Friday January 1st… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Looking Forward To Progress In 2021
Happy New Year to all. I was getting a little tired of hearing and reading the phrase “thank goodness that 2020 is ending.” Just because the calendar date flips from one year to the next does not mean that bad circumstances will disappear overnight. In truth, the worst of the COVID19 may be ahead of us in the first few months of 2021 before vaccines are widely administered. Yet, at least to start out this year we have a lot if hope since it appears that we have good vaccines in the first place.
As we start 2021 on the climate and environmental front, we see more hope, mainly because the era of Trump is ending. Also, we find that country after country is electrifying quickly with that energy being produced by renewables. Our global warming trend needs to slow down in a hurry, though. We end 2020 nearly tied with 2016 as the warmest year in recorded history. We are now at +1.2°C above preindustrial conditions closing in on that first United Nations threshold of +1.5°C we have been warned to not cross.
There is just about no way to sugar coat what happened in 2020, mainly due to the pandemic. A year that held out so much progress for humanity ended with big setbacks from every corner that can be measured from our health to the economy to the environment. Today I will be posting some tweeted items that should encourage us to strive for progress in 2021:
Here is more climate and weather news from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
First some 2020 climatology:
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid COVID-19 pandemic:
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”