Currently in Portland — July 6, 2023: Continued hot

The weather, currently.

Well, fire warnings didn't keep people from setting off fireworks as usual—and there were several fires to show for it, although official causes haven't been named for most.

On Thursday, the official heat warnings will have expired, but it'll still be too darn hot. High temps are set to reach around 90, and it'll be a hazy day, too. Personally, I'm going to stay hunkered down in the shade, with fans running until late this week when we get back to clear skies and temps a more reasonable mid-80s.

— Stella Harris

What you can do, currently.

The climate emergency doesn’t take the summer off. In fact — as we’ve been reporting — we’re heading into an El Niño that could challenge historical records and is already supercharging weather and climate impacts around the world.

When people understand the weather they are experiencing is caused by climate change it creates a more compelling call to action to do something about it.

If these emails mean something important to you — and more importantly, if the idea of being part of a community that’s building a weather service for the climate emergency means something important to you — please chip in just $5 a month to continue making this service possible.

Thank you!!

What you need to know, currently.

Tuesday was the hottest single day on Earth in the history of human civilization, according to a combination of global satellite data and historical tree ring analysis. One point in far northern Canada was hotter than Miami. In Siberia, the temperature in Altai hit 94°F. Despite July being mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere, temperatures in Argentina and Chile soared to more than 86°F (30°C). In the Philippines, Metro Manila recorded its hottest-ever July day. The temperature in Iran, Algeria, and Oman all reached 122°F (50°C).

“It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial,” Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told the Washington Post. Given Earth’s annual temperature cycle typically peaks in late July, this is a record that could be broken several more times this month.

The new record comes after June’s global temperature was a shocking 1.46°C above preindustrial levels — just a hair shy of the line-in-the-sand 1.5°C temperature goal agreed to in the Paris Climate Accord, albeit on a monthly basis. Large swaths of every continent and every ocean basis recorded their warmest month on record. Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth told Currently that the new data make 2023 “the odds-on favorite to be the warmest year on record” with about a 77% chance of hitting that mark.

The cause, of course, is climate change driven by fossil fuel burning. Canadian wildfires burning out of control, sharply lower sea ice in the Antarctic, record-setting melt of the Greenland ice sheet, and “scary warm” ocean temperatures all add up to this moment in time being yet another shift-change in the Earth’s climate system.

According to the IPCC, we need "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" to stabilize the Earth’s climate system before these kinds of records begin to accelerate. We are in a climate emergency, and you are part of the solution.

—Eric Holthaus