- This Looks Like Earth’s Warmest Month. Hotter Ones Appear to Be in Store. The New York Times
- This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in around 120,000 years, scientists say CNN
- July 2023 set to to be the hottest month ever recorded, climate scientists say euronews
- July is the hottest month ever, and two ‘real-life versions of Mattel’s CSO Barbie’ are speaking up Fortune
- July has been so blistering hot, scientists already calculate that it’s the warmest month on record Yahoo News
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Tag Archives: hotter
Bitcoin ETF race gets hotter as ARK Invest adds surveillance agreement to application – Cointelegraph
- Bitcoin ETF race gets hotter as ARK Invest adds surveillance agreement to application Cointelegraph
- Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin Rise After Fidelity ETF News: Analyst Says King Crypto Poised To Touch $40K I Benzinga
- ARK Invest Gains Edge In Bitcoin ETF Approval Race With New Surveillance Agreement | Bitcoinist.com Bitcoinist
- BlackRock has ‘50% chance’ of getting spot Bitcoin ETF approved: Analyst Cointelegraph
- Cathie Wood’s Ark made this change to bitcoin ETF Filing. Here’s why it matters MarketWatch
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Natural Gas Futures Rally Early as Models Show Hotter Southern U.S. by Mid-June – Natural Gas Intelligence
- Natural Gas Futures Rally Early as Models Show Hotter Southern U.S. by Mid-June Natural Gas Intelligence
- Why You Should Doubt The U.S. Department Of Energy’s Sudden Projection Of Falling Natural Gas Demand Forbes
- Natural Gas Price Forecast – Natural Gas Markets Rally to Kick Off the Week FX Empire
- Natural Gas Futures Post Second Straight Gain as Production Eases, Cash Prices Strengthen Natural Gas Intelligence
- Natural Gas Price News: XNG/USD bulls eye $2.30 amid economic optimism, doubts on US DoE forecasts FXStreet
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Fed Official Says Hotter Data Will Warrant Higher Rates – The Wall Street Journal
- Fed Official Says Hotter Data Will Warrant Higher Rates The Wall Street Journal
- Federal Reserve officials sound warnings about higher rates The Independent
- ‘Inflation is not coming down as fast as I thought’ — Fed’s Waller open to stiffer rate hikes MarketWatch
- Bank of America warns the Fed will hike rates to the ‘point of pain’ as experts say there’s no ‘serious signs’ the economy is under control Yahoo Finance
- Fed’s Waller: if data stays hot, policy rate should go above 5.1%-5.4% Reuters
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The universe is slightly hotter than it should be. ‘Dark photons’ could be to blame.
Observations suggest that the intergalactic gas in our universe is a little hotter than it should be. Recently, a team of astrophysicists have used sophisticated computer simulations to propose a radical solution: an exotic form of dark matter known as “dark photons” could be heating the place up.
These strange particles would be the carriers of a new, fifth force of nature that normal matter does not experience, but occasionally these dark photons can flip their identities to become regular photons, providing a source of heat.
Feeling neutral
We could find such dark photons by observing the intergalactic gas using what’s known as the Lyman-alpha forest. When we observe light from a distant, bright object, like a quasar (glowing objects powered by black holes at the centers of distant galaxies), there is a series of gaps in an otherwise smooth spectrum of light from that faraway object.
Here’s why: that light has to filter through billions of light-years of gas to reach us. Occasionally that light will pass through a relatively dense clump of neutral hydrogen — a type of hydrogen that consists of one proton and one neutron, and which permeates gas clouds throughout the universe.
Most of that light will pass through unaffected, but a very specific wavelength of light will get absorbed. This wavelength corresponds to the energy difference needed to bump an electron from its first to its second energy level inside the hydrogen atoms.
When astronomers look at the light coming from that object, it will look otherwise unremarkable except for a gap at the wavelength of that specific energy transition, known as the Lyman-alpha line.
The light from the distant object will pass through multiple clouds and clumps of neutral hydrogen. The expansion of the universe causes the gaps to redshift to different wavelengths, with a new gap appearing at a different wavelength depending on the distance to the particular gas clouds.. The end result of this is the “forest”: a series of lines and gaps in the spectrum.
Getting hot in here
These Lyman-alpha gaps can also be used to measure the temperature of each gas cloud. If the neutral hydrogen were perfectly still, the gap would appear as an incredibly thin line. But if the individual molecules are moving, then the gap will widen because of the kinetic energy of those molecules. The hotter the gas, the more kinetic energy the molecules have, and the wider the gap.
In a paper appearing in November in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team of astrophysicists have pointed out that by using this method, it seems that the clouds of gas that scatter between galaxies are a little too hot. Computer simulations of the evolution of those gas clouds predict them to be just a little bit colder than we observe, and so perhaps something is heating up those clouds that isn’t currently accounted for in our astrophysical simulations.
One possible explanation for this discrepancy is the presence of “dark photons” in our universe, the study authors claim. This is a very hypothetical form of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that accounts for roughly 80% of all the mass in the universe, yet doesn’t seem to interact with light.
Since astronomers do not currently understand the identity of dark matter, the field is wide open with possibilities as to what it could be. In this model, instead of the dark matter being made of invisible particles (like a phantom version of electrons, for example), it would instead be made of a new kind of force carrier — that is, a type of particle that mediates interactions between other particles.
A warm and fuzzy darkness
The familiar photon is the force carrier of electromagnetism – it’s what creates electricity, magnetism, and light. Dark photons would be a force carrier for a new force of nature that does not operate at the usual scales in the usual scenarios (for example, in our laboratories or within the solar system, where we otherwise would have already observed it).
According to the study authors, the dark photons would still have a tiny bit of mass, and hence they could still account for the dark matter. Plus, because they’re force carriers, they may also interact amongst themselves and with other potential dark matter particles. In the models investigated by the team of astrophysicists, the dark photons are capable of one more trick: they can occasionally turn into a regular photon.
In physics terms, the dark photons can “mix” with regular photons, very rarely swapping identities. When they do, the newly created photon goes on to do what regular photons always do: heat things up. The researchers performed the first ever simulations of the evolution of the universe, including the effects of these sneaky shapeshifting dark photons. They found that a particular combination of dark photon mass and the probability of changing into a regular photon could explain the heating discrepancy.
This result is a very far from a slam-dunk case for the existence of dark photons. A range of possibilities could also explain the Lyman-alpha results, like inaccurate observations or a poor understanding of (normal) astrophysical heating between galaxies. But it is an intriguing clue, and the results can be used as a springboard to continue exploring the viability of this exotic idea.
New technique shows old temperatures were much hotter than thought
Enlarge / Isotopes in sediment cores like these can provide indications of past temperatures.
In a paper recently published in Science, Professor Nele Meckler of the University of Bergen and colleagues argue that the climate between around 35 and 60 million years ago may have been considerably warmer than we thought. Their finding suggests that a given level of CO2 might produce more warming than prior work indicated, and it hints that the ocean circulated differently during that warm, ice-free climate.
Their conclusions come from new measurements of carbon and oxygen isotopes found in the shells of tiny creatures, called benthic foraminifera or “forams,” that lived on the seafloor at the time. Earlier work with similar samples had estimated temperatures using oxygen isotopes—a technique that could be confused by changes in how much water was locked away in ice at the poles and, to a lesser extent, variations in ocean salinity. The new study used a technique that registers temperatures more reliably and produced much warmer numbers.
A newer, clearer thermometer
Benthic foram oxygen isotopes have been a mainstay of ancient global climate studies, with the latest most detailed record extending back 60 million years. Deep ocean temperatures reflect ocean surface temperatures over timescales longer than about 1,000 years because the global “conveyor belt” of ocean circulation turns over on that timescale. Oxygen isotopes in that water reflect ocean surface temperature, and by extension global climate, because water with the heavier isotope oxygen-18 is a bit harder to evaporate than water with oxygen-16; when the sea is warmer and there’s more evaporation, oxygen-18 builds up in the oceans.
This isotope buildup is calibrated to temperature, but that calibration requires knowing ocean salinity and how much water is locked up in ice caps. “The global [oxygen isotope] curve… has always had this semi-hidden uncertainty due to the dual influences of temperature and ice volume that we can now resolve using clumped isotopes,” said Sierra Petersen of the University of Michigan, who was not involved in Meckler’s study.
The clumped isotope method removes the need to make that assumption about how much water is locked away in ice because it simultaneously measures the levels of carbon-13 found in the same sample of calcium carbonate in a foram shell. Thermodynamics favors “clumping” of heavier isotopes in calcium carbonate in cold water, but as the water gets warmer, entropy increasingly exerts its influence, and the heavier isotopes become more scattered in the shell material. The degree of isotope clumping is calibrated to temperature in the lab for a variety of materials, enabling clumped isotope measurements to yield temperature measurements in deep time.
The new method indicates that between 57 and 52 million years ago, the North Atlantic abyss was about 20°C. That’s a big difference from the oxygen isotope data, which yielded temperatures of 12–14°C. “That’s a whole lot warmer,” said Meckler. For comparison, today’s equivalent is around 1–2°C.
Hotter nights could lead to a 60 percent rise in global mortality: study – The Hill
Story at a glance
- Numerous studies have detailed the deleterious health effects posed by rising day-time temperatures resulting from climate change.
- Now, new research underscores the extreme toll rising night-time heat could have on human health.
- According to models, by the year 2100, the world could see an up to 60 percent spike in mortality thanks to climbing temperatures at night.
As the United States continues to trudge through a sweltering summer and with a warm fall on the way, new research underscores the potentially deadly ramifications of rising heat at night.
Published in The Lancet Planetary Health, data from Japan, South Korea and China show hotter night-time temperatures could lead to a 60 percent spike in mortality rates around the world by the end of the century.
Previous research on the deadly effects of rising heat has typically focused on excessive day-time temperatures, while “the risks of increasing temperature at night were frequently neglected,” explained study co-author Yuqiang Zhang of the University of North Carolina in a statement.
Night-time ambient heat can interrupt the normal physiology of sleep and subsequently lead to a host of complications including immune system damage, chronic illness, and systemic inflammation, authors said. In urban areas, these outcomes might be exacerbated due to the urban heat island effect.
Furthermore, data show that by the 2100s, “total populations exposed to night-time heat are projected to increase four to eight times compared with the 2010s across the northern hemisphere.”
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Researchers measured hot night excess (HNE) in the three regions between 1980 and 2015 and modeled projections for the years 2016 through 2100. Different climate change scenarios were employed and measurements were controlled for the effects of daily mean temperatures.
A total of 28 cities with varying climates were included in the models along with daily death records from local health agencies.
By 2090, the average intensity of hot nights in these cities will nearly double from around 69 degrees fahrenheit to 103.5 degrees fahrenheit. Severity of night-time heat worsened even under a scenario where the goals of the Paris Agreement were met. Under the models, regions with the lowest average temperatures had the largest potential for warming.
“The occurrences of HNE are projected to occur more rapidly than the daily mean temperature changes,” Zhang continued. “The frequency and mean intensity of hot nights would increase more than 30% and 60% by the 2100s, respectively, compared with less than 20% increase for the daily mean temperature.”
Co-author Haidong Kan of Fudan University in China added that governments and local policymakers should take the findings into account to better prepare for the impending consequences of climate change.
However, because the data were collected from three countries, researchers urged caution when generalizing findings to wider populations. They are currently working to develop a more broad, global dataset.
In the meantime, “Locally, heat during the night should be taken into account when designing the future heatwave warning system, especially for vulnerable populations and low-income communities who may not be able to afford the additional expense of air conditioning,” Zhang said. “Stronger mitigation strategies, including global collaborations, should be considered to reduce future impacts of warming.”
Published on Aug. 10, 2022
UK heat wave: Scientists say temperatures are getting ‘hotter faster’ than their tools can calculate
But the World Weather Attribution project, which carried out the analysis, also said that its findings are likely to be an underestimate, warning that the tools available to scientists have limitations and are creating a blind spot to just how much of a role humans are playing in heat waves.
Heat waves are becoming more frequent and longer globally, and scientists say that human-caused climate change has an influence on all of them.
To determine human influence on extreme heat, scientists use a combination of observations and climate models, or simulations. While models are often conservative in their findings, observed extreme heat in western Europe increased much more than estimated by the models.
“While models estimate greenhouse gas emissions increased temperatures in this heatwave by 2˚C, historical weather records indicate that the heatwave would have been 4˚C cooler in a world that had not been warmed by human activities,” WWA said in a press release. “This suggests that models are underestimating the real impact of human-caused climate change on high temperatures in the UK and other parts of Western Europe. It also means that the results of the analysis are conservative and climate change likely increased the frequency of the event by more than the factor of 10 estimated by the study.”
The UK last week experienced high temperatures that climbed over 40 degrees Celsius (104.5 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time on record on July 19, hitting 40.3C in the English village of Coningsby. The British government issued its first-ever red level extreme heat warning for several parts of England, including the capital, London.
As temperatures soared, the country’s infrastructure buckled. Train tracks bent out of shape; an airport runway melted; London’s fire brigade declared a “major incident” as a number of fires broke out, in what the service said was its busiest days since World War II.
People were advised to work from home, some schools were shuttered, while hospitals and emergency services were stretched to their limits.
“In Europe and other parts of the world we are seeing more and more record-breaking heatwaves causing extreme temperatures that have become hotter faster than in most climate models,” said Friederike Otto from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, who leads the WWA project. “It’s a worrying finding that suggests that if carbon emissions are not rapidly cut, the consequences of climate change on extreme heat in Europe, which already is extremely deadly, could be even worse than we previously thought.”
Every fraction of a degree of global warming will bring worsening impacts of the climate crisis. The world has already warmed around 1.2 degrees Celsius on average, and there is a growing consensus that humans must try to keep warming to 1.5 degrees to avoid tipping points, where some ecosystems that the Earth relies on for its ecological balance may struggle to recover.
The scientists said the model results also indicated a heat wave as intense as last week’s in the UK is “still rare in today’s climate,” with a 1% likelihood of it happening each year. However, once again weather records suggest the computer simulation results are conservative and similar extreme heat events are likely to occur more frequently as well.
In response to the publication of the new WWA analysis, Dr. Radhika Khosla from the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, praised the scientists for their speed.
“By carrying out rapid analysis based on established, peer-reviewed methods the WWA team are able to get evidence-based results into the public domain while we can all still remember the major disruptions from last week’s extreme heat. This is the latest in a series of studies that all show the same result: climate change makes heatwaves more likely and more intense,” Khosla said.
“The level of heat the UK is now experiencing is dangerous: it puts strain on our infrastructure, economy, food and education systems, and on our bodies. As the study points out, many homes in the UK become uninhabitable in extreme heat. Adapting to rising temperatures, building heat resilience with sustainable approaches, and protecting people is an urgent priority as unprecedented temperatures become the norm.”
Peter Stott, a science fellow in climate attribution with the UK’s Met Office, said this won’t be the last time the country will be forced to deal with such extremes.
“Temperatures above 40C will occur again, possibly in the next few years and very likely over the next few decades,” Stott said. “Only by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions can we reduce the risks of such extremes becoming more and more frequent.”
CNN’s Angela Dewan and Rachel Ramirez contributed to this report.
India has seen months of extreme heat and this week it will only get hotter
The worst of the heat wave is expected late this week into this weekend with high temperatures approaching 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit (5-8 degrees Celsius) above normal across northern and northwestern India as well as parts of Pakistan.
Over one billion people will be subjected to excessive heat — 10% of the world’s population, according to Scott Duncan, an extreme climate expert.
This region, including New Delhi, could endure temperatures in the mid to upper 40s Celsius — which means temperatures over 110 and up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit are possible.
And, unfortunately, this heat wont sleep.
Extreme nighttime temperatures can be deadly
Little to no relief will come during the overnight hours as minimum temperatures will not dip below 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) in many areas.
Prolonged periods of warm nights can prove deadly as they limit the body’s ability to recover from daytime heat.
This presents a major problem for India’s population as a large portion lives without air conditioning, creating a life-threatening situation, particularly for the elderly.
Barmer, a city in India, already recorded a high temperature of 45.1 degrees Celsius — a whopping 113 degrees Fahrenheit — on Tuesday.
On the same day, a station in Pakistan tied the record for the highest maximum temperature in the Northern Hemisphere at 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit (47 Celsius), according to Maximiliano Herrera, an expert on climate extremes.
Extremely sweltering March breaks 122-year-old temperature record
Leading up to the current extreme swell, temperatures were steadily above average for March and April.
The average maximum temperature for India as a whole recorded in March 2022 was the highest recorded in the past 122 years, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
This year’s March high-temperature average was 91.58 degrees Fahrenheit (33.10 Celsius), just barely edging out the previous record from 2010 of 91.56 degrees Fahrenheit (33.09 Celsius).
Since March 11, heat waves have affected 15 of the Indian states and Union territories, according to the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), adding that “Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have suffered the most among the states, with 25 heat waves and severe heat wave days each during this period.”
The pressure pattern associated with La Niña conditions, which are currently presiding over the Pacific, has persisted longer than expected. This, along with warm waves coming from the Arctic, has caused heat waves to form, according to Raghu Murtugudde, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland.
The current impact of La Niña on the spring and summer seasons in India is completely unexpected, Murtugudde added.
April and May, known as pre-monsoon season, are typically the hottest months of the year when the region bakes endlessly.
This heat would continue to build into the summer months were it not for the cloud cover and rain provided by the monsoon season.
The relief, though welcome, comes slowly.
The Monsoon season, which brings India much-needed precipitation and cooler temperatures, generally starts in early June over the southern part of the country.
However, it takes upward of an entire month to bring relief to places in northern India, which are currently seeing the worst of the heat wave.
On the bright side, the models show that the monsoon seasonal rainfall is likely to be 99% of what it normally is, according to the IMD.
Monsoons are vital to the region because they provide much of the annual rainfall for India, aid irrigation for agriculture, and provide relief from the intense heat waves during the pre-monsoon season.
India’s heat waves will only get worse
As with many other extreme weather events, heat waves will become increasingly more severe as a result of climate change.
“The future of heat waves is looking worse even with significant mitigation of climate change, and much worse without mitigation,” said Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of hydrology and climate at MIT.
India is among the countries expected to be worst affected by the impacts of the climate crisis, according to the UN’s climate change authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The latest state of the science report from the IPCC in August 2021, noted with “high confidence” that hot extremes have increased in South Asia, and that those climbing extreme temperatures are attributable to human-caused climate change.
“More intense heat waves of longer durations and occurring at a higher frequency are projected over India,” it stated.
Without any change, a possible humanitarian crisis could be underway across India as large parts of the country could potentially become too hot to be habitable.
Hotter nights increase risk of death from heart disease for men in early 60s | Heart disease
Men in their early 60s have a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease on warmer than usual summer nights, according to new research.
Previous studies have focused on the potential for warm spells of weather that involve extreme or sustained periods of high temperatures to coincide with surges in deaths and hospitalisations due to heart conditions. However, until now, findings related to age and gender have been inconsistent.
Researchers from the University of Toronto in Canada set out to examine any possible link between high summer temperatures at night and increased cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths among people aged between 60 and 69.
They studied data from the Office for National Statistics on almost 40,000 adult deaths attributed to CVD for the months of June and July in every year between 2001 and 2015 in England and Wales because heatwaves in the UK are most frequent and intense during these months.
The results, published in the journal BMJ Open, showed that after allowing for certain variables, a 1C rise in the usual summer night temperature was associated with a 3.1% increase in the risk of CVD mortality among men aged 60 to 64, but not older men or women in either age group.
Researchers also examined US data for King County, Washington, a similarly sea-facing region, at parallel latitude to England and Wales, with comparable land-ocean atmospheric properties and similarly low prevalence of residential air conditioning.
The US data on about 500 deaths only included men. In King County, a 1C rise was associated with a 4.8% increased risk of CVD mortality among those aged 65 and under, but not in older men.
The findings are worrying, the authors said, because in recent years, regions such as the ones studied have experienced a proportionate rise in night-time rather than daytime summer heat intensity.
The study was observational, so cannot establish causality. The researchers also acknowledged some limitations. However, the strengths of the research included its large population size data and use of rigorous national mortality and meteorological data.
“Considering the growing likelihood of extreme summers in western USA and UK, our results invite preventive population health initiatives and novel urban policies aimed at reducing future risk of CVD events,” the authors concluded.