Guest post from Colin Price, a professor in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University.The Earth has a fever! When we get a fever our body temperature rise by 1-2 degrees, and we feel pretty rotten. We stay at home, don't want to talk to anyone, we are cranky, and we behave strangely. That fever is relative to our average body temperature of 37C (you will have to translate Celsius to Fahrenheit if you wish). Well, the Earth has a similar fever of 1 C at the moment, relative to its average temperature of 15 C. And similar to our bodies that start acting strange when we have a fever, the Earth is also starting to show signs of irritability, strange behaviour, which we are noticing through changes in the weather and climate.
The facts are that the temperatures observed today and during the last few decades are the highest they have been for at least 1000 years if not longer (we don't have accurate data further than that). Furthermore, the concentration of greenhouse gases that are known to absorb heat emitted from the Earth's surface are now the highest we have seen in at least 600 thousand years, and likely longer (we have no data going back further in time). If you don't trust the temperature data, take a look outside. 95% of all mountain glaciers around the world are melting and receding. The Greenland ice sheet is dramatically losing mass (ice) due to melting, while the summer Arctic sea ice is continuously shrinking every year.
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