Climate Scientists Aghast at How Bad Things Are Getting, and So Fast

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-scientists-aghast-bad-fast

"Extreme events are so far outside anything we have expected."
By Victor Tangermann - Published Jul 11, 2026 7:02 AM EDT

The July 4 holiday weekend wasn’t just a scorcher — it was so hot it disrupted public events and strained power grids as temperatures soared into the triple digits.

Across the pond, Europe is bracing for yet another devastating, record-breaking heatwave. And it’s barely out of the last one, which was responsible for at least 1,300 excess deaths.

Even climate scientists, who have long watched as global warming rears its ugly head, are astonished at the accelerating trend. As Bloomberg reports, their models have long predicted rising temperatures due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. Yet the trend is speeding up to a degree that has caught even experts off guard.

…

“We could call them super-extremes or mega-extremes,” University of Exeter climate change and Earth system science chair Tim Lenton told Bloomberg. “We’re starting to see extremes on a spatial scale and a magnitude that’s really surprising.”

…

[IbogaProject]

1. Ice holds a tremendous amout of heat

And soon, maybe this summer, the Arctic Ocean will go blue. It takes about 1/300th the heat to move a mass of water from 33 to 34 as with same mass if ice from 31 to 32. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-2026-el-nino.html?m=1

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. It's not so much that ice holds heat, as that it takes a lot of heat to melt it.

“Phase changes” (i.e. from solid to liquid or from liquid to gas) take a great deal of heat. The less ice there is to melt, the more heat there will be available to heat the ocean, in addition, sea water is nowhere near as reflective as snow-covered ice. So, much more sunlight will be absorbed by the ocean, heating it, rather than being bounced back into space.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-cover

The sea ice cover is one of the key components of the polar climate system. It has been a focus of attention in recent years, largely because of a strong decrease in the Arctic sea ice cover and modeling results that indicate that global warming is amplified in the Arctic on account of ice-albedo feedback. This results from the high reflectivity (albedo) of the sea ice compared to ice-free waters. A satellite-based data record starting in late 1978 shows that indeed rapid changes have been occurring in the Arctic, where the ice coverage has been declining at a substantial rate. …

[IbogaProject]

3. Thank you

I used very poor wording. I was trying to convey that that phase change was consuming tons of heat increase masking the heat loading into our climate

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. You're welcome

(I knew what you meant.)

[JoseBalow]

5. "We could call them super-extremes or mega-extremes,"

If they start naming heat waves, please somebody just end me.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. Oh... Daffy...? This is your queue