Monday's scorching heat has a climate fingerprint - WRAL News
Monday's scorching heat has a climate fingerprint
The heat index on Monday surpassed 113 degrees at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, marking the hottest day of the year during a summer of record heat.
Climate change made Raleigh's high temperatures five times more likely, according to the Climate Shift Index.
The Climate Shift Index is a tool that uses a categorical scale to show how much climate change is influencing temperature on a particular day with data analyzed by the nonprofit Climate Central. Areas west of Raleigh, including Durham and Fayetteville, had temperatures made four times more likely because of climate change.
Climate Central analysts say this heat would be very difficult to encounter without human-caused climate change, not necessarily impossible, but highly unlikely.
July was the hottest month every recorded on earth, by a wide margin.
This year has been the third-hottest on record through July, according to combined data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Those organizations say this year has a 99% chance of finishing among the top five on record.
A new satellite image from the NASA Earth Observatory shows record heat in recent years is impacting sea ice growth in the Antarctic.
The continent is currently in the depths of winter, but the amount of sea ice is drastically lower than what is considered normal for this time of year.
“What we’re seeing this year is uncharted territory in the satellite record,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), one of NASA’s Distributed Active Archive Centers.
Antarctica has been seeing a sharp decline in its sea ice coverage since 2014. The sea ice in Antarctica this July covered about 2 million square kilometers less than the 1981 to 2010 average, an area larger than Mexico.
Human-caused climate change is believed to be the main driving force behind the low ice coverage, according to NASA scientists.
Melting ice can influence ocean currents and sea level rise across the globe.
Liz McLaughlin Mark Bergin
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.