The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/28/the-northern-hemisphere-winter-of-2019-20-was-the-warmest-ever-on-land

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

317 172 6 years ago

economist.com

tartoran• 6 years ago

What winter? We had a sproll, a combination of spring and fall and folks, at this pace our kids will not believe us we used to have feet of snow by Christmas.

tootie• 6 years ago

I bought my kids sleds three years ago after a big snow storm. There hasn't been enough snow to use them again since. When I was a kid (same part of the country) we'd get weeks of sledding every winter.

empath753• 6 years ago

We had an au pair from Colombia this year and she was really excited to see snow and build a snow man and we just had a couple of dustings.

lsllc2• 6 years ago

It seems like winter tries to happen between Thanksgiving and Dec 15, then it's on to "spring".

I replaced my snowblower at the end of the 2015 record snow season and I think I've used it twice in 5 winters since then. In previous winters I'd typically need to use it probably 5 times or more.

sebazzz• 6 years ago

This doesn't surprise me at all. In the Netherlands, we barely had any nights where the temperature was sub-zero (Celcius). We actually had several mosquitoes in our living room when we left the door open. It is just like the sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where fall directly skipped winter and directly went to spring.

Given we had very much trouble with the oak processionary[1] last year, causing itching and even being dangerous to one's eyes, I fear what will happen this year. Will it be dangerous to let our children play outside?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_processionary

yamrzou• 6 years ago

Mirror: http://archive.is/dO21H

Fiveplus• 6 years ago

Appreciate the link. I didn't expect HN to allow articles behind paywall like reddit.

Donald• 6 years ago

It’s becoming apparent that the 21st century will be marked by a series of natural disasters of various severities and speeds that regularly erode global supply capacity and quality of life.

Udik3• 6 years ago

Becoming apparent from what?

bamboozled3• 6 years ago

A recent increase of natural disasters backed by scientifically proven predictions of more to come with increasing severity adn frequency?

chewz• 6 years ago

How is warm winter natural disaster? I like it like that.

mrpopo• 6 years ago

Many insect and parasites populations shrink during winter. With a warm winter, the ecosystem is now unbalanced, some forests will die out, some animal species will be ridden with ticks, etc. In the longer term, unbalanced ecosystems cause disasters like the ongoing locusts invasion in Africa.

thawaway18372• 6 years ago

Because if it is indicative of a warming planet (which this particular event may or may not be, although the warming of the planet is beyond doubt at this point), then life for human being is gonna get much worse because we have spent centuries setting up civilization based on environmental conditions which are not true anymore.

As a result you will see mass migrations as earlier fertile regions become arid, and people compete for scarce resources, exposure to diseases that populations in a region do not have immunity for, and because the changes are due to warming (I.e. an increase in energy in the ecosystem) the greater energy means extreme weather events will become even more extreme, and milder ones will become extreme.

falcolas• 6 years ago

Fires. Warm winters mean little snowpack. Little snowpack means that everything is dry and dead come August. All of the plant life being dry and dead in August means that any fires which occur will be much worse.

state_less2• 6 years ago

I hope the Covid self quarantining demonstrates that WFH works. We can do more WFH and cut down on traffic, time lost in traffic and our carbon footprint. We also might spread less of the flu around too.

andy_ppp• 6 years ago

Yes, there should also be offices available nearby. I like having coworkers too much to WFH full time!

state_less2• 6 years ago

I'm happy to see people being proactive on the social front. Over time doing WFH, I've found that putting a little effort into getting into social situations goes a long way. My wife used to live in a coop and we now live in a marina where we play cards and have drinks with folks and that helps combat loneliness. We're in this together, we can improve it over time.

WanderPanda• 6 years ago

And probably get more lonely, too.

baron_harkonnen• 6 years ago

...or build a community of people around you not centered around work?

I worked remote for a very long time, at first it was lonely then I realized I needed to reach out to people locally who were interesting to chat with. I was able to grow friendships over lunches and coffees that ordinary office life would not have allowed.

Covid19 makes that impossible right now, but WFH doesn't mean lonely. It's just that your default is to get all your socialization from coworkers. Socializing with people in your community based on common interests is much more rewarding than by common employer

aerhjae5rjnert• 6 years ago

Loneliest place I ever worked was in-office at the borg

vikramkr11• 6 years ago

All I'm hearing from friends is that WFH is way worse than it was hyped up to be and that it's so much worse not being able to work with your coworkers in person and to have separation of your home and work for mental health. Everyone is different and WFH is not a panacea.

theli0nheart• 6 years ago

I'm surprised it needs to be said, but WFH during a pandemic is not equivalent to WFH during normal life.

atomi• 6 years ago

You adjust and you adapt. We've been doing that for all of human history.

swiley• 6 years ago

As a junior software engineer at a new job: I think the only reason I’ve been productive at all during this is because I have some experience working remotely. A lot of people aren’t taking it seriously and don’t realize how important discipline and separating everything is. I’m glad I’m at a company that had good plans in place for something like this but I feel like these two things put me in a tiny minority.

The good news is: everyone has learned a lot and if they want to do it again it might be easier.

leetcrew4• 6 years ago

if nothing else, it gives you as an individual the chance to prove you can be just as productive from home.

chapium• 6 years ago

That was my experience, I posted a while back about it. Things don't work so great when a remote person is attached to a mostly local team. If a majority of the team is remote and a skeleton crew is local it tends to work better. At least those are the two scenarios I've been in first hand.

Arnt• 6 years ago

True.

I have a feeling, though, that after this, many people will be less willing to travel for meetings. Video conferences may be poor compared to walking to a conference room in the same building, but they may also compare favourably to travelling by airplane to a similar conference room in a similar faceless building in a different city. And many, many people are getting VC practice now.

gedy• 6 years ago

My observation is there's two major groups: people with kids who are now trying to work and watch children at same time. Childless young people for whom work is a big part of their social interactions. The "work" part of face to face interactions is a minority of most everyone's days, even in the best of cases.

misc7183• 6 years ago

It doesn't have to be all or nothing though. A lot of companies that weren't willing to even consider the option are embracing or at least begrudgingly allowing WFH during the pandemic, even if that leads to only a 5 or 10% increase in WFH over the long term it's a net gain.

bamboozled3• 6 years ago

There is a large difference been "trying to export your regular office culture to fit the working from home experience" and working for a properly distributed team / company with a culture setup for doing so.

You need to give this stuff time and probably re-establish a lot of your companies culture to fit remote work, or yeah, you will probably have a pretty crap experience.

Edit: Add link to a good and very recent podcast on this topic by Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg: https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/

endorphone• 6 years ago

As happens in every single WFH discussion, it turns from someone saying "look, more people can WFH" to the strawman that this means that everyone must work from home and that WFH is being presented as an incredible panacea with all upsides.

Not everyone should work from home. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people need the in face connections. Working from home has lots of downsides that have been covered on here and everywhere many, many hundreds/thousands of times.

But a lot of people don't need to go into an office, at least not every working hour of every day. A lot of positions don't. A lot of people thrive fully working from home, some working part time from home and other times in the office, or a cafe, or whatever.

But how these discussions always go is the no-work-from-home crowd effectively saying that no one should work from home because they personally don't enjoy it.

freehunter• 6 years ago

As a conflicting anecdote, I’m a consultant working for a large vendor and all of my clients are now suddenly WFH and the only people who don’t like it are the managers. All the engineers I’ve talked to have said they’re way more productive without side conversations and walk-ups constantly.

I can say my work schedule has gotten a lot busier without even taking on new projects or clients, my clients just seem to have a lot more time to work than they did before.

icedchai2• 6 years ago

I find WFH "depressing" because I like to get out of the house. The separation is more important for some than others.

Brajeshwar• 6 years ago

Right now, people went WFH without preparation and the first thing people (with no experience working remotely) is to replicate their office style. Almost everyone I talked to, talked about meeting/video calls throughout the day.

So, my question to them, "So, when do you work?"

Video Calls / Meetings should be the last resort. Working remotely (WFH) is not bringing the office work at home, it is an entirely different experience and should be approached thus.

Besides the many other advice floating around, some cores ones that works are;

- Communicate, communicate, over-communicate, mostly via email or other long-form writing).

- If you do the above (writing), it helps in the key element of working remotely - asynchronous. The day you can work asynchronous with your team, is the day you won in working remotely. If you write, then you can also share it anytime, to anyone.

empath753• 6 years ago

How much of that is just generally disliking change, though?

People’s homes aren’t organized around work now, but prior to the industrial era, they were, and people complained about working in factories and offices.

werber• 6 years ago

I live alone in one the harder hit parts of the US and normally enjoy “WFH”, but for me that usually means coffee shops, parks, beaches. Its the being stuck in an apartment, not interacting with anyone except on video calls. This whole situation has made me really reconsider my priorities, and made me wish I’d settled down younger.

gdubs• 6 years ago

For the experiment to be fair we should spend three months unable to leave our offices, and have everyone bring their kids, and be responsible for janitorial, barista, and cafe services.

kpennell2• 6 years ago

Agreed. I think this will make many people realize how much they DON'T like wfh

loco5niner2• 6 years ago

WFH is a panacea for all my open office woes.

Nux• 6 years ago

This is a bad exercise in wfh. Rushed, poorly planned, if at all, with kids around and no way to get some peace and quiet required for proper focused work...

If anything I'm afraid this taught companies wfh sucks and should be avoided.

vikramkr11• 6 years ago

I think the message a lot of people in my societal circle (I can't generalize obviously) are getting is that WFH is terrible and a sacrifice you have to make for the pandemic. It'd be like if after ww2 you introduced rationing as a smart way to manage your budget - people would go hell no. That was a sacrifice I made for the war and it sucked, not something I'd do voluntarily.

take_a_breath• 6 years ago

Won’t controlling for all those variables in distributed locations (wfh) always be harder than a centralized location (office)?

lm28469• 6 years ago

that WFH works

It only works when you can do your job from home (aka not most jobs). It also only works if you don't have kids, a partner or have a big enough home to isolate, which isn't the case for most people. The current situation will make people hate wfh.

vikramkr11• 6 years ago

And it removes the healthy separation of home and work. It doesn't matter whether or not this is doing WFH "right" or if this WFH is similar to WFH in a non-pandemic situation - this is now what people think of when they think of WFH. A wartime sacrifice they made to fight coronavirus. Not something you'd voluntarily do.

GordonS2• 6 years ago

It only works when you can do your job from home (aka not most jobs)

I don't think that really needs to be said.

It also only works if you don't have kids, a partner or have a big enough home

I've been mostly working from home for several years now (maybe ~10), and I'm just as productive at home as in the office - definitely moreso during periods when there have been particularly loud and obnoxious employees working in the office.

I totally agree that you need to be able to isolate yourself from others in the home - you need a home office, where you can close the door and be in "work mode".

As long as you have a home office, it's actually a bonus if you have young kids and/or a spouse in the house, as you get to have lunch with them every day.

Not having to commute is a huge bonus, especially if you live far from the office. You save money, time, and even carbon emissions. You get extra time in bed, if you want it.

Even your employer potentially benefits, by not having to pay for office space (or at least reduced office space if they have hot desks).

But not everyone has space for even a small home office, and even then not everyone has the self-discipline to be in "work mode" while at home. And of course, some people are just really sociable, and enjoy that aspect of an office environment.

So it's definitely not for everyone, but it would be wonderful if more people were given the choice.

vegetablepotpie2• 6 years ago

Although work from home reduces traveling to the office, transportation only accounts for about 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. A bigger contributor of global green house gas emissions is power generation, which we’re still doing plenty of.

Every bit helps, but if we want to have serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions we’ll have to make significant infrastructure changes. Behavioral and policy changes alone will not sufficiently address climate change. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse_Gas_by_...

_ph_2• 6 years ago

Even if it doesn't cut down emissions so much (and electric cars are very good at that too), it does make a lot of difference for the daily traffic jams. If we could reduce those, it would be of great benefit.

epistasis• 6 years ago

What region is that graph describing? In the US, transportation is 29% of emissions:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

In California, it is something like 40% of emissions.

These percentages are going to increase quickly, as renewable generation is now cheaper than other types of electricity generation in most markets, and prices are plummeting like a rock.

The same can't be said for electric car prices, nor EV adoption rates.

I think land use changes that permit transit are by far the most important infrastructure changes to reduce emissions. However even in California efforts to change this over the past three years (SB827, SB50) have met a brick wall of resistance, despite widespread acceptance climate action and desire for better transit.

Transportation GHG emission rates are going to be far far harder to change than power generation emissions.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 6 years ago

...for some types of work, for some types of personalities, and under some circumstances.

Right now all we have is a bunch of people thrown into an unfamiliar situation and being told to make the best of it.

abyssin• 6 years ago

I hope it reminds people it's possible to live a life without traveling hundreds of kilometers every week, and that what matters it spending time with your loved ones, having food, shelter, and access to healthcare. We can change our lifestyles towards something less harmful to our environment, and still live happy lives. Nobody is entitled to a lifestyle that destroys the environment.

willis9363• 6 years ago

I can't read this because of the paywall. The headline is wrong, which doesn't give me a feeling that it is worth reading anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record

simion314• 6 years ago

Disable JS. I personally have a deciated browser for reading stuff with JS off by default and enable it for each site I consider it deserves JS (like if is using it for interactivity,maps or is a true app and not an article)

gbear605• 6 years ago

Okay, add the phrase “in recent time” which is the relevant assumption

willis9363• 6 years ago

I’m not the one making an article with a lie as a headline. Why is everyone okay with prefacing data with deception?

perfunctory6• 6 years ago

The headline is wrong

In case you've been living under a rock, in the current cultural context "warmest ever" means "warmest since records began".

EverydayBalloon6• 6 years ago

What year did records begin?

What did the data set look like then (spatial diversity, measurement variance, etc...)

How do you compare that data set to one collected this year?

matchbok• 6 years ago

The headline's meaning is obvious - it's clear what you are doing.

willis9363• 6 years ago

So then you know that I am calling out the headline of scientific article for being a lie. Do you think headlines of scientific articles should be lies?

shellbubble• 6 years ago

Apart from anything else this could turn out to be extremely problematic in areas where the average temperature is around 0 degrees C. Lots of melting of snow (and then refreezing as ice)....

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

ericb2• 6 years ago

If we don't figure out a way to get past the anti-science types it will be the death of us all one or the other. We need to develop anti-memetic technology. Bad memes are killing us.

bfieidhbrjr2• 6 years ago

Speaking as someone who did physics in college:

Science, whatever that means, has become sclerotic and harmful to the public. It's held up as a paradigm of reason and hope but if anything it's full of politics and lies and has been for a long while. Let's talk evidence:

* It's looking like the last 40 years of string theory has been a boondoggle.

* Pretty clear that most of medicine is based on fraud and regulatory capture - we know that most chronic treatments and even public health advice is just plain wrong. If this is new to you, any book by Gary Taubes is a reasonable introduction.

* Even within climate science, the models aren't as clear cut as we tell the public. If however we do believe the models (which is reasonable to do!) then things are going to be so dire that we can't tell the public or they'll freak out. Buying an electric car or not flying isn't going to do anything - we need to be massively carbon negative to have any impact at all. You should assume the absolute worst climate predictions are a reasonable picture of the future.

* The reproducability crisis. We know most science journals are now full of BS.

My proposed solution is that we have the death penalty for anyone who conducts experiments that aren't triple-blind. It's the only way to get any real evidence.

So, you know, science is wonderful. But science-as-done-by-humans is a morass of sewage and it's not entirely surprising the public don't believe in it any more, there are plenty of "hard" scientists that don't either.

caiobegotti• 6 years ago

You finally lost me at "death penalty", sorry.

emj• 6 years ago

I do not think mixing up the practice of science with how ideas and policys are being spread is productive. We are beings who care a lot about what other people do and about our own turf, that will have a greater effect on science even if we get perfect reproducible results.

Over all I think we make progress, even if it's needs to be backwards at times.

ericb2• 6 years ago

In places, you're conflating the very bad meme problem, to which science itself is susceptible, with science itself.

For example, the whole "fat is bad, carbs are good" meme was never backed up by solid science, it itself was a bad meme.

Pretty clear that most of medicine is based on fraud and regulatory capture

I can't speak for you, but if I have a heart attack or cancer, I'll still go to the hospital, so it isn't as bad as you're stating.

Even within climate science, the models aren't as clear cut as we tell the public.

Ok, death penalty for non-triple blind is crazy. But if we're thinking of tough ideas:

* Imprisonment for corporate lobbying.

* Corporate dissolution for political donations or influence

* Corporate dissolution for attempts to "influence science"

* Corporate dissolution for PR campaigns that lied

* No corporate-funded "scientific" studies should be published

* The reproducibility crisis is a bad incentives problem in science and publishing. We need to change the incentives. The system needs to change to reward something like "points" where points come from publishing failure to reproduce as opposed to just the notoriety of "first to find some interesting result"

kpennell2• 6 years ago

I wish I could get back the 3-4 min wasted on reading this

scythe3• 6 years ago

Even within climate science, the models aren't as clear cut as we tell the public. If however we do believe the models (which is reasonable to do!) then things are going to be so dire that we can't tell the public or they'll freak out. Buying an electric car or not flying isn't going to do anything - we need to be massively carbon negative to have any impact at all. You should assume the absolute worst climate predictions are a reasonable picture of the future.

Climate models are broadly quadratic: CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere determines the rate of heat accumulation in the Earth's atmosphere, so we integrate CO2 emissions twice to get warming estimates. This is massively oversimplified, but suggestive.

But progress is exponential. The long-term benefit of buying an electric car isn't that you emit less carbon dioxide. It's that market trends move towards emitting less carbon dioxide. More investment goes to battery development, less to oil extraction. (Some futurists argue that exponential progress can't last forever, but we only need a few decades.) For example, one of the major challenges in battery development is the reliance on cobalt. But currently, cobalt is too cheap to motivate serious development of alternatives like V2(PO4)3 or sulfur cathodes. Iron phosphate, a cheaper choice for grid batteries (where energy density is less critical), is likewise undercapitalized due to low demand from grid operators. Even with widespread nuclear power, grid storage is necessary to manage varying loads.

This is why I'm dubious of the ascetic approaches like just avoiding meat or airplanes. We need new technology -- the kind that allows us to live well without carbon emissions. Heat pumps are a major (IMHO the biggest) open problem -- commercially available air-source models run only at intake temperatures above -20 C, and ground-source heat pumps might not work well when they're used at a high areal density. (Electric joule-heaters meanwhile consume so much electricity that we'd need to double electricity production in northern areas!) It's much easier to give up beef/dairy or airplanes than heating, but heating residences alone (in the US) generates more carbon emissions than both put together (home heating: ~440 Mt; airplanes: ~150 Mt; cattle: 190 M; industrial heating: ~500 Mt).

I am a physicist, not an economist. I am not qualified to say what climate policy should be w.r.t. economic impacts. But if messaging were my job, I'd spend a lot more time discussing new technology R&D spending than villainizing the fuel industry. China's status as a leader in green tech is conspicuous, while we are busy watching teenagers yell at legislators.

https://www.csis.org/east-green-chinas-global-leadership-ren...

argumentum• 6 years ago

Interesting, if one of humanity's failures (climate change) mitigates another (lack of pandemic preparedness)

perfunctory6• 6 years ago

In case somebody is wondering about the significance of a temperature record

https://books.google.com/books?id=N0FLSOmeFPsC&pg=PT59

Bottom line: records are extremely rare if events occur at random. If new records become far more common than the harmonic series predicts, then this is telling us that annual climatic events are no longer independent annual events but are beginning to form part of a systematic non-random trend.

EverydayBalloon6• 6 years ago

So after a few data points, we're already declaring that a huge stochastic system has now suddenly turned deterministic? smh

tomc1985• 6 years ago

IIRC the last several winters have been "the hottest on record" .... your stochastic system is hitting once-in-a-million-years level odds

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 6 years ago

We have more than "a few" datapoints at this time. Also, I don't think determinism is relevant to climate change. I.e. whether reality is deterministic is not what's at issue, it's whether the earth is heating up and whether human activity is a primary causal factor (yes, in both cases). There's also no conflict between determinism and systems too large to model precisely -- stochastic systems, in other words.

zeeboo• 6 years ago

So after I rolled this 20 sided die 8 times and it got a 20 every time that means it's loaded? smh

Amygaz• 6 years ago

You are OverBallooning what he just said (sorry couldn't resist). There is no implication that the system is absolutely deterministic or will ever be.

Imagine a normal symmetric binomial distribution, along a X-axis of events and severity. Now imagine that the binomial distribution isn't normal and symmetric anymore, it is skewed toward the X-axis of more severe events (i.e. a negative skew). In this model, we still have the same number of events, but their distribution along the severity axis is skewed towards more severe events, and as such they have a higher probability of happening.

TheCoelacanth• 6 years ago

They aren't saying that it is becoming deterministic. They are saying that the probability distribution is changing.

ungerik• 6 years ago

Ever, like ever ever? Or ever since we measured?

Mountain_Skies• 6 years ago

Probably a combination of observation records, which aren't that old, and computed valued from analysis of sources such as ice cores. Obviously this is not the highest temperature winter in the northern hemisphere over the existence of the planet but may indeed be the warmest out of those periods from which we have records, observed or imputed.

leeoniya2• 6 years ago

it was and will be higher before and after there is a "we"

teslabox2• 6 years ago

Most of the cold air was locked up over the Artic this past winter, whereas normally it is carried south by the jet streams. Some areas of the planet did have record cold in February. An article about February's snow in Baghdad, Iraq (the second snowfall in the last 100 years) says the warm winter in Virginia had to do with the "north atlantic oscillation" [NAO]:

So why is it that we seem to be in a snow hole?
Part of it has to do with something called the North Atlantic Oscillation. This combines the effect of two features in the atmosphere; the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. - https://www.wsls.com/weather/2020/02/12/baghdad-sees-rare-sn...

Having just used the "disable javascript to read the article" trick, I noticed this Economist article correctly points out the NAO's influence in keeping cold air locked up in the Arctic, but doesn't mention the snow in Baghdad nor the blizzards in Turkey [0] nor the record colds elsewhere (certain places in Canada, eastern Russia, etc)

Wikipedia has this page on the North Atlantic Oscillation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation

[0] https://www.ntvhouston.com/2020/02/blizzard-buries-turkish-v...

I read reports of potato farmers in Idaho having to deal with an early frost last fall, and racing to harvest the potatoes before they were ruined by an early cold snap. I don't know how much of their crops were lost. I've also noticed reports of a sugar shortage.

Humans need to work on being climate-flexible, not being "all in" on global warming.

"A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy in which a statement falsely claims an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional logically valid option." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

The false dilemma presented in this article is that of "global warming" vs. "the old climate status quo". The third logically valid option is that climate is now cooling due to the solar cycle. I read a great article about one of the solar telescopes having measured slight changes in the sun's output over the last 20+ years... The data is out there, scientists just have to consider the full spectrum of climate possibilities.

[Edit] I thought the article was about the SOHO satellite, but maybe it was about instruments on the International Space Station. These pages mention European solar observatories on the space station:

The Sun does not always shine with unchanging power: its output varies minutely over the period of about 11 years known as the ‘solar cycle’. In principle, these fluctuations can affect us on Earth.

- http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...

This is where the Solspec instrument comes in. Part of the Solar package on the International Space Station, it was launched with the European Columbus space laboratory in 2008 and tracked the Sun until it was shut down this year [2017]. It measured the energy of each wavelength in absolute terms and its variability – a feat that requires a higher order of precision than relative measurements. As an analogy, it is easy to feel a change in temperature, but nobody on Earth can sense the exact temperature without a thermometer.

- http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...

scythe3• 6 years ago

Most of the cold air was locked up over the Artic this past winter, whereas normally it is carried south by the jet streams. Some areas of the planet did have record cold in February. An article about February's snow in Baghdad, Iraq (the second snowfall in the last 100 years)

The "second" snowfall would mean it wasn't a record. The data showing this winter was the warmest on record as a global average (not just Virginia) takes these outliers into account. Nothing about those events calls the general warming trend into question.

Humans need to work on being climate-flexible, not being "all in" on global warming.

No, humans need to accept reality. Carbon dioxide emitted by human activity is warming the planet and that could destabilize parts of the environment that humans rely on.

The third logically valid option is that climate is now cooling due to the solar cycle.

This is a joke, right? You said it yourself: the period of the solar cycle is 11 years. It cannot explain a phenomenon that has been observed over more than a century.

teslabox2• 6 years ago

The bit in my comment about the period of the solar cycle being 11 years was a quote. The sun also oscillates in intensity over hundreds and thousands of years. The sun was (allegedly) slightly less active the Europe's colonial age, which motivated a lot of people to leave Europe. The sun was slightly more active during most of the 20th century, leading to the observations behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Some scientists, who aren't wedded to the anthropogenic theory, have looked at all the solar numbers and concluded we're due for a couple decades of weak solar cycles (global cooling) before the warming resumes.

I don't know who to believe, I just wanted to point out that there might be a reason behind this alleged "warmest winter ever" other than "it's the CO2". I'm not particularly interested in debating with someone with convictions of hot-earth environmental catastrophe being more reasonable than cold-earth environmental catastrophe, so feel free to have the last word.

cmrdporcupine• 6 years ago

Worst season ever to be a skier in the northeast. Rain, rain, rain, then an early close due to COVID-19

lsllc2• 6 years ago

Yeah, definitely a season to forget, but TBH the conditions in Jan/Feb were surprisingly good (when it wasn't raining!).

tinyhouse• 6 years ago

I enjoy WFH and agree with what everyone is saying that the current situation is far from ideal for WFH. However, many people who promote WFH forget something pretty important. If you have an home office then great. But many people live in small apartments with other family members and don't have ideal conditions for WFH. The solution is having many co-working spaces so that most people have one nearby. But people should be able to have their own desk and everything.

icedchai2• 6 years ago

This was definitely the warmest winter I remember in my lifetime. There was hardly any snow.

cryptica• 6 years ago

Only a couple of years ago, I spent winter in Moscow (Russia) and it was the coldest winter in over a century. At one point, it was -27 degrees celcius (-16.6 Fahrenheit) outside in the middle of the city. There was a meter of snow everywhere in the city. This winter I was in Germany and it was much warmer than last year but I wouldn't jump to conclusions on that basis.

chupasaurus2• 6 years ago

-27°C happens there once in about 10 years, and the coldest winter in a century was in 1941-42 (because of General Moroz on duty!).

This year Moscow basically didn't have a winter, in my town near Urals it was pretty similar with 2002.

leeoniya2• 6 years ago

The most commonly cited risks of climate change are natural disasters: fiercer wildfires and hurricanes, bigger floods and longer droughts. But one of the most striking recent effects of global warming has been unusually mild weather in many parts of the world.

maybe if it was framed first as the massive and irreversible ecosystem disruption which it is, people would take more notice. the result of this could easily be loss of essential plankton at the bottom of it all, just like loss of insects and plant pollinators due to pesticides.

it's always sea level rise this and coastal floods that. i'm fucking sick of this idiotic reductionist rhetoric. there will be far bigger problems which cannot be solved by relocating 3 miles inland.

Carlin was spot on: "The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

TeMPOraL5• 6 years ago

it's always sea level rise this and coastal floods that. i'm fucking sick of this idiotic rhetoric.

The true picture is closer to "sea level rise, coastal floods, changes of average temperature -> a chunk of the planet suddenly becoming uninhabitable -> mass migration -> lots of suffering, starvation, death, possibly war". But maybe this chain of reasoning has too many steps for a regular person to follow. Maybe the communication needs to focus on "no more food X in stores once average temperature in place Y goes above Z degrees"?

roenxi2• 6 years ago

Maybe the communication needs to focus on "no more food X in stores once average temperature in place Y goes above Z degrees"?

Lots of people suffering and dying due to famine is the normal state of affairs. China has suffered more than 100,000,000 deaths due to famine since the year 1800 [0]. That is a lot of deaths.

I'd put it that pre-industrial conditions are probably a greater risk factor for famine than post-industrial global warming. Indeed, I suggest running out of fossil fuels is a higher risk factor than global warming. With enough cheap energy we could switch to something like hydroponics and air conditioning for all in the next 100 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

truculent• 6 years ago

possibly war

I like your optimism!

bjourne2• 6 years ago

Maybe the communication needs to focus on "no more food X in stores once average temperature in place Y goes above Z degrees"?

Exactly this. Climate change means no bananas and no coffee in the future. You like bananas and coffee so you want to help combat climate change. It is cynical, but Western people care more about their bananas and coffee than a few hundred million Bangladeshis and Indians becoming climate refugees.

yongjik• 6 years ago

I think, if "the sea will literally rise and destroy many costal cities" is not scary enough, it's not the problem with the rhetoric, but people. Some people are determined to not worry about global warming.

It's time we politely left these people behind in their echo chamber. You don't invite a creationist to discuss pandemic response.

kuon• 6 years ago

I hope we are not on an exponential curve with this too. Covid reminded us how exponential are surprising.

eloff5• 6 years ago

It's not a linear trend, but probably not exponential (polynomial?) Still all the large and scary effects are at the end when everyone alive today is dead. Our descendants will have plenty of reason to curse our lack of foresight and stealing from future generations.

However, stating an unpopular but still possibly true opinion: If our human caused global warming disrupts the repeated glaciation cycles known as ice ages, maybe tens of thousands of years from now people will have missed a terrible natural disaster. Not much consolation to the people who live through the next couple centuries.

perfunctory6• 6 years ago

Depends what you mean by "large and scary". Some say it's already happening. See Australian fires, people killed in European heat waves, etc.

imtringued• 6 years ago

This idea that we are doing ourselves a favor by skipping the next ice age is bizarre. It took less than 300 years to prevent it and the next one was thousands of years ago before it would happen. Also, the large and scary effects aren't coming when everyone is dead. They will be there by the time current college graduates retire.

perfunctory6• 6 years ago

FWIW

"Scientists have long recognized that carbon dioxide emissions and their resulting effects have been increasing exponentially."

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/26/what-the-c...

usaar3332• 6 years ago

That claim doesn't match reality.

Ppm growth by year is sub-exponential even if above linear (looks like quadratic is a better first order approximation): https://datahub.io/core/co2-ppm

Actual temperature rise is actually a logarithmic function of co2 ppm, literally the opposite of exponential: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration...

tzs2• 6 years ago

The monthly records continue, too. From NOAA:

February 2020 marked the 44th consecutive February and the 422nd consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202002

ur-whale• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/dO21H

The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land

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