Europe Heat Sets All-Time Records Again, Plus More Bad Climate News

Forecast map of the departure from normal in Europe for expected
high temperatures today. Areas that are whitish will be about
30 degrees hotter than normal, which is uncharted territory
for these regions. 

The second super intense heat wave of the summer is now underway in western Europe, and like in the June heat wave, all-time record hot temperature records are falling.

This isn't your grandfather's heat wave. This one is much worse.

Germany broke its national all-time record high Wednesday when one town reached 105 degrees. Belgium had its hottest day on record with a reading of 103.8 degrees. The Netherlands also broke its all time record, reaching 102.7 degrees.

The city of Bordeaux, France, reached its all time record high of 106.1 degrees.

Incredibly, these new records are in danger of falling today as the heat wave, if anything might grow more intense. And expand. Paris, France, might break its all-time heat record. So might the United Kingdom.

Already this summer, 25 percent of France's weather stations have reported all time record high temperatures, according to the Category 6 blog. Forty-four of Germany's 490 stations have also done so, and that will surely increase today.

Most European homes don't have air conditioning, so this is a dangerous situation. Governments have learned from other, recent deadly heat waves and have set up cooling centers, air conditioned places and other options for vulnerable people to go.

By Saturday, cooler air will undercut the heat ridge and push it north into Scandanavia. That would probably make all time record highs fall up there, too.  It's possible the heat dome will extend as far as the North Pole, which isn't exactly great news for the already scant Arctic sea ice pack.

There's other types of climate related trouble and news, too:

ARCTIC FIRES

The center of this heat wave will move to Scandanavia and parts of the
Arctic this weekend, which is bad news for the ice up there. 

Extensive probably unprecedented wildfires burning in Alaska, northern Canada and Siberia and cloaking the Arctic in smoke, Forbes reports. Wildfires in such northern areas are bad to begin with, but these could contribute a bit toward making climate change worse.'

Especially in areas were peat is on fire, the blazes are belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which adds to the surplus that's causing climate change in the first place.

Soot particles from the fire are landing on Arctic ice. Bright white ice reflects sunlight, but darker material draws the sun's warmth in. The soot would therefore make the ice melt faster in the summer than it otherwise would.

ICELAND GLACIER DEATH

An Icelandic glacier dubbed OK is officially dead, the apparent victim of climate change. Summers in Iceland have gotten hotter in recent years and decades. That means the island's 400 or so glaciers are in retreat.

OK is the first of Iceland glaciers to be declared dead but it won't be the least. A glacier "dies" when it becomes so thin that it can't move on its own because it doesn't have enough weight.

According to Slate, the OK glacier probably died several years ago, and there's likely a few other glaciers in Iceland that have also died.

PAST CLIMATE CHANGE SMALLER

People who say climate change doesn't exist point to other climate shifts that happened before we started pushing all that CO2 into the atmosphere. They point to the Roman Warm Period between the years 0 and 300 AD, the Dark Ages cold period around the year 500 AD, the Little Ice Age in the 1300s through 1700s and the Medieval Warm Period around the year 1000 as examples.

According to Science News, these past climate events were regional, covering only sections of the Earth. That's unlike the current global warming, says Science. They report that 98 percent of the Earth is warmer now that it has been at any time in the previous 2,000 years.

This new study appears in the journal Nature.  The scientists conducting this study came to their conclusion by using proxies for temperatures from tree rings, glacier ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, cave deposits and historical documents.