5. An incredibly powerful heatwave has been sitting over southern North America for weeks on end now, with places like Texas and northern Mexico breaking daily record high temperatures for days on end.
6. In the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, sea surface temperatures are sky-high.
Water temperatures are in the *90s* by the Florida coast, Miami keeps breaking daily record heat index values, and a major coral bleaching event will soon be underway.
🧵Since it is becoming hard to keep track, here is a list of countries/municipalities that have seen catastrophic flooding in the first 11 days of September 2023:
- Greece
- Turkey
- Libya <--- *thousands feared dead*
- Brazil
- Hong Kong
- Shanghai
- Spain
- Las Vegas
1. Huge downpours from Storm Daniel have flooded enormous swaths of land in central Greece, putting entire towns under several meters of standing water.
This is a huge agricultural area, with 25% of crop being lost.
There are quite a few people running around saying that these extreme snow totals in California this winter are evidence against climate change.
Well... is it?
Here is a quick crash course on the physics of snow and precipitation: 🧵
Snow is a complicated way to measure temperatures, especially when speaking to the general public about it.
When people think of snow, they think of wintertime, cold weather, and polar regions. When we talk about climate change, we're talking about the Earth warming up.
Consequently, people tend to believe that more global warming = less snow. For some cases, especially in warmer climates, that is absolutely true.
However, it is not true everywhere all the time, and mountainous California is one of those examples.
Chat GTP is helping me out and... I give it my code and it tells me how to fix it!
In under 30 minutes I not only learned out to create a graph, I learned how to add a trendline, change the line color, change the background color, and label it!
This should put the 2022 California heat wave into perspective for you.
Climate change is accelerating worldwide.
In Pasadena, CA, a day w/ an average temp of 90°F (( High temp + low temp) / 2 ) used to occur once per decade. It was reserved for the absolute hottest days of resident's lives.
Now, a single heatwave is producing 10 such days IN A ROW
Climate change is loading the dice against us. Extreme weather events like floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts are becoming more extreme, more frequent, and longer lasting.
The atmosphere holding more energy is dangerous for the way life on Earth is evolved right now.
The western megadrought will very likely become the biggest climate story in the nation for this half of the century.
An enormous amount of infrastructure, money, and manpower will be required to keep water flowing to the cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and San Diego.
No other climate catastrophe, whether it be wildfires, heatwaves, or flooding, has the power to bring an entire region to its knees.
Water is life. If Lake Mead dries up, the water availability to CA will be stretched even further before this state dries up too.
This catastrophe is going to be he first one of many to bite us in the ass. You want to adapt to the climate crisis instead of stopping it?
Adapting to this issue will first require the fallowing of entire agricultural regions in the SW US.