Enviormentalism - Blog Posts

2019 Temperature By the Numbers

The Year

2nd Hottest

2019 was the second-hottest year since modern record keeping began. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration work together to track temperatures around the world and study how they change from year to year. For decades, the overall global temperature has been increasing.

Over the long term, world temperatures are warming, but each individual year is affected by things like El Niño ocean patterns and specific weather events.

The global temperature is an average, so not every place on Earth had its second-warmest year. For instance, the continental U.S. had a cold October, but Alaska set records for high temperatures. The U.S. was still warmer than average over the year.

Globally, Earth’s temperature in 2019 was more than 2°F warmer than the late 19th Century.

The Record

140 years 

Since 1880, we can put together a consistent record of temperatures around the planet and see that it was much colder in the late-19th century. Before 1880, uncertainties in tracking global temperatures are larger. Temperatures have increased even faster since the 1970s, the result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

10 years

The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

20,000 Individual Observations

Scientists from NASA use data from more than 20,000 weather stations and Antarctic research stations, together with ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures to track global temperatures.

The Consequences

90%

As Earth warms, polar ice is melting at an accelerated rate. The Arctic is warming even faster than the rest of the planet. This northern summer, 90% of the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet melted.

8 inches

Melting ice raises sea levels around the world. While ice melts into the ocean, heat also causes the water to expand. Since 1880, sea levels globally have risen approximately 8 inches, although regional rates of sea level rise can be even higher.

100+ fires

As temperatures increase, fire seasons burn hotter and longer. During June and July 2019, more than 100 long-lived and intense wildfires burned north of the Arctic circle. This year also saw intense, record-setting fires in Australia.

46% increase in CO2 levels

This decades-long warming trend is the result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, released by human activities.

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Any other eco radfems out here?

Environmentalism and Feminism are two of the most important movements to me, especially since I find them both very closely tied together. The treatment of the planet and the treatment of women by the patriarchy are one and the same and we’re seeing the rot that comes of that destructive exploitation now more than ever. The male obsession with exploitation and abuse of such deep beauty and power will never not sicken me.

I also feel such a connection between womanhood and the earth. She’s the one entity who is almost always female, and I’ve always loved that so much ever since I was a young catholic girl wishing I could worship Gaea instead of the detached male god up in the sky who didn’t really seem to represent anything other than passive judgment and condemnation. The earth is real and beautiful and offers life and creation and that’s just such a womanly thing to me.

And I don’t mean that in a pseudo conservative “Women’s highest good is giving birth” way, but about all forms of female creativity. Female creatives are an endless source of wonder and inspiration to me. Women now dominate fiction writing, for instance, and in my (completely unbiased lol) opinion, they write much better books than men. I rarely find a book by a man that I feel is genuinely a good book.

I know I’m a lot more “woo woo” than most of my mutuals on here lol, but womanhood, not femininity, is something I love and revere very deeply and in a spiritual way. The reality of women and what we do is enough for me to find them basically angelic. I don’t need some farce of performative, perfect, clean girl femininity when my god is covered in the residue of her creation, whether it’s soil or paint or ink stains, or even the invisible ideas in her head and how they affect what she talks about.

This is a bit of a ramble but I’m feeling like a lot less of an angry dyke than usual lol and god I just love women. Or maybe I’m just very lesbian.