Passover starts next week, but in no small irony, most seders have been cancelled because of plague. It would have been enough if we just had covid-19; but we also get thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes tonight:
Adhering to the stay-at-home order should come easier Saturday as the rumble of thunder began in the early morning hours and was expected to continue throughout the day.
In a hazardous weather outlook, officials warned of possible thunderstorms, large hail and up to 60 mph winds through Sunday.
The outlook for north central and northeast Illinois, and northwest Indiana, warns of a significant thunderstorm risk, golf ball-size hail and damaging winds up to 100 km/h. Officials also added a risk of flooding and fog for the region.
In other disaster news, today is the 41st anniversary—yes, forty-first—of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
I'm just excited that it's Saturday, so I get to go to the grocery store today. (Several of them, probably, depending on what Trader Joe's is out of.)
Even when I work from home, I have a lot to do. At least I don't have a commute today, giving me extra time to catch up later:
And now, back to work.
New research shows that global CO2 levels will likely hit 417 ppm this year, the highest ever in human history, and a level not seen since the oceans were 20 m higher:
This year's rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to be 10 percent higher than normal, according to University of Exeter geography professor Richard Betts, head of the climate impacts division at the Meteorological Office, the U.K.'s national weather service. About 1 percent to 2 percent of the increase will come fromAustralia's devastating wildfire season, [said Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London].
Australia's historic fires, which raged from September through early February, are thought to have unleashed about 900 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
When the planet last had an atmosphere that mirrored today's chemical makeup, Earth was in the midst of the Pliocene Epoch. During that geologic period, which lasted from about 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago, humans had yet to appear on the planet, and average sea levels were up to 20 m higher than they are today. Global average temperatures were also around 3°C warmer, with temperatures at the poles likely double that, according to Siegert.
Well, here in Chicago, we're 183 m above sea level. If we were 163 m above sea level it would take us a lot less time to get to the Mississippi Delta by Vicksburg, Miss., or to the Atlantic Coast in Richmond, Va. (I'd really miss Boston and London, though.)
On the other hand, unless Lake Michigan drops about 4 m by Saturday, we're looking at the second consecutive month of record lake levels, after the record year we had in 2019.
I was going to lead off with a New Republic article about Michael Bloomberg, but they just put up a paywall yesterday and lost my subscription information. And their new "subscribe now" page doesn't work. But why would anyone need to test software before deploying it to production?
Anyway, that wasn't the only article that interested me today that I'll read later on:
Finally, it's going to be warmer than usual this weekend, so I'm going to add some Brews with my Choos.
Yesterday in Chicago the temperature bottomed out at -19°C after dumping 50 mm of snow on us. Today the temperature just went above freezing, where it's expected to hover for a while.
So, mild winter indeed, with more ridiculousness to come.
While I do get to sign off a bit earlier today, I might not read all of these articles until tomorrow:
Finally, despite today's near-record low temperatures in Chicago, we expect a 12°C increase from earlier this morning until tomorrow afternoon. Hey, if this is the only day all winter that even flirts with -18°C, I'm happy.
The frozen continent hit its all-time-warmest temperature yesterday:
Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 18°C was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history.
The Antarctic Peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50 years, temperatures have surged a staggering 3°C in response to Earth’s swiftly warming climate. Around 87 percent of glaciers along the peninsula’s west coast have retreated in that time, the majority doing so at an accelerated pace since 2008.
The WMO notes that cracks in the Pine Island Glacier “have been growing rapidly” in the past several days, according to satellite imagery.
Additional extreme warmth is likely in the Antarctic Peninsula in the coming days. Temperatures some 22–28°C above normal are predicted by some models.
Oh dear.
Welp, the Senate has acquitted President Trump almost entirely along party lines, as everyone knew it would. Only Mitt Romney (R-UT) crossed the aisle to vote for conviction. Here's a roundup of the news in the last few hours:
About yesterday:
- The Washington Post has an annotated SOTU.
- Alexandra Petri clutched every pearl she owned, "and also the pearls of strangers, and some oysters that may contain pearls in the future" after Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped up her copy of the SOTU.
- NBC called the address Trump's "victory lap." Oh no, NBC; he's got more lapping in him.
In other news:
And it's snowing.
Both O'Hare and Midway set temperature records yesterday: 11°C at O'Hare and 12°C at Midway. Which we can all agree was a much more pleasant day than 2 February 2011.
We conclude January 2020 in Chicago having 16 out of 31 days (including today) with no visible sun, tying the all-time record of 9 consecutive days without sun set on 9 January 1992. We've had only 24% of possible sunlight this month, making this the third-gloomiest January on record after 1998 (20%) and 2011 (23%).
But this is really just a consequence of our unusually mild winter. Since December 1st, we've had 46 out of 60 days above freezing, and only 6 days below -10°C. And mercifully, the forecast for tomorrow and Sunday calls for warmth (11°C on Sunday, fully 9°C above normal) and sunshine (20% predicted for tomorrow, and 90% predicted for Sunday).
So, all right, I can live with more than a week of gloomy skies in exchange for unseasonably mild weather in January.