By Chris Hatch
We’re not just breaking records anymore, we’re absolutely shattering them.
Last week, temperature records were obliterated, simultaneously, at both frigid ends of the Earth. Antarctic weather stations recorded temperatures 40 C higher than what we used to call “normal.” While in the Arctic, the mercury soared 30 C above average for this time of year.
Scientists were left scrambling for words. “Impossible,” “unthinkable,” “stunning,” “freakish.” Cryosphere scientists who spend their lives on the planet’s ice sheets and glaciers say “Antarctic climatology has been rewritten.” The events “upended our expectations about the climate system.”
Mark Maslin, at University College London, told The Guardian: “I and colleagues were shocked by the number and severity of the extreme weather events in 2021… Now we have record temperatures in the Arctic which, for me, show we have entered a new extreme phase of climate change much earlier than we had expected.”
It used to be, back in the good old days of the Holocene, that temperature records were broken by fractions of a degree. Not in great leaps of several degrees. But we are now regularly shattering extreme records — last week, one all-time record was topped by 15 C.
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