News Reporter: Climate Coach: Are we in an era of "global boiling"?

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Down-to-earth advice for life on our changing planet.

By Michael J. Coren

Welcome. This week, a trillion trees and Otis, a beloved grizzly. But first, was July a tipping point?

Last month previewed life on a more extreme planet.

In Vermont, a single storm dropped two months of rain in 48 hours. Fires raged "like a blowtorch" across the Mediterranean. The waters off South Florida, driven by global sea surface temperatures experiencing two decades' worth of warming in a single year, reached a blistering 101 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the Phoenix metro area, millions sweltered under temperatures at or above 110 for more than four weeks, smashing U.S. records rivaled only by Death Valley, along the California-Nevada border. As El Niño supercharges human-driven warming, expect blowtorch conditions to continue at least until the end of the year.

We may look back on July, the hottest month on record, as the moment when much of the world simultaneously felt the full fury of climate change for the first time. "The era of global warming has ended," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres declared Thursday. "The era of global boiling has arrived."

But for scientists like Claudia Tebaldi of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, July was not historic. It was just another data point climate modelers have been predicting with ever-increasing accuracy since at least the 1960s.

"It's not like what we see outside our window wasn't part of the possibilities," says Tebaldi, who uses statistical analysis to help refine climate change projections. "It was just the part that was deemed the much more pessimistic."

Scientists will be studying this summer for years to understand just what it means for the complex interaction between the oceans, atmosphere and land as humans alter their environment. But the sheer size of these anomalies, while surprising, are only part of a trend that keeps going up.

A more useful way to see this summer, she suggests, is not as exceeding some critical threshold, but as a sign that we're shoving the planet closer to more dangerous — and predictable — instability.

"As we keep on playing with the system," she warns, "we need to be ready for more surprising behavior."

Field Sample

Alaska's newest gold rush? Seaweed. The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin traveled to Alaska to report on "kelpers," ocean farmers who are raising the nutritious marine plants that restore ecosystems.

Kelpers hope Alaska's cold waters will become the next kelp farming frontier, even though the state lacks easy access to markets and infrastructure. But as waters warm in places like New England and the Mediterranean, Alaska holds promise. "The sky's the limit, because we have more coastline than the rest of the Lower 48 put together," Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) said in a phone interview.

Sugar kelp is smoked in Alaska by Dune Lankard, right, president and founder of the Native Conservancy, and Brandyn Ashley Comparan. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Snapshot

Supermoons occur when the moon's orbit brings it closest to Earth. This month, we'll have two. The August full moon in North America is traditionally called the sturgeon moon, the time when the continent's largest endangered freshwater fish species begins to spawn. "All those flower and animal names you see on full moons come from Native American traditions," says NASA ambassador Tony Rice. "They refer to the good hunting or gathering that month, often focused on the northeastern U.S." Here's how to see the supermoon.

The sturgeon supermoon on Tuesday in Austin. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

The Learning Curve

People see a recycling symbol and hope the item will be recycled, reports Robert Gebelhoff in The Post. For many plastics, this amounts to "wishcycling." See some of the plastics that are rarely recycled below.

Because we have more than 20,000 recycling centers in the United States but no uniform standards on what they will accept, it makes it nearly impossible to know what plastics can be recycled at any given location (glass, metal and paper are widely accepted). To fix this, the burden must be shifted from the public to the companies generating the waste. Say hi to extended producer liability.

On the Climate Front

From The Post:

Republicans want to plant a trillion trees. Scientists are skeptical.

These places baked the most during Earth's hottest month on record

Your body can build up a tolerance to heat. Here's how.

Beloved grizzly Otis was again late for salmon season. Blame climate change.

From elsewhere:

Yes, heat can affect your brain and mood. Here's why.

A study of Atlantic Ocean currents reinvigorates the climate collapse debate

Brazil's golden monkeys have rebounded from the brink of extinction, and Amazon deforestation in Brazil fell more than 60 percent last month, reports the Guardian

How climate change could cause a home insurance meltdown, reports NPR

"I just got back from a cruise to eastern Greenland (in late June) and wanted to share first-hand how things are getting scary," writes Sandi, who snapped this picture of ice from northern Greenland very far south via the seas to eastern Greenland. The region's ice is melting at record rates, raising global sea levels.

Have photos of our changing world? Send them to me at climatecoach@washpost.com.