The Earth Is Running a Bad Fever

NASA, NOAA and the British Met Office report that 2016 was the hottest year on record:

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

What's particularly worrying is that the poles are heating up much faster than the rest of the world:

The heat extremes were especially pervasive in the Arctic, with temperatures in the fall running 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal across large stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Sea ice in that region has been in precipitous decline for years, and Arctic communities are already wrestling with enormous problems, such as rapid coastal erosion, caused by the changing climate.

Because of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, the planet is on track to warm by 1 to 3 degrees Celsius, or 1.8 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. You don't think that sounds bad? How long would you live if you were running a five-degree fever?

A five-degree temperature increase will endanger our food and water supplies, flood coastal and river cities, ravage the countryside with ever more powerful tornadoes, and kill our forests with insect infestation and drought.

Donald Trump famously tweeted that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by China. Yes, the same China that is constantly choking under thick clouds of smog, forcing people to wear face masks whenever they go outside. The same China where hundreds of thousands of people die each year from burning coal.

Consider these factors:

For years oil companies have been trying without success to tap oil reserves in the Arctic. They've abandoned this project because the weather is just too cold and unpredictable.

Russia is the largest country in the world, but most of its land is in Siberia, It's basically unusable because it's just too damn cold. Russia has huge oil and gas reserves in Siberia, but has similar difficulties extracting them.

Shipping between the east coast of America and Asia requires going south through the Panama Canal. The bigger ships can't even fit through the canal, and have to go all the way around Tierra del Fuego, almost to Antarctica. That's almost 10,000 miles out of the way! If the North Pole was free of ice, the Northwest Passage would be open. Shipping would be much faster and cheaper.

If you're into conspiracy theories, isn't it much more likely that the oil companies and Russia are conspiring to make global warming worse, so that Alaska and Siberia can be easily developed, and open the Northwest Passage so they can ship oil quickly and cheaply to China, Korea and Japan?

Trump's nominee for secretary of state is the former CEO of  Exxon Mobile, and a pal of Vladimir Putin. Given the trillions of dollars these men stand to gain from a warming planet, can you really believe anything they say about global warming?