was July, temperatures reached over 100 with one instance of “feels like temperature” of 112 degrees F. Okay, we’re baking.

I’m pretty sure May was regarded as having multiple days of recording breaking heat throughout the US and I believe June was the same. This heat dome just sits over the middle of the US and not budge, leading to days of oppressive heat and sun beating down on the dirt – grinding out any cool air. On top of the recording breaking heat, there are multiple areas across the West/plains/Texas undergoing severe drought.

I do wonder if those areas are being primed for fires, just like what the Pacific Northwest and California undergo every year.

There just doesn’t seem to be any place safe from climate change. We have to pick our poison that we can tolerate: fires, earthquakes, drought, heat waves, tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes. Did I leave anything out?

Since this summer has been uncommonly hot, I thought I would look at the temperature data. It’s been a while since I’ve pulled those data and today was a good day to update them.

Global Land-Ocean Temperature Means

The first one is the world-wide averages for land and ocean combined. The graphic below and all subsequent images were enlarged so that we can read the text better. The data in Image 1 is from NASA, and it operates on a mean deviation from the 1951 – 1980 global means.

We can see a definite increase in temperatures, probably starting in 1980. It looks like there was a relatively huge jump in deviation around 2014.

Image 1: Global Land-Ocean Temperature Means

Sea Surface Temperature

Next is the temperature of the surface of the seas. Again, a strong upward trend, with a jump around 2013. It looks like those confidence intervals seem to have tightened up. I’m not sure what that means.

Image 2: Sea Surface Temperatures

Ocean Heat

The next one is the temperature of the ocean water, not just at the surface level, but also deep in the waters. Again, no surprise here, a trend of increasing temperatures. In this one, I’m not seeing a sudden jump but more like a steady increase since 1970s.

Image 3: Ocean Heat

State Temperatures

This last one measures the deviation from average of the state temperatures. For some reason, the base year is rather wide, ranging from 1901 to 2000. This is what the government site (NOAA) provided. I think I need to investigate this one to see if I can adjust the base year, but for now, it looks like since 2000, deviations have been on the positive side, meaning average state temperatures have been increasing.

Image 4: State Anomaly

Everything on the UP, UP, UP

I hope the climate deniers are finding it hard to deny that right now, we are having a HOT summer. It feels like – although it may be wishful thinking – the denials are getting fewer and fewer with less vehement pushback. I’m hoping more and more are willing to admit that something is happening and that we need to take action. I imagine the ones having the hardest time making the transition would be those who work in the Oil & Gas industry, maybe they even own a company that services the larger O&G majors. Those may be the ones who have the hardest time admitting that the weather is not normal and that we have too many extreme weathers. If we can find a way to help them transition out of O&G into clean energy…

Graphics

For all of these graphics, I’m using Power Query to pull in the data from the government sites into Power BI. They are set up such that I just refresh the linkages, so long as the sites do not change anything on their end.

It’s nice to play around with the data to see what is going on.