Over the weekend, Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center tweeted the above GIF, along with the text:
“Historic central/eastern Pacific outbreak- 3 major hurricanes at once for the first time on record!
#ElNino#climate“
Yes, over the weekend the Pacific Ocean saw three category four hurricanes for the first time since humans began recording the weather. This almost definitely has something to do with the fact that we’re experiencing one of the hottest El Niño warming cycles due to climate change.
Even for those of us who don’t live in the middle of the plastic-filled Pacific Ocean, this is indicative of a very bad trend. After the UK suffered a winter of extreme flooding and persistent storms, a government report found a link between an increasingly hot and wet Pacific and changes to the global jet stream. That same destabilization of the planet’s ocean/wind currents has been blamed for the awful “polar vortex” that made pretty much all of us on the East Coast hate winter even more than usual.
In short, the Pacific Ocean is much warmer than it should be. So much so, that maybe people will actually be tempted to go in the water at the beach in LA.
Come on, humanity. Get it together.
This year, while you’re biting your tongue over the holidays when some crazy rural relative is denying climate change, don’t. Explain the ancient proverb “don’t shit where you eat” calmly and how that applies on the scale of the chemical composition of the atmosphere of the one planet we’re all stuck on together. Because we’re already way past the point of terrifying, as the GIF above illustrates.
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