I came across this quote in an article in The Guardian.
“If the anomaly does not stabilize by August – a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events – then the world will be in uncharted territory.”
Apparently, the climate scientists who make it their hobby to track ‘global temperatures’ were alarmed and confounded by the tenth consecutive month of record heat.
Obviously, they were not paying attention to Pagosa Springs last month. It’s been fricking cold here. We had snow… in April.
But what got me thinking was the word, “uncharted”.
I’ve seen lots of charts, these past few years, showing ‘global temperatures’. More charts than I can count.
In fact, that same Guardian article included a chart:
The article was written by The Guardian’s Global Environment editor Jonathan Watts, and he was quoting Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute.
“Uncharted”.
I believe the word “chart” used to refer to maps, possibly before the word “map” was invented, and something that was “uncharted” did not appear on the map.
Almost everything you can imagine now appears to be charted. My two favorite coffee shops, in this tiny Colorado town, both appear on maps. My own house appears on maps. My car, in my driveway, appears on maps. I wouldn’t be surprised if my cat, Roscoe, appears on maps when he’s sunning himself on the front steps.
So I’m interested in the idea what it might mean when a NASA director — supposedly a ‘climate expert’ — says that the “the world will be in uncharted territory”.
The world doesn’t have any ‘uncharted territories’ left. For heaven’s sake, Antarctica is charted. Antarctica is so charted, we now know what’s underneath the ice, even though the ice is as much as 4,000 meters thick (13,000 feet.)
If I were looking for some uncharted territory, I would probably need to look at the bottom of the ocean. But even most of that is now charted.
I’m pretty sure the Moon is charted. Okay, maybe not the dark side of the Moon, but at least the side we can see, I bet, is charted.
Then we have climate, which is not a ‘territory’ at all, but rather, an ‘occurrence’… but still, it’s charted.
Here’s that chart again, in case you missed it the first time.
According to this chart, March 2024 was about 1.7 degrees warmer than the average of the global temperature in 1850-1900.
I didn’t know people even had thermometers in 1850?
Turns out, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer in 1714. But he kind of screwed things up. For some reason, he measured his ‘freezing point’ — zero degrees — using a mixture of water and sea salt… a mixture that freezes at a much lower temperature than plain water… so plain water ended up freezing at 32 degrees, which was awkwardly unpleasant.
Fahrenheit then calculated that the temperature of the human body was 96 degrees, which it’s not. He was off by 2.8 degrees.
These are the kinds of ‘scientists’ who were measuring the ‘global temperature’ in 1850, mostly in Germany. (Was anyone measuring the ‘global temperature’ everywhere, in 1850? I kinda doubt it.)
So we can take any temperature comparison between March 2024 and March 1850 with a grain of salt. Or a grain of salt water, if you prefer.
If we are in ‘uncharted territory’ now, Fahrenheit was basically ‘off the charts’.
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry — in particular the five dozen companies linked to 80% of global emissions — are pooh-poohing charts like the one above. Last month, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser was applauded at an oil industry conference in Houston for declaring: “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”
Until I can afford an electric car, I’m all in favor of abandoning fantasies. “Uncharted territory”? Siri, show me the nearest gas station…