Hope you like it hot

Not my image. Let me know if you want it removed.

As I hope ESE readers know, I am quite concerned about climate change.

The cheesecake photo is meant more as gallows humor than anything else. The environment might be ruined but we will see plenty of cordate posteriors soaking in the rays.

Though we're going through day 2 of single digit or subzero temperatures here in the Midwest, 2016 will go down as the warmest year on record. Just one more reason to hate this year, but I digress.

Frigid temperatures tend to make people forget the difference between climate and weather. A few facts from Discover magazine (links at the end of the post):

"While polar blasts come and go in a matter of days, climate is something that takes place over a much longer time period. Climate is, in fact, the average of the weather in a particular area — or the globe overall — over years, decades, centuries and longer."

With that in mind, consider that September was the hottest September on record and November the second warmest of such months. In the case of this last November, it was only slightly edged out by November of 2015. 

So even though many of us are being subjected to a temporary swath of Arctic cold, that absolutely does not dismiss that massive amounts of data supporting climate change and humanity's contribution to it.

Remember me blogging about two degrees? Well here's an article about it:

http://www.cnn.com/specials/opinions/two-degrees

The idea is that if we can keep the global rise of temperatures to below two degrees Celsius, we might have a chance of mitigating the more disasterous effects of climate change. Even at the time of that article, I thought the headline proclaiming the end of the fossil fuel era was both presumptuous and ostentatious. As if to sadly underscore the point, the political landscape has changed considerably since the Paris Accords.

Now we'll be lucky if we can keep the increase under 3C.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2016/12/15/might-not-feel-like-it-today-but-2016-will-be-the-warmest-year-in-the-surface-temperature-records/#.WFiHELVOLYV

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2016/10/17/last-month-was-warmest-september-on-record/#.WFiG_LVOLYV

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