Temperature changes around the world – 1901-2018

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48678196

by NeedMoreTea • 7 years ago

154 66 7 years ago

cagenut• 7 years ago

imho the ipcc made this the first chart in their latest report for good reasons: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1...

its time to move past slam-dunking on the creationists/anti-vaxers/flat-earthers/climate-deniers and focus on the much harder part: engineering for zero by 2040.

that is within the realm of your next mortgage. your utilities and larger institutions are already financing infrastructure that will be around then.

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people. It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?"

I think what we need to be using when we talk about climate change are things like projected coastline and population displacement maps.

One of the most powerful facts I've seen recently in Canada was an insurer talking about how some houses simply aren't insurable anymore because they will be flooded again every few years. I want to show people a map of "communities that will be uninsurable by 2050"

hi5eyes• 7 years ago

the toronto islands properties an example of the very flooding right now

shitgoose• 7 years ago

houseboat is the solution. i always wanted to get one.

ianai3• 7 years ago

The book “uninhabitable earth” is good for this. As is his talk on the Chris Hayes podcast. Some key points:

2C means genocide. Entire island nations under water and lost. Every minor increase means exponentially higher costs - many more dead, large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. 4C is something like Hong Kong/Shanghai, and many other parts of th world uninhabitable. Going outside would be fatal within minutes.

Here’s a map someone put together for 4C: https://mymodernmet.com/parag-khanna-global-warming-map/

At 8C of warming, clouds may be unable to form.

ianai3• 7 years ago

The majority of emissions have been released in the last 30 years. All human emissions prior to that point are less than the human emissions from that point. People were talking about climate change back then. People decided to burn more oil.

The map I included there seems pretty optimistic compared to some others I’ve seen. In a recent paper, “Boaty McBoatface” saw faster wind currents increase ocean churn and aided sea warming faster than expected. I’ve taken this to suggest the current ocean raises predicted are under estimates.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

The thing with that map is it's absurdly optimistic, as it implies a world entirely happy to have entire populations of other countries and continents to move into yours.

The amount of migration, displacement, rebuilding and major wars that would actually get us to that point is unimaginable.

Uninhabitable Earth is terrifying, and convincing. I thought I had a pessimistic outlook on climate until I read that.

Anthony-G• 7 years ago

Scarily, much of the regions marked in that map as suitable for food-growing is mountainous or tundra. I wouldn’t be optimistic about its fertility and suitability for agriculture – even with optimal climatic conditions.

SECProto• 7 years ago

I want to show people a map of "communities that will be uninsurable by 2050"

Relatedly, there was a recent story in CBC [1] pointing out that flood maps are due to get updated next year, and the impact it will have on housing prices.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/flood-plains-1.5135336

southern_cross4• 7 years ago

Recent research suggests that flood maps (at least in the US) now and always have understated flood-prone areas by a factor of something like 3x. So those 100-year and 500-year and such flood pronouncements may be equally off, too.

donjoe• 7 years ago

Similar to this map?

https://ss2.climatecentral.org

gmuslera2• 7 years ago

People must understand that increasing 1.5ºC of yearly average of global temperature is not the same as the increase of 1.5ºC in any particular day in their local city.

It is not only not evenly distributed around the world (this chart, and the monthly ones on https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v4.html gives a different picture), that is the average could well mean 10+ ºC in their particular area in several given days (this week there was like 40ºC in Poland, and there was over 50ºC in India and Vietnam the previous one) while decrease in others, that is not just how they feel temperature, but also what is affected by it in larger areas (more energy to fuel extreme weather events, including the ones that brings extreme cold), and that the regions with the bigger increase in temperature have also several of the possitive feedback loop factors for increasing the global temperature even more.

You don't need 100ºC to get a lethal temperature, with half of that (it is becoming increasingly common), depending on hidration and humidity, a lot of people will die. And you die in a particular place/day, not in a global yearly average, after you are dead doesn't matter if the next week the temperature is bearable. And the food sources that feed billions of people must survive too. And the complex ecosystem that enables that you, and your food sources survive as it is now, even if you are not aware of how something that just got extinct was essential, should survive too.

taneq2• 7 years ago

It kind of reminds me of when stereo manufacturers stopped using RMS power to rate speakers and instead started using peak power. Suddenly your 50W speakers were 2000W and wow that number was really big.

Climate scientists have been using RMS temperatures but it's peak temperatures that people notice.

DenisM• 7 years ago

I found this to really illustrative of what 1.5 might mean. https://xkcd.com/1732/

And it's not speculative - it's historical. It shows that decline of 4.5 means basically complete icing of the north North America and puts 1.5 in perspective.

DanielleMolloy• 7 years ago

Is there a good similar chart for daily or monthly maximum temperatures that one could share instead? As you say, people don't understand the problem about 1.5 degrees increase in average indeed.

If temperature regularly exceeds 40°C it will look more threatening to people.

wdr1• 7 years ago

Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people. It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?"

That plus a few other things, including how much variance is to be expected?

MrMember• 7 years ago

The variance is tricky because of the enormous time range and the huge number of variables. It's also impossible to account for any black swans, positive or negative, that might happen in the next 80 years. We have no idea if some miraculous carbon removing technology will be discovered that saves us all. Or if we're missing some key component to the puzzle and actually we'll be extinct by 2050.

pepijndevos• 7 years ago

Are you telling me that every country in the 1900 recorded their yearly temperature?

I'm not saying it's fake, but I'd like to know where the data comes from, and how reliable it is.

Y-bar• 7 years ago

From the article:

most stripes are built on global data collated by Berkeley Earth

epistasis2• 7 years ago

That's the project that was started by a physicist that didn't trust the numbers previously in the field, and basically called climate scientists amateurs, and set out to show them how they're all doing it wrong.

What happened in the end was he just recapitulated exactly what climate scientists had been saying all along, so he had to trumpet "oh but it's never been done this precisely," just glancing over all the damage he had done to the credibility of the field with his completely unfounded doubt.

Replication is great, and I'm glad Berkeley Earth is still at it.

But we need to start holding people accountable for their predictions on this matter. If somebody is filled with unfounded doubt, why the hell should we listen to them until they've actually done the work to provide data?

If you haven't even bothered to check sources but want to parade around how you think the data is untrustworthy, data which you haven't even sourced much less evaluated, why should we listen to such data-free and evidence free speculation that has proven to be wrong every time is has been evaluated?

If somebody is skeptical of climate scientists at this point in history, it says a lot about their inability to evaluate technical matters and their ability to form unfounded opinion when there is no need for unfounded opinions. That reflects extremely negatively on the technical capabilities of a person.

wolfram74• 7 years ago

Even without read-the-thermometer records, tree corings and lake bed sediment samples and a number of other go-out-and-look methods can get pretty useful atmospheric data from the past. I don't know what the resolution would be, but it might fill in some gaps.

danielbigham• 7 years ago

One challenge with using things like trees to estimate long-ago temperatures is that you have to build a complex mathematical model to map to temperature, and I'm aware of at least one famous study that got the math wrong, to the point of being potentially suspicious. (But I haven't studied this stuff enough to know whether or not other proper studies exist)

southern_cross4• 7 years ago

It has been pointed out that tree rings respond mostly to changes in precipitation rather than temperature. If you can properly compensate for that, and for various other potentially confounding factors, then maybe you can derive some proxy temperature data from them. Other proxies have their own problems too, of course.

southern_cross4• 7 years ago

See my comment(s) elsewhere in this thread.

gmuslera2• 7 years ago

1 dot per country, regardless of its size or shape, may not be very fair.

Maybe data availability will rig the chart, but perhaps something similar, not grouping countries and continents but similar sized areas by latitude could show a more definite trend.

It ss not the same kind of chart, but https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/glo... seems to show that.

boybd• 7 years ago

Seems particularly manipulative to only show the last 100 years. How about the last 1000 or 2000 years instead?

frumiousirc• 7 years ago

rXKCD https://xkcd.com/1732/

epistasis2• 7 years ago

But if they just show 2000 years, why would they cut off there? Seems manipulative too, we should definitely go back to at least 10,000 years.

mikeash• 7 years ago

To avoid cherry-picking, it should go back to the formation of the Earth.

harsh3195• 7 years ago

Temperature estimates over the past 2000 years using multiple proxy methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past...

admiralspoo• 7 years ago

Very manipulative, and definitely misleading to show only land surface temperatures, and only for the last 100 years.

cheschire• 7 years ago

I find it interesting how the warm years in the rest of the world seem to correspond to cold years in europe. The strange deep cold of early WW2 in Europe is also interesting.

imeron• 7 years ago

Very interesting indeed. WW2 cold: It would be interesting to know if this was a result of the increased dust in the air because of the war or just pure randomness.

AlbertoGP• 7 years ago

The article mentions it at the end:

This is quite a well-studied period that was probably linked to a large El Niño event - the climate cycle associated with shifting pressure patterns and a weakening of the trade winds in the Pacific.

The world warmed, apart from Europe which had a deep cold spell. And it probably had an impact on the outcome of WWII. The harsh winters at the time frustrated Hitler's armies as they invaded the Soviet Union.

your-nanny• 7 years ago

I've used a similar compartment plot as a way of evaluating fMRI quality, and how different preprocessing routines affect it. Compartments determined by structural masks, eg white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid, etc.

martincollignon3• 7 years ago

Reading these headlines is pretty depressing. If you want to do something about it, a paper called Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning[0] just came out, and under Tools for Individuals a startup called Tomorrow[1] is mentioned. They're actively looking for help to get more integrations to their app to calculate people's personal CO2 emissions.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433

[1] https://www.tmrow.com/

aaronbrethorst2• 7 years ago

edit: If you want to do something about it, vote for elected officials with credible plans to address our climate crisis.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

vote for elected officials who are promising to address our climate crisis.

Vote for ones with credible plans, instead.

martincollignon3• 7 years ago

Completely agreed - this is priority #1. But individuals could probably benefit from being aware of their emissions

jellicle• 7 years ago

personal CO2 emissions

I think trying to frame this as an issue of personal responsibility, as "turn the lights off when you leave the room to save the world", is not only wrong but actively harmful to doing what is needed: massive, concerted, governmental, action.

martincollignon3• 7 years ago

Both will be needed - most people in industrialized countries would be shocked by what their driving and flying and eating really is, especially if tied to a $ amount

_Microft4• 7 years ago

I found a surprising way to reduce my carbon footprint: I downloaded the music and am playing it locally now instead of streaming it over and over again.

I was listening to music on Youtube pretty much all the time and that amounted to about 35GB of traffic per month in average.

That's 420GB per year and with 7kWh/GB and emissions of approximately 500g/kWh that's a surprising total of roughly 1.5t of CO_2 emissions per year. And a downside is almost non-existant.

Edit: my playlist consists of a small number of songs, so I actually get savings. That would not work when listening to a list that does not actually repeat of course.

tjoff3• 7 years ago

Where on earth did you dig up the 7kWh/GB figure from?

_Microft4• 7 years ago

It was mentioned in [0], it's actually the higher one of two different sources (I haven't looked at the sources to be honest because that would require actually finding them which I haven't yet):

A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. An assessment at a conference of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reached a lower number: 3.1 kWh per gigabyte.

[0] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud (2017)

nroets• 7 years ago

I'm surprised to hear it takes 7 kWh to transmit 1 GB. My phone consumes only 0.3 kWh a month and I use 1 GB. So the power requirements are very asymmetric.

CondensedBrain• 7 years ago

That probably factors in the infrastructure it takes to deliver the data.

yongjik2• 7 years ago

There is no way 7kWh/GB is an accurate figure. For example, AWS Oregon region charges you $0.05/GB after the first 150 TB.[1] This page[2] says the current electricity rate of Oregon is 9.8¢/kWh. Assuming AWS is getting electricity at half the price (and making no profit), it can burn 1.02 kWh/GB.

The actual number is most likely lower: AWS has to make some profit, and it's not known for being cheap.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/

hn234• 7 years ago

It really does not matter how much they pay because the market price does not include the actual costs a company imposes on the environment. There is no CO2 Tax, is there?

Ask yourself: How can it be more efficient to stream the same stuff over and over again, wasting CPU cycles on couple of fat machines etc. instead of playing it from a local cache (hard drive, ...). IMHO it cannot be more efficient. It is convenient and it appears to be cheap.

_Microft4• 7 years ago

The article talks about the cost of transferring a file from the cloud vs loading it from a local harddrive.

It's not only the amount of energy used for that at the datacenter, it's also summing up all the fractions of power usage per GB of the used fiber connection, the repeaters on this fiber connection, routers, switches, losses in power supplies, energy required for air conditioning the hardware, the phone/cable/mobile infrastructure that also has switches, repeaters, ... until ones own modem, router and computer at the own location that is needing energy to operate.

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

If you want to help, pressure your political representatives:

https://www.sunrisemovement.org/

https://rebellion.earth/

There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international level.

seaghost• 7 years ago

Nature will take care of it by killing us until we start to do things differently.

Temperature changes around the world – 1901-2018

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