Colorado Just Experienced its Hottest Six-month Average Temperature in Recorded History
As if we didn’t need another reminder that the earth is warming faster than ever, the last six months from July through December saw the highest average temperature ever recorded in Colorado. In fact, average global temperatures in 2019 and 2020 ranked among the top three warmest years in recorded history.
Aboard a Colorado National Guard helicopter, Gov. Jared Polis on Friday, Dec. 31, 2021, gets a flyover tour of Boulder County neighborhoods destroyed by wildfires the previous day.
The data released this month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that last year was the 45th consecutive year that saw global temperatures rising above the average, meaning that the planet has not had a colder-than-average year since 1976, according to the report. The planet’s average land and ocean surface temperature last year was 1.51 degrees higher than the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its report.
Colorado exceeded average temperatures across all areas. In fact, legendary as it was, the data shows that our most recent average temperatures have exceeded what until now were the highest average temperature peaks for the state: the 1930s Dust Bowl era.
With water levels falling in the grand river basins that begin in Colorado (the Colorado, Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande), with worries over snowpack and water tables, historic wildfires, and even this past year a dust storm on the high eastern plains, it isn’t surprising that so many are asking; “what is going on?”
It isn’t just Colorado that is warming. According to NOAA:
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Damaged houses are seen at the Ahr river in Insul, western Germany, Thursday, July 15, 2021. Due to historic rain falls the Ahr river dramatically went over the banks the evening before. People have died and dozens of people are missing in Germany after heavy flooding turned streams and streets into raging torrents, sweeping away cars and causing some buildings to collapse. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
The U.S. Climate Normals collection has 10 versions: 1901-1930, 1911-1940, and so on through 1991-2020. In the featured image above, the U.S. annual average temperature during each Normals period are compared to the 20th-century average (1901-2000). The influence of long-term warming is obvious.
- The entire globe’s average temperature is rising due to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. While at this moment, the highest and lowest temperatures on earth are likely more than 100°F (55°C) apart, to speak of the “average” temperature, then, may seem like nonsense. But temperatures vary from night to day and between seasonal extremes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (when it is winter here, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere). This means that some parts of the earth are quite cold while other parts are downright hot. So using the data, to detect and track changes in earth’s “energy budget” (global average temperature) is possible: how much sunlight earth absorbs, minus how much it radiates to space as heat, over time.
- The warming is more pronounced at the poles — and at higher elevations: for instance, the average temperature of the Arctic has risen three degrees since the mid-1960s, and this past fall was the warmest ever recorded there.
- For the full past 12 months, 2021 was earth’s sixth hottest year on record. The hottest year in NOAA’s 141-year climate record remains 2016.
- What the maps show us is that what is normal now — the last 30 years from 1991-2020 years – have been and continue to be significantly warmer than any 30-year segment for the past 100 years. NOAA scientists conduct other analyses that tell us about what used to be normal, is no longer.
- NOAA says that the world’s ocean heat hit record highs in 2021, causing concerns that within the next decade the ice shelves in the arctic are in danger of collapsing into the oceans, raising the possibility that sea levels could rise by several feet.
Drought (Photo/Pixabay)
As a society, the analyses reveal that we need to be prepared for more extreme weather events — extreme heat events where they have never occurred before in the far northwest. Stalled rain and snow systems dropping a year’s worth of moisture at once. Hurricanes, torrential rain, and flooding not just in traditional tornado alleys, but in geographic areas where they have never occurred, wiping out huge swaths of the landscape of towns and regions. Weather events that used to happen in a single season, now crossing all seasons.
In the west, conditions are being called here as “climate hell”, as stalled jet streams are continuing to cause prolonged drought conditions and extreme wildfire events.
In an interview with the LA Times, Russell Vose, chief of climate monitoring for the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), said “It’s clear that each of the past four decades has been warmer than the one that preceded it. Of course, all of this is driven by increasing concentrations of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.”
Climatologist Becky Bolinger of Colorado State University says that Colorado, and the rest of the country are unlikely to see an exact repeat of the Dust Bowl because we’re able to manage the land better than during the 1930s. But there are some similarities in the extreme temperatures, abnormally dry climate, and the dust storm that swept from Colorado to the Midwest last month.
Featured image: Annual U.S. temperature compared to the 20th-century average for each U.S. Climate Normals period from 1901-1930 (upper left) to 1991-2020 (lower right). (NOAA NCEI)
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