It may be lockdown lethargy, or the brain fog many are suffering whilst sheltering in place – I’ve lost my impetus where genealogy and family history are concerned. But I can still juggle happily with numbers for hours on end. Disappointed with the appearance of a graph showing temperature differences this year in the two hemispheres (relative to the Pre-industrial baseline), I sought a whole measure smaller than a degree centigrade or Fahrenheit and found one. I have called it an “IPCC unit”.

The International Panel on Climate Change issued a paper at the time of the Paris Accord that declared the global average temperature had risen one-degree centigrade above Pre-Industrial by 2017. It suggested a further half a degree rise by 2040 – to the 1.5°C limit that should be avoided at all costs.

Assuming an unwavering linear rise, we are looking at a modest-seeming 0.0217°C per annum. (I reckon that to be 0.0391 degrees in Fahrenheit money.)

Creating the graph using IPCC units gives this picture of weekly temperature relative to Pre-Industrial, reported by my Ten Stations over the last thirteen weeks.

I have kept it as simple as possible to make it clear that the northern stations are responsible for all the above-average global warming in this time period and the southern stations for all but a tiny bit of the cooling.

Koltsovo has warmed at over 250 times the rate projected by the IPCC. Rio de Janeiro is the “coolest” of the stations.

Koltsovo has cooled by about 55 IPCC units over the thirteen weeks. That’s about 1.2°C, down from 7.8°C above Pre-Industrial to 6.6 degrees. (Global warming isn’t a hoax in Russia.)

Rio’s average weekly mean temperature over this period was 25.6°C but it cooled about 12 IPCC units, or 0.25°C,  from 0.19 to 0.44 degrees BELOW Pre-Industrial.

Shanghai is the northern station that is closely tracking the hemisphere average.

The Ten Station Globe has dropped from 2.09°C above Pre-Industrial in Week 8 to  1.89 degrees in week 20. It is, however, a long drop to a rise of only a single IPCC unit by the end of the meteorological year.

Metal 11 · Roundabout