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Globe breaks heat record for 8th straight month. Golfers get to play in Minnesota’s ‘lost winter’
January 2024 broke the old record from 2020 for the warmest first month of the year by 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit.
For the eighth straight month in January, Earth was record hot, according to the European climate agency.
That was obvious in the northern United States, where about 1,000 people were golfing last month in a snow-starved Minneapolis during what the state is calling “the Lost Winter of 2023-24.”
For the first time, the global temperature pushed past the internationally agreed-upon warming threshold for an entire 12-month period, with February 2023 to January 2024 running 2.74 degrees Fahrenheit (1.52 degrees Celsius) hotter than pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Space Agency.
That’s the highest 12-month global temperature average on record, Copernicus reported.
The globe has broken heat records each month since last June.
January 2024 broke the old record from 2020 for the warmest first month of the year by 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit (0.12 degrees Celsius) and was 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 1800s, the base for temperatures before the burning of fossil fuels. Even though it was record hot in January, the level above normal was lower than the previous six months, according to Copernicus data.
Climate scientists blame a combination of human-caused warming from the burning of fossil fuels and a natural but temporary El Nino warming of parts of the Pacific, saying greenhouse gases have a much bigger role than nature. This is the time of year that El Nino warming often peaks, said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler.
“This is both disturbing and not disturbing. After all, if you stick your finger in a light socket and get shocked, it’s bad news, sure, but what did you expect?” Dessler said.
Just because the globe exceeded the 1.5-degree warming threshold for 12 months, that’s not what scientists mean by reaching the warming limit of 1.5 degrees, said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, co-author of a United Nations science report about the harms of exceeding more than 1.5 degrees. The 1.5-degree limit, adopted by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, is more about a 30-year average.
“These are much more than numbers, ranks and records — they translate to real impacts on our farms, families and communities from unprecedented heat, changing growing seasons and rising sea levels,” said North Carolina State Climatologist Kathie Dello.
International Falls, a Minnesota city on the Canadian border that proudly bills itself as the “icebox of the nation,” recorded its first-ever 50-degree high for January on Jan. 31, when the temperature hit 53 Fahrenheit (11.7 Celsius). Minneapolis has already set a record for the number of 50-degree days for a winter.
About 70% of Minnesota currently has bare ground, with most of the state so far getting less than 25% of normal snowfall.
Authorities have rescued dozens of ice anglers from normally solid northern Minnesota lakes after ice floes broke off and carried them along. The annual Art Shanty Projects festival on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis in January had to be cut short due to open water and unsafe ice.
The Montgomery National Golf Club, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) south of Minneapolis, should be blanketed under a thick layer of snow this time of year. Instead, it’s doing a booming business.
“We did about a thousand golfers in January. If we had had just one golfer, that would have been a record,” owner Greg McKush said. “After today, we will have had about a thousand golfers for February, which is unheard of.”
McKush said he reopened two Saturdays ago and figures he might be able to stay open all winter if temperatures continue to reach at least into the 40s.
It seems like the fairways are trying to green up, he said, and a lot of the frost has come out of the ground. Most golfers are telling him conditions are “better than expected.”
In Wisconsin, fourth in the U.S. in maple syrup production, the mild winter weather prompted many farms in the state’s northern and central regions to begin tapping their trees in mid-January — up to two months earlier than normal, depending on the area, said Theresa Baroun, executive director of the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association.
“There’s a wide range of the state that are tapped and cooking syrup already. It’s very unusual. This is one of the most abnormal weather patterns for starting out the maple season we’ve seen,” she said Wednesday. “For maple trees to run, it needs to be freezing at night, above freezing during the day. And this weather has been perfect for the maple trees to run.”
Baroun, whose family has about 1,200 maple trees at their Maple Sweet Dairy in De Pere, Wisconsin, just south of Green Bay, said the farm began cooking sap this week and that’s the earliest her family can remember since production began in 1964.
The February sturgeon season on Michigan’s Black Lake was canceled for the first time due to lack of ice for safe fishing.
At Isle Royal National Park, an island in Lake Superior between Michigan, Minnesota and Canada, scientists couldn’t conduct their annual wolf and moose count because the ice was so weak they couldn’t land ski-planes on it to get there.
One of the stranger consequences has been the early emergence of ticks. The Metropolitan Mosquito Control District in Minnesota reported its first deer tick of 2024 on Monday, posting a creepy photo on social media of a tick in a vial against the backdrop of Feb. 5 on a calendar. District officials said they haven’t found any mosquito larvae yet – but it’s not from a lack of searching.
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The Trump and Harris campaigns both hosted news conferences ahead of Walz-Vance rhetorical clash.
MINNEAPOLIS — The Trump Campaign Monday hosted a national conference call featuring several Minnesotans ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. The Harris Campaign, for its part, held a press conference to punctuate reproductive rights.
Gov. Walz will face off with Ohio Sen. JD Vance in the CBS Studios in New York Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. for what will most likely be their only meeting before Election Day.
Congressman Tom Emmer, the Republican House Majority Whip, told reporters Walz isn’t the good-natured everyman that he comes across as in his campaign rallies. Emmer, who played Walz in debate rehearsals with Vance, said Walz is far more liberal than he’d have you believe.
“He’s a good debater. He will stand there, and he lies with conviction,” Emmer told reporters. “And he has little mannerism, where it’s just, ‘Hey, I’m the nice guy.’ But he’s not nice at all.”
Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller cautioned that Vance is not as experienced in debates as Walz, who has been running for elected office and winning consistently since 2006.
“Tim Walz is very good in debates. Really good. He’s been a politician for 20 years,” Miller said.
“He’s not going to be the wildly, gesticulating, effeminate caricature we see at rallies pointing to Kamala Harris and dancing about on the stage. Walz is going to be buttoned up. He’ll be ready to defend his own radical left record in Minnesota.”
Miller predicted that Vance will hammer away at Walz over the spike in illegal immigration during the Biden-Harris years and will highlight violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.
“What Kamala Harris has done has turned every community in the United States into a border community. Nobody is safe anymore.”
The Harris campaign, by contrast, kept the focus on reproductive rights and fertility issues. State lawmakers and abortion rights advocates called out Vance for previous statements that he’d support an abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest.
“Trump and Vance have a plan to give Trump unprecedented, unchecked power to roll back reproductive rights, raise the cost for middle class families and threaten our democracy,” Sen. Erin Maye Quade, an Apple Valley Democrat, told reporters.
“Now, more than one in three women across the country live under an abortion ban. Women are being turned away from emergency rooms begging for care. Doctors are facing the threat of jail time for doing their jobs.”
The event, at Frogtown Community Center, featured women who had needed abortions for medical reasons.
“The only reason I have my three beautiful boys today is because I had an abortion. Without it I might not have a uterus, and I might not have my family,” Tippy Amundson said.
During her first pregnancy she learned at 20 weeks that her baby would not be viable after birth but would pose a health risk to her if she carried it to term.
DFL Rep. Kaohly Her of St. Paul revealed she too required an abortion earlier in her life.
“I myself have had an abortion after suffering an ectopic pregnancy. I found my way to a reproductive health clinic where I got the medical care I needed to save my life.”
During the Trump Campaign’s conference call, national reporters also heard from Tom Behrends, who served with Walz in the Minnesota National Guard and has claimed — without proof — that Walz retired after learning their unit would be deployed to Iraq.
“When the nation called, Tim Walz hung up and ran the other way.”
The National Guard’s official records conflict with Behrend’s account. A Guard spokesperson said that Walz left in May 2005 — two months before his unit received a special alert about a possible deployment and three months before receiving it received a mobilization order.
“The Minnesota National Guard can confirm the 1-125 Field Artillery Battalion received an alert order on July 14, 2005. An alert order is a notification for possible mobilization. The unit received a mobilization order on Aug. 14, 2005,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé told KARE.
“The Minnesota National Guard confirms Governor Timothy James Walz served from April 8, 1981, to May 16, 2005.”
Nevertheless, the fact that Behrends appeared in the Trump Campaign’s event indicates Vance will confront Walz about the timing of his retirement from the military.
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Local mom says two-year-old is bullied for her looks. Now, she’s asking parents to help end bullying against kids with disabilities.
Now, at two years old, Mirlee Janice Ramirez and her beautiful smile show how far they’ve come since KENS 5’s Sarah Forgany first interviewed her mother in 2022.
SAN ANTONIO — Two years of raising a child with a rare genetic disorder has given Flor Ramirez a unique perspective.
Flor is a former KENS 5 employee, and as colleagues, we have helped raise awareness of her daughter, Mirlee’s, condition, Apert Syndrome. It’s a condition that causes the fusion of bones in the skull, hands and feet.
Now, at two years old, Mirlee Janice Ramirez and her beautiful smile show how far they’ve come since KENS 5’s Sarah Forgany first interviewed her mother in 2022.
“She has excelled and met goals. She’s running. She’s playing. She’s balancing herself,” Ramirez said.
Mirlee was an infant two years ago and Flor was trying to figure out how to be a new mom and how to navigate the surprise of baby’s disabilities.
“So many fears…what the healing process is going to look like, because as she gets older, it changes,” Ramirez said.
Little Mirlee has gone through seven surgeries in her young life and receives continual therapy from Children’s Rehabilitation Institute TeletonUSA (CRIT).
Occupational Therapist Marites Navarro Graves says Mirlee has made incredible progress.
“She can move her arms, but also feeding, eating so she can hold her spoon better,” Navarro says.
Navarro has more than 20 years experience and has been with CRIT since it first opened in 2014, serving only a few families at that time.
“Our populations are mostly with cerebral palsy, neurological musculoskeletal disorders,” Navarro said.
The organization now serves over 350 patients all over the U.S.
“We serve the whole family, not only the patient itself, because when you have a disability at home, it has an impact on the whole family,” Ana Hernandez, CRIT Business Development Manager, said. “We see miracles everyday happening here in all types of therapies.”
Ramirez considers her daughter one of those miracles. But, outside of the warm, welcoming and colorful walls of the CRIT facility, Ramirez has a much different experience.
She says she has endured bullying in public places from both kids and adults and doesn’t feel comfortable going to the playground.
“Now that she’s growing and she’s getting older, she’s more aware of what’s going on,” Ramirez said. “It’s very difficult as a mom to see your daughter go through that.”
Ramirez says she understands differences in perspectives and says she welcomes adults and children to walk up and ask her questions, instead of just staring.
“Sometimes it may seem a little uncomfortable on both parties but it helps us to educate children,” Ramirez said.
In the meantime, Ramirez says her daughter is breaking barriers and conquering new skills every day.
“I never thought that I’d see my daughter riding a bike ever. She’s having the best time of her life… to her, that is such a big accomplishment.”
A spokesperson with the Ellis County Wild Game Dinner confirmed that a man bought a guitar that had been signed by Swift and destroyed it.
WAXAHACHIE, Texas — A North Texas man is going viral for taking a hammer to a guitar signed by Taylor Swift.
A video that’s now been reposted across several social media platforms shows a North Texas man grabbing a guitar decorated in the style of the superstar’s Eras Tour and smashing it with a hammer that was handed to him by one of the men helping the auctioneer.
“I see the guy grab a hammer off the stage,” JD Cobb, who shot the video, told WFAA. “When I started video-ing it, I thought it was a joke.”
Cobb shot the video at the Ellis County Wild Game Dinner in Waxahachie, Texas, Saturday night. A spokesperson with the event confirmed to WFAA that the guitar was signed by Swift, and the man bought the guitar for around $4,000.
The spokesperson claimed there was no malice behind the smashing, though he did hint at the fact it had something to do with Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. They also confirmed that Taylor Swift has never used the guitar.
“It has been surprising to me how big of a deal people are making it out to be. It wasn’t meant to be mean or malicious,” Ellis County Wild Game spokesperson Craig Meier told WFAA. “He was just making a lighthearted statement showing disapproval of people in the entertainment industry trying to influence politics.”
Swifties online were critical of the decision to smash the guitar.
Some claimed it was immature, others used much harsher words. Many, though, cited the fact the $4,000 he spent could have gone to charity, and, in the end, it did. The proceeds for the dinner went to the Future Farmers of America.
“It was just a funny thing that happened at our annual event. The crowd thought it was hilarious,” Meier said in a statement. “The important thing is that 100% of the money raised goes directly to local youth and agricultural education programs. At the end of the day, the kids win and will benefit from this.”
