It’s been yet another unprecedented year for our Earth and if you’ve been keeping up with climate change news, you’re probably ready to get off the rollercoaster. One day it’s doom and gloom, the next it’s a tech piece about a breakthrough that will solve all of our problems.
Unfortunately we’re ending this year with one of the biggest dips on the climate coaster as the president elect voices his plan to make America great again and selects his cabinet. Taking a look back at the biggest headlines from last year I can only imagine what is yet to come. Buckle up!
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
Image Credit: NOAA
September 2016 – Vice
It’s a banner week for the end of the world, because we’ve officially pushed atmospheric carbon levels past their dreaded 400 parts per million. Permanently.
A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature
Image: xkcd
xkcd
When people say “the climate has changed before” these are the kinds of changes they’re talking about.
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
November 2016 – Washington Post
Political people in the United States are watching the chaos in Washington in the moment. But some people in the science community are watching the chaos somewhere else — the Arctic.
Freak storm pushes North Pole 50 degrees above normal to melting point
December 2015 – Washington Post
A powerful winter cyclone — the same storm that led to two tornado outbreaks in the United States and disastrous river flooding — has driven the North Pole to the freezing point this week, 50 degrees above average for this time of year.
The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently
September 2016 – Climate Central
In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million.
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
March 2016 – Boston Globe
Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
Clockwise from top left: A family sleeping on the roof of a house in New Delhi last May; people navigating a flooded street in a canoe in Arnold, Mo., on Dec. 31; tourists in a haze-shrouded Singapore last September; the drought-stricken Molatedi Dam in South Africa in November. Credit Clockwise from top left; Tsering Topgyal/Associated Press, Jeff Roberson/Associated Press, Edgar Su/Reuters, Stuart Graham/Associated Press
January 2016 – NY Times
Scientists reported Wednesday that 2015 was the The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends by far, breaking a mark set only the year before — a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world.
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
A house in Norfolk, Va., that has been repeatedly hit by tidal floods sat on temporary supports as workers prepared to elevate it permanently in June. Credit Eliot Dudik for The New York Times
September 2016 – NY Times
NORFOLK, Va. — Huge vertical rulers are sprouting beside low spots in the streets here, so people can judge if the tidal floods that increasingly inundate their roads are too deep to drive through.
Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland.
The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends
Photo by Brill/ullstein bild via Getty Images
January 2016 – Huffington Post
Noam Chomsky, the noted radical and MIT professor emeritus, said the Republican Party has become so extreme in its rhetoric and policies that it poses a “serious danger to human survival.”
“Today, the Republican Party has drifted off the rails,” Chomsky, a frequent critic of both parties, said in an interview Monday with The Huffington Post. “It’s become what the respected conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call ‘a radical insurgency’ that has pretty much abandoned parliamentary politics.”
Scientists Accidentally Discover Efficient Process to Turn CO2 Into Ethanol
October 2016 – Popular Mechanics
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change. Their findings were published in the journal ChemistrySelect.
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