The July 2020 global land and ocean surface temperature of 0.92°C (1.66°F) above the 20th century average tied with 2016 as the second highest July global temperature since records began in 1880. This value was only 0.01°C (0.02°F) shy of tying the record warm July of 2019.
Regionally, the Caribbean region had its warmest July on record, with a temperature departure of 1.24°C (2.23°F) above average. This was 0.09°C (0.16°F) above the previous record set in 2016.
NASA’s earth observatory post Grand Plateau Glacier provides a pair of aerial images of the glacier, copied here, from 1984 and 2019, both from Sept of the given year.
In the images, a moraine near the coastline acts like a dam, trapping meltwater and forming a proglacial lake. Also note the end moraine visible poking above the surface of the lake in the 2019 image. This mound was left behind by a lobe of the glacier front that appears in the 1984 image.
Over the past 35 years, the entire flow of the glacier system changed. In the 1984 image, many of the glacier’s branches flow toward the lake to the southwest; by 2019, retreat caused some branches to change course and flow toward the northwest. Notice the change in direction of the thin brown lines tracing the flow of the glacier’s branches. These are medial moraines: rocky debris from the sides of glaciers (lateral moraines) that have merged, causing the debris to be carried down the center of the combined glacier.
Retreat is not the only change; Grand Plateau is also visibly narrowing and thinning.
Larger images are available covering more area on the page. There is also an option to view the images together with a slider going over the image to change the year and, of course, more information about the changes in the glacier.
By the end of 2018, the United States had 125 operational battery storage systems, providing a total of 869 MW of installed power capacity and 1,236 MWh of energy capacity.
There are two other graphs in the post including which regions have the most storage capacity (can you guess before you look?). There are also links to data.
As of late last year, 18% of U.S. adults say they turn most to social media for political and election news. That’s lower than the share who use news websites and apps (25%), but about on par with the percent who say their primary pathway is cable television (16%) or local television (16%), and higher than the shares who turn to three other pathways mentioned in the survey (network TV, radio and print).
One specific set of nine questions focused on foundational political knowledge, such as the federal budget deficit and which party supports certain policy positions. Researchers created an index of high, middle or low political knowledge based on how many of these nine questions respondents got right (high knowledge answered eight to nine questions correctly, middle got six or seven right and low got five or fewer right; see here for more details of the political knowledge index). While at least four-in-ten individuals who turn mainly to news websites and apps (45%), radio (42%) and print (41%) for news fall into the high political knowledge category, the same is true of just 17% of those who turn most to social media. Only those in the local TV group scored lower, with 10% in the high political knowledge category.
Even as Americans who primarily turn to social media for political news are less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues in the news, they are more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims.
This is an extensive article with numerous charts and graphs. There is also a detailed methodology section.
The great lakes observing system has a Great Lakes Buoy Portal that provides access to data from great lakes buoys. The link first takes one to a map where buoys can be selected. For example, buoy 45028 is near Duluth, MN. The interactive graph on the page is copied here. There are other data sets which include, wind speed, wind gust, wind direction, wave height, air temp, solar radiation, along with water temp at various depths. The data download button on the page allows users to select data over various time periods. GPS coordinates of the buoy are also given. There is a lot of data here waiting to be used in a classroom.
NASA’s Vital Signs of the Planet Sea Level Sea Level page provides data on sea level. For example, since 1993 sea level has increased by about 94mm, but this is an average. In their Sea Level 101, Part Two: All Sea Level is `Local’ by Alan Buis (7/14/2020) they provide the map copied here. There is noticeable variation in sea level change around the globe. They note:
“Relative sea level” refers to the height of the ocean relative to land along a coastline. Common causes of relative sea level change include:
Changes due to heating of the ocean, and changes in ocean circulation
Changes in the volume of water in the ocean due to the melting of land ice in glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets, as well as changes in the global water cycle
Vertical land motion (up or down movements of the land itself at a coastline, such as sinking caused by the compaction of sediments, or the rise and fall of land masses driven by the movement of continental or oceanic tectonic plates)
Normal, short-term, frequent variations in sea level that have always existed, such as those associated with tides, storm surges, and ocean waves (swell and wind waves). These variations can be on the order of meters or more (discussed in more detail in our previous blog post).
There are other graphics in the post including an animation of Greenland ice loss with a scatter plot.
The article in Quanta Magazine How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things are Different Now) by Howard Lee (7/21/2020) provides a summary of 10 different causes that impact earth’s climate and how they compare with modern climate change. On example is plate tectonics as see in the graphic copied here. Another is Orbital Wobbles:
Magnitude: Approximately 6 degrees Celsius in the last 100,000-year cycle; varies through geological time
Time frame: Regular, overlapping cycles of 23,000, 41,000, 100,000, 405,000 and 2,400,000 years
Earth’s orbit wobbles as the sun, the moon and other planets change their relative positions. These cyclical wobbles, called Milankovitch cycles, cause the amount of sunlight to vary at middle latitudes by up to 25% and cause the climate to oscillate. These cycles have operated throughout time, yielding the alternating layers of sediment you see in cliffs and road cuts.
This is a good article for quantitative literacy with the comparisons of magnitudes and time frames of different effects on the climate. To be clear
However, the weathering thermostat takes hundreds of thousands of years to react to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Earth’s oceans can act somewhat faster to absorb and remove excess carbon, but even that takes millennia and can be overwhelmed, leading to ocean acidification. Each year, the burning of fossil fuels emits about 100 times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes emit — too much too fast for oceans and weathering to neutralize it, which is why our climate is warming and our oceans are acidifying.
Electricity is a secondary energy source that is produced when primary energy sources (for example, natural gas, coal, wind) are converted into electric power.
The technology and the type of fuel used to generate electricity affect the efficiency of power plants. For example, in 2019, of the 11.9 quads of natural gas consumed for electricity generation, natural gas plants converted 45% (5.4 quads) into net generation of electricity. By contrast, of the 10.2 quads of coal consumption, coal plants converted 32% (3.3 quads) into net generation.
The post has three other graphs and links to electricity data.
There is now a new page that contains animations for concepts related to statistics and calculus. They are not sustainability related, but since I post materials for calculus and statistics and I have been playing with R, I decided to post these. There are 19 topics covered with 36 animations. In particular, if you teach calculus or statistics these animations may be helpful. So, go to the Animations page and take a look.
Averaged as a whole, the global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2020 was 0.92°C (1.66°F) above the 20th century average of 15.5°C (59.9°F), tying with 2015 as the third highest June temperature departure from average in the 141-year record.
Nine of the 10 warmest Junes have occurred since 2010; the seven warmest Junes have occurred in the last seven years (2014–2020).
From NOAA’s Global Climate Report – July 2020:
