Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.

The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).

It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.

“They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time,” Meier told The Associated Press Friday evening. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.”

“It’s pretty stunning,” Meier added.

“Wow. I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic,” said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the continent.

“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.

Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”

Both Lazzara and Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly then it might be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.

The Antarctic warm spell was first reported by The Washington Post.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said.

At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

By comparison, the world as a whole was only 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) above the 1979 to 2000 average. Globally the 1979 to 2000 average is about half a degree (.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average.

What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent — except for its vulnerable peninsula which is warming quickly and losing ice rapidly — has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.

Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrinking to 741,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in late February, the snow and ice data center reported.

What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said.

And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.

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GARDNERVILLE, Nev. (AP) — The governors of California and Nevada called for more federal firefighting assistance Wednesday as they toured a region blackened by one of several massive wildfires that have destroyed dozens of homes in the West.

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak and California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood on ashen ground as they surveyed burned homes and a mountain range of pine trees charred by the Tamarack Fire south of Gardnerville, Nevada, near Topaz Lake.

The governors, both Democrats, called on the federal government to provide more firefighting resources and stressed that climate change could make wildfires even more intense and destructive in the future.

Battling multiple large-scale fires with limited resources, the U.S. Forest Service decided in early July to let dozens of lighting fires burn, including the Tamarack Fire.

Sisolak said more resources and firefighters would have prevented the U.S. Forest Service from having to make difficult decisions about where to direct its resources.

“We need help on the federal side. We need more people coming in. We need more resources. We need more air support. We need more boots on the ground in order to make this a more fair fight in terms of fighting these fires,” Sisolak said.

Nevada firefighters with the East Fork Fire Protection District told Newsom that each year fires are spreading earlier in the season due to hotter temperatures and drier weather.

The U.S. Forest Service manages the majority of wildfire-prone land in California. Newsom said the agency is understaffed, underfunded and in need of major changes.

“We have a historic framework that has to be thrown out. You can’t look back a decade or two. The world is radically changing as the climate changes. You may not believe in science, you got it with your own damn eyes,” Newsom said, gesturing toward the blackened landscape.

Cooler weather and even some rain helped in the battle against some of the largest blazes this week but fire officials warned that hotter, drier weather was returning.

The 106-square-mile (275-square-kilometer) blaze was more than halfway surrounded by containment lines. At least 23 buildings have burned since lightning sparked the fire on July 4.

Evacuation orders for about 2,000 residents on both sides of the state line were lifted early in the week.

Tuesday saw thunderstorms that brought some rain and cooler and more humid weather that made grass and brushy areas less prone to burning, fire officials said. The chance of thunderstorms with some rain, possibly heavy at times, was expected to continue through Friday.

“This wet stuff fell out of the sky yesterday that I barely remembered and recognized,” Dan Dallas, an incident commander for the fire, said Tuesday evening at a briefing.

It fell gently overnight over the whole fire and coupled with firefighter efforts moderated the ferocity of the blaze.

“We’re not doing hand-to-hand combat” on the blaze, he said.

It was a welcome relief from the fiercely dry, hot weather that had scorched much of the West only a week or two earlier, when flames feeding on bone-dry fuel raged through a dozen states.

A historic drought and recent heat waves tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American West. Scientists say climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

California’s largest blaze, the Dixie Fire, was 23% contained but remained a threat to more than 10,000 homes in the region about 175 miles (282 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco.

The fire had scorched nearly 340 square miles (880 square kilometers), an area bigger than New York City. Weather conditions trapped smoke over the blaze and the shade helped lower temperatures and keep humidity up but authorities said temperatures could warm up to well above normal in the second half of the week.

Wednesday’s report on property losses showed 35 structures and 19 minor structures destroyed, and seven other structures damaged. It did not specify the types of structures.

In neighboring Oregon, rain also fell Tuesday morning over the 3-week-old Bootleg Fire, which has destroyed 161 homes, 247 outbuildings and 342 vehicles in Klamath and Lake counties.

Crews hoped to get a break from cooler temperatures and a chance of isolated thunderstorms through Wednesday before hotter, drier weather returned, officials said.

Crews had the lightning-caused fire more than halfway contained after it scorched nearly 646 square miles (1,673 square kilometers) of remote land.

On July 18, a day of especially extreme fire activity, the blaze spawned a fire tornado in the Fremont-Winema National Forest, scientists say. The phenomenon occurred when smoke rose nearly 6 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky and formed giant clouds, Bruno Rodriguez, a meteorologist assigned to the Bootleg Fire, told the Herald and News of Klamath Falls, Oregon.

Neil Lareau, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Nevada, told the newspaper that extensive tree damage, scoured road surfaces and damage to the soil indicated wind speeds between 111 mph (178 kph) and 135 mph (217 kph).

“Prior to last year, there had only been two well-documented tornado-strength vortices generated by fires,” said Lareau, who began studying the phenomenon after fire-generated tornadoes occurred last fall. “A decade ago, we could not have even imagined this. But here we are.”

Nearly 80 large, active wildfires that have blackened more than 2,300 square miles (6,000 square kilometers) continued to burn through 11 Western states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

On Tuesday, record-breaking heat hammered the northern Rockies and smoke from dozens of large wildfires as far away as California drove pollution to unhealthy levels.

Unhealthy air was recorded around most of Montana’s larger cities — Billings, Butte, Bozeman and Missoula — and in portions of northern Wyoming and eastern Idaho, according data from U.S. government air monitoring stations.

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Besides, do you know the chances that our customs people would allow that illegal alien balloon through our ports if it tried to sneak in? The Brits would say chances are nil. We might describe it as, uh, a fat chance. Americans: Where is your entrepreneurial spirit? Shouldn’t someone in the U.S. of A. make plans right now to mass produce our own Baby Trumps? Or at the very least, shouldn’t we follow the normal corporate model and manufacture them in China — just like some MAGA hats are. (At least they are right now; we don’t know if they’d be covered if Trump really did level more tariffs on China.)

This entire discussion is based on the announced intention for POTUS to take the traditional July Fourth concert and fireworks display in Washington, 40 years’ worth of tradition, and stir things up a bit. No one can stir things up like Donald Trump can, and that would seem to be the point. His main change would be making a speech from the Lincoln Memorial, featuring who else but The Donald? It might also feature his hordes of supporters chanting “Lock her up!,” “Build that wall!” and other patriotic favorites. Protesters could respond by chanting “In prison!” quoting their founding mother Nancy Pelosi.

All of these changes require planning, months of preparation. Oh wait, it’s the Trumpster we’re talking about here. He’s allergic to planning. So with little time left, the security people, the transportation people, the Porta-John people, and all the logistical people are being instructed to wing it. They can only hope that the multitudes will stay away in droves because it looks like the whole spectacle will fill lots of cluster trucks. Even if his address is delivered to a teeny tiny audience, Trump will claim it’s the biggest crowd ever for a presidential speech on July Fourth at the Lincoln Memorial, which is probably true since no other president has ever made one at the Lincoln Memorial. Abe himself did make a speech in 1863, but it was from a second-floor window of the White House.

And he made his remarks on July 7. But he talked about the importance of July Fourth. Someone decided that it counted. By now, you have probably learned more about presidential Independence Day speeches than you ever wanted to know. But clearly, this one will cause your juices to flow, as will Trump’s anger at the “fake news media” who reported that only a few dozen people showed up. Most of them were celebrating “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” by going to the beach to pursue happiness. Many of those who remained in D.C. would exercise their unalienable right to fly their Baby Trump balloon. 

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Actually, the term they use is “dangerous individuals,” and arguably what these expelled guys regularly spew out is dangerously crazy. Alex Jones was given the boot, along with removal of links to his Infowars site, which constantly puts out extremist conspiracy theories. So was Louis Farrakhan, but most of those on the do-not-vie list were either on the far right, or even further right, out there in Goofyland.

The problem with censorship is in who decides who’s dangerous. One guy’s “dangerous” is another one’s provocative, or perhaps someone who is just a worthwhile but annoying dissenter. Do you want Mark Zuckerberg, some other techie or businessman or, most ominously, a government official deciding who’s “dangerous”? Obviously, the bozos who were kicked off Facebook (and Instagram, too) have a screw loose.

Society would be a better place if their fantasies were not shared with anyone, much less everyone on the planet, but who draws the line?

Trump’s millions of supporters consider themselves victims of anything and everything. The president knows that, and he speaks their aggrieved language. It’s all a giant plot, he thunders, to discriminate against conservatives by shutting down the ideas they’d express
over Facebook, Twitter and all the other media that claim to be everyone’s megaphone.

Now he and his accomplices have come up with another opportunistic scam to exploit that paranoia. The White House has released a form. If anyone out there believes he or she has been discriminated against by the sinister guys who run social media, he or she can fill out the form. It’s not just another way to push the buttons of his frightened faithful; instead, Trump claims it’s available to everybody, no matter what the political outlook.

It asks for contact information: name, address, email address, along with citizenship and residency status. Additionally, it seeks links and screenshots of any material posted that was allegedly censored. Danger! Danger! Your email addresses alone are gold. Anyone who provides that information can expect to be barraged with fundraising appeals. No word on whether the Russian trolls will have to list where they’re from.

Much of the other information requested on this innocuous form has a potential to be scooped up and put in some database somewhere, just like the ones controlled by Facebook and all the others.

In the process of constructing this global mess, the social media brainiacs just may have created a problem that does not have a solution. In addition to the perils of censorship, we
have on the other side the insidious potential of misinformation, gross distortions and hatred put out there for the gullible to lap right up. Maybe the technology has seized control.

Notwithstanding that broken clock, time doesn’t stand still. Nor, as Trump suggests, can we return to the past. Thanks to technology, and our own unwillingness to responsibly filter what we read on the internet, the future may be splattered with even more ignorance and hate.

Bob Franken is an Emmy
Award-winning reporter who
covered Washington for more
than 20 years with CNN.

Visit HSJC for the cutting edge opinion pieces

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