The 1980s were thehottest decade on record for planet Earth. Until the 1990s.
The 1990s were the hottest decade on record.
Until the 2000s.
The 2000s are the hottest decade on record.
This year is hotter.
2010 is on pace to be thehottest year on record--and last week was the hottest week on record.
During a summer like this, comedians tell jokes using a convention established by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. Carson would observe that it is a hot day--really hot. Then Ed McMahon (usually with the chorus of the audience)would ask, "How hot is it?" And Carson's jokes would begin--"It's so hot that..."
Well, this summer it's been so hot in Washington and elsewhere in the U.S., in Russia and other places, that people have been hospitalized for heat exhaustion (includingSenator Robert Byrd the day before he died), power outages are more frequent, etc. Hot weather fries infrastructure and incidentally, it fries brains (figuratively speaking.) This is a product of heat and humidity that isn't often acknowledged: it makes thinking clearly a lot harder.
Once again recently, scientists predicted that heat waves will continue to increase in severity and duration.
But it's not just the hot summer in much of North America, or the very hot summer in Russia, or just the more violent storms and floods in parts of the U.S., or the fires in southern California and the drought in the southwest, nor even the melting Arctic. The surface of the planet itself is hotter, on average.
It's called global warming, a term that will shortly be35 years old. It means for one thing that related phenomena are intensified. The El Nino effects are greater because of it, for example.
How hot is it? In what may be the worst news of the year for the human future, it'shot enough to kill over an estimated 40% of the ocean's phytoplankton, the very basis of the ocean's food chain, which also produces half the world's oxygen and devours a lot of CO2.
Primitive life forms that people almost never see don't register as all that important. But it's like the bees--few people even notice these little creatures, but if they died off, human life would probably end within months, if not weeks. If this ocean finding is confirmed, it raises the Climate Crisis to yet another level of urgency and portent.
How hot is it? Hot as hell. And not as hot as it's going to be.