![]() ![]() Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf that impedes the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart. If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects-like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs-are likely to happen more quickly than expected. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1☌ global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change-leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.” And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began-a milestone surpassed again the following day. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Its impacts, however, are accelerating-sometimes far faster than expected.įor a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Please review our full terms contained on our Terms of Service page.Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. We further caution that our travel scores are only as good as the data that underpin them, that weather conditions at any given location and time are unpredictable and variable, and that the definition of the scores reflects a particular set of preferences that may not agree with those of any particular reader. While having the tremendous advantages of temporal and spatial completeness, these reconstructions: (1) are based on computer models that may have model-based errors, (2) are coarsely sampled on a 50 km grid and are therefore unable to reconstruct the local variations of many microclimates, and (3) have particular difficulty with the weather in some coastal areas, especially small islands. We draw particular cautious attention to our reliance on the MERRA-2 model-based reconstructions for a number of important data series. We assume no responsibility for any decisions made on the basis of the content presented on this site. ![]() Weather data is prone to errors, outages, and other defects. The information on this site is provided as is, without any assurances as to its accuracy or suitability for any purpose. See all nearby weather stations Disclaimer ![]() The details of the data sources used for this report can be found on the William P Hobby Airport page. ![]()
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