State of the climate: Heat across Earth’s surface and oceans mark early 2019

https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-heat-across-earths-surface-and-oceans-mark-early-2019

by perfunctory • 7 years ago

61 18 7 years ago

Great. Well, if we aren't going to restrict CO2 and methane emissions any, can we at least agree to legalise all drugs for the going away party.

edit - I am only half joking. The war on drugs is not noted for its logical underpinnings, but if it has any, they are largely predicated on worrying about future consequences. If our official political stance is going to be 'yolo, fuck the future consequences', we may as well be consistent.

perfunctory2• 7 years ago

Ocean heat content (OHC) set a new record in early 2019
In many ways, OHC represents a much better measure of climate change than global average surface temperatures. It is where most of the extra heat ends up and is much less variable on a year-to-year basis than surface temperatures. Most years set a new record for OHC and 2019 has been no exception so far, with the first three months showing the warmest OHC since records began.
Changes in the amount or rate of warming are much easier to detect in the OHC record than on the surface. For example, OHC shows little evidence of the slowdown in warming in the mid-2000s, seen in surface temperature records.

southern_cross2• 7 years ago

Have you seen recent claims that scientists can detect temperature changes of as little as 1/1000th of a degree in the deep ocean, occurring over a period of several decades? Are you gullible enough to believe such claims? I'm not.

perfunctory2• 7 years ago

Have you seen recent claims

No, I haven't.

magnamerc• 7 years ago

Last weekend I overhead two older gentlemen talking about climate change. They were both agreeing with each other that it's all 'cyclical' and that clearly there are businesses that stand to benefit from climate change research. This is in Canada btw.

I don't know how you convince these people. Luckily, they're on their way out, but they still represent a large portion of the voting population for at least the next decade. Do we need more intense floods and forest fires every single year until they finally admit that maybe there's something to this climate thing?

agentultra• 7 years ago

Whether they believe it or not it's happening.

I think we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion or we're screwed. There's no room for error at this point.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

I think we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion

I don't like where that path leads. I mean, you're not wrong that it would be able to solve the problem faster but I don't think the end justifies the means.

ptah3• 7 years ago

it's also a form of macho virtue signalling

dexen• 7 years ago

Here's a snarky reply, because I've laughed out loud upon reading your "they're on their way out" and the "we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion" posted in one of responses.

how you convince these people.

Four easy steps:

- show them the hockey stick graphs from models,

- show them the graphs from actual measurements,

- point out 2019 is colder than 2016, and probably than 2017, as per the article,

- point out the graph looks pretty close to a cluster of sine waves when watched at any scale

Congratulations, now they are convinced for life. You can celebrate that with them by watching the 2006 An Inconvenient Truth for all the beautiful animations.

Snark aside, the gist is: people who have been following news for some two decades or more don't generally get alarmed that easily.

yongjik• 7 years ago

- point out the graph looks pretty close to a cluster of sine waves when watched at any scale

Is this some kind of backhanded admission that you will never admit global warming ever, whatever happens to the global temperature? Any graph can be arbitrarily closely approximated by a series of sine waves, that's the basic idea of Fourier Transformation.

Chardok• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the problem seems to be a Prisoner's dilemma for countries - curbing CO2 emissions without all other countries doing so puts said country at an economic disadvantage. It also puts a large onus on developing countries that don't have the established industry to easily convert to "greener" technologies/industries. Top that with most Western countries being in relatively low threatened areas comparatively and you get a large populace happy to remain ignorant.

I'm convinced the only possible savior at this point would be a Superpower aggressively enforcing environmental regulations to the point of going to war over it, but that seems unlikely.

chessturk• 7 years ago

I'm convinced the only possible savior at this point would be a Superpower aggressively enforcing environmental regulations to the point of going to war over it, but that seems unlikely.

It could feasibly handled economically. I've wondered if a stronger world govt a century or so down the line saying eco friendly or tariffs. I can't speak to liklihood, but it seems feasible.

southern_cross2• 7 years ago

Well, if they're old enough then they probably either experienced first-hand (or heard first-hand accounts from even older folks) the relative cold of the 1970s, which was preceded by the relative heat of the 1930s, which was of course itself preceded by a relatively cool period. So there is a definite down/up/down/up cyclical nature there.

And current flooding issues are generally nothing like what occurred before effective flood-control measures were put into place. And current forest fires are generally nothing like what occurred before effective fire-control methods were put into place. Being young, you've grown up in a fairly "controlled" world, so (much like anti-vax folks who don't understand what the world was like before vaccines came along), you have no life experience dealing with the world as it existed before those other controls were put into place.

State of the climate: Heat across Earth’s surface and oceans mark early 2019

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