Source: Scotland – Highland Council
Maps of the Council’s gritting routes by priority and policy are available online at www.highland.gov.uk/gritting
The information provided is a summary of reports from operational staff and is intended to give a general indication of typical conditions in each area at a point in time. It is not intended to imply that any individual route is entirely snow and ice free and drivers must be aware that conditions can change rapidly and make their own assessment of conditions for travelling.
Road condition reports for Friday, 8 January 2021 are as follows:
Ross and Cromarty East
Last year ties 2016 as hottest: report
SOMBER MILESTONES: Warming in the arctic was nearly 7°C above mid-19th-century levels, as wildfires in Siberia released a quarter-billion tonnes of carbon, the report said
AFP, PARIS
Last year has tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, the European Union’s climate monitoring service said yesterday, keeping Earth on a global warming fast track that could devastate large swathes of humanity.
The six years since 2015 are the six warmest ever registered, as are 20 of the last 21, evidence of a persistent and deepening trend, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported.
Last year’s record high a soaring 1.25°C above preindustrial levels was all the more alarming because it came without the help of a periodic natural weather event known as El Nino, which added up to two-tenths of a degree to the 2016 average, according to data from NASA and the UK Met Office.
C: Copernicus EU
A year ago this week, much of Australia was reeling from the bush fires sweeping viciously across the country.
But its leaders were still in denial about climate change, despite the carnage caused by the fires.
A year ago today, my blog criticized the Australian Government’s response to the fires after one of the government’s MPs, Craig Kelly, had appeared on British television to falsely state “to try and make out that somehow or other the Australian Government could have done something by reducing its carbon emissions that would have reduced these bushfires was just complete nonsense.”
Juan Carlos Caval/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Last year was the joint hottest globally and by far the warmest year recorded in Europe, making the years from 2015 onwards the warmest six on record.
Global average temperatures tied with 2016 at 0.6°C above the long-term average – despite the absence of an El Niño event, a climate phenomenon that has a warming effect. There was an El Niño in 2016.
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Europe, by contrast, demolished records by a wide margin, at 1.6°C above the long-term average. This compared with 2019’s 1.2°C above the average – itself record-breaking at the time. Norway and Sweden both had their hottest years on record.
Human activity will push concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels 50% higher than before the industrial revolution this year, breaching a symbolic climate change threshold, the UK s Met Office forecast on Friday.