As predicted, the world is still warming:
It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record.
The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in ‘the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.’ It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.
Most significantly, NASA’s March prediction has come true: ‘It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.″
The warming is gradual. There won’t be any clearly defined moment where we can say “that is the first climate change disaster” or “those are the first climate change deaths”. But historians looking back (if there are any) may well pick the 2003 European heat wave, over 70,000 deaths, as the first major event. There were over 3000 more deaths in the 2006 European heat wave, and 225 in North America. Now it’s happening again:
Hundreds die in Indian heatwave
Record temperatures in northern India have claimed hundreds of lives in what is believed to be the hottest summer in the country since records began in the late 1800s.
The death toll is expected to rise with experts forecasting temperatures approaching 50C (122F) in coming weeks. More than 100 people are reported to have died in the state of Gujarat where the mercury topped at 48.5C last week. At least 90 died in Maharashtra, 35 in Rajasthan and 34 in Bihar.
Hospitals in Gujarat have been receiving around 300 people a day suffering from food poisoning and heat stroke, ministers said. Officials admit the figures are only a fraction of the total as most of the casualties are found in remote rural villages. … Mean temperatures for both March and April were the highest in more than 100 years.
Well it’s only dead “darkies”, as Paul Holmes and Andy Haden would put it, so it won’t get any media coverage in NZ. But this is the pattern of the future, in the long run hitting non white populations the hardest (“Climate change is racist”). And all the while the little people concerned about no one but themselves (like ACT and Federated Farmers) will bitch and moan about the costs of the ETS. And the deaths will keep coming.
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