GENEVA, July 4 (Reuters) - Temperatures are expected to soar across large parts of the world after the El Nino weather pattern emerged in the tropical Pacific for the first time in seven years, the World Meteorological Organization said on Tuesday.
El Nino, a warming of water surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean, is linked to extreme weather conditions from tropical cyclones to heavy rainfall to severe droughts.
The world’s hottest year on record, 2016, coincided with a strong El Nino - though experts says climate change has fuelled extreme temperatures even in years without the phenomenon.
Even that record could soon be broken, according to the WMO.
I have 3 young-and-not-so-young adult children (big gap between them) and I have found myself wanting to apologize to them so many times for bringing them into this shit show. I really didn’t know it was going to get this bad. As a child of the 70’s I was promised a world of ecologically and socially conscious people by now. Welp…
Also a child of the 70s, and I thought we had a lot longer before the shit show started, and that we had time to fix it, and that we would fix it. I really didn’t think I’d be seeing it happen. It breaks my heart. Humanity is capable of so much better than this, but we just… haven’t. And won’t.
We had heaps of time.
We knew about greenhouse gases and their warming effect for about 200 years now.
Shit, even if we’d acted just. 50 years ago in the ‘70s we’d be far along.
Instead everyone at every step of the way fiddled their hands too worried to threaten the comforting status quo of their lives.
Yes this is true, but what I was meaning is that a lot of the effects of climate change are happening faster than predicted, because we’ve made things worse than predicted.