Tracking Crucial Metrics of Earth's Global Warming

https://www.climatechangetracker.org/

by a2x • 5 years ago

89 68 5 years ago

tdrdt2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know why the change at the north pole is bigger than the south pole? Is this because the north pole is floating on water?

SiempreViernes4• 5 years ago

I think the biggest factor differentiating the climate on the halves of the globe is that there's more landmass on the upper* bit of the Earth, so my first guess would be that the difference is tied to this overall difference.

*Comment by the North Hemisphere Gang

ximeng11• 5 years ago

https://www.news18.com/amp/news/buzz/global-warning-north-po...

This suggests that when the ice melts the darker water absorbs more energy from the light, and then warmer water freezes less resulting in a permanently warmer arctic.

Muromec• 5 years ago

Because co2 is not evenly distributed with most polluters concentrated in northern hemisphere and prevailing wind direction to be from equator to poles.

wcoenen• 5 years ago

Any air moving towards the poles must necessarily be balanced by air moving away from the poles. This manifests as "Hadley cells" and other similar wind patterns.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Ea...

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

I really dislike the use of the word "anomaly" in climate change circles. It may be technically correct, but it feels like propaganda. All it is is the difference to the average of an arbitrarily chosen time frame.

It would actually be strange if temperatures where exactly like the average all the time, so calling it an anomaly if they are different from the average really seems misleading. Again, it may be the technically correct term, but it has a different meaning in "normal language" imo.

The trend of the temperature may be "anomal", but that is not what they call an "anomaly".

SiempreViernes4• 5 years ago

Anomaly relative to the climate without the extra human forcings, like how you could call the dead forest from acid rains an "anomaly". A simple average of a reference period is used as reference for simplicity but is by the fact that climate change is happening much faster than typical climate variations so it's fine for now: the difference is (still) essentially entirely out fault.

tdrdt2• 5 years ago

I think the point parent is making is that it is possible to cherrypick a reference period.

You can say that the melting of glaciers is an anomaly but when an ancient forest appears below the melted glacier how can we agree on what an anomaly is?

I don't want to deny global warming but I agree with the parent that it's difficult to state what an anomaly is.

jimmydorry• 5 years ago

To add to your post, where and how did they determine that 30 years was the appropriate time scale to use?

The value we show is a 30 year rolling average of temperature change. We have chosen that long term trend because it fits the time scale of the climate and its changes.

tonmoy• 5 years ago

There isn’t enough temperature record around before that timeframe to estimate an accurate global average. You can still see the effects of temperate indirectly

polotics• 5 years ago

How and why does it feel like propaganda? What is being compared is averages with and without CO2 induced forcing.

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

No they picked a certain time frame and compare to the average temperature of that time frame. Nothing more, nothing less. I think the reference time frame is some 20 year period in the end of 20th century, but not sure if I remember it correctly.

beowulfey3• 5 years ago

It is a comparison of two averages, not of a single temperature to an average. A changing average suggests a change in the underlying factors at play, because while a single observation may not ever match the average as you say, a system in equilibrium should not see the average changing. This is why it is called anomalous: the mean is changing continuously.

It’s a crude metric but in the framework of the analysis (pre-industrial vs post-industrial) it is an appropriate comparison.

PeterisP• 5 years ago

I would consider that "anomaly" would refer to something unusual or unexpected, an outlier, or a weird unexplained occurrence contrary to our expectations, or a one-off deviation followed by a return to the norm.

On the other hand, a continuously changing mean or a systematic pattern IMHO is not an "anomaly"; something can't be unusual for long - if something has become or is clearly going to become usual, then it's a "new normal", it's a "trend" or something like that, but not an anomaly anymore; if we're seeing what we expected to see, that can't be called an "anomaly" because that's the expected result.

With respect to climate change we see that the underlying factors have changed, we mostly know why, we observe the consequences now, see their trends and can predict how the mean is going to change - so all the factors are contrary to the definition of "anomaly".

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

I don't think that explanation is correct. The average temperature of a year is just a specific way to take a measurement. Comparing it to an average of averages over several years is then the same as comparing a measurement to an average of measurements.

That the climate should never see averages changing seems obviously false. There clearly are cycles that last longer than a year, for example, as several ice ages came and went before industrialization. El Nino take phases last between two and seven years.

Angostura• 5 years ago

Temperatures are anomalous, given what we know about the state of all the non anthropogenic factors acting upon climate at the moment. Nothing really contentious or 'propaganda' there.

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

It is a technical term meaning difference to the average of a certain period of time. In itself such a difference to the average does not imply anything strange is going on. I'm not saying there isn't an anomaly in the sense of common speech, it just seems weird to me to use it in charts that are supposed to show the existence of an anomaly.

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

7952• 5 years ago

Comparing to a baseline is useful because that is what our culture, technology and habits are adapted to. And the conditions that ecosystems can be based on. An increase in temperature away from that has consequences that need to be understood.

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

I have nothing against the comparison, just with the choice to call the deviation from the average "anomaly".

I think in one step you should present the data, making sense of it is another step. Technically "anomaly" is just used for the distance to the average of some chosen timeframe, but in common language terms it suggests something unnatural is going on. As I said, it would be unnatural to have exactly the average temperature every year. (It may still be such an extreme difference that it is unnatural, but that is not how they use the word anomaly. It just means different from the average).

davidw• 5 years ago

My understanding is that it's changing at a faster rate than previous non human caused shifts. That's the anomaly.

landemva• 5 years ago

The fastest shifts occurred after large volcanic activity. And cold summers for a few years then led to crop failures.

Am really interested in more analysis of correlation of reduced sunspot activity and then increased volcanic activity. It appears to be a fascinating correlation.

Update - The mammoths with undigested grass in their stomachs, which froze to death while eating, may indicate magnetic pole flip creates faster climate change than volcanic activity.

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

They use the term anomaly strictly in a technical sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly

It means the difference to the average of a certain time frame. Whether it was caused by human activity is a different question. That is why I call it misleading. They certainly want to imply humans caused it, but at the point where they show the chart they haven't really shown it. That requires considering other aspects.

esarbe3• 5 years ago

What are "climate change circles" supposed to be?

You mean the people not willfully blind of the facts? Sure, must be propaganda.

mistermann2• 5 years ago

The non-purely-materialistic dimension of reality (the part that prevents humanity from actually doing anything substantial about climate change) unfolds according to people's perceptions of reality, not reality itself (which we do not see, even though it seems to be the exact opposite of that). It may be enjoyable to look down one's nose at the unintelligent, but realize that intelligence is a spectrum and the sense one has that they are at the apex of that spectrum is illusory.

Science is a very useful tool, but it is not the only tool we need to deal with this problem, and it is certainly not the best tool for dealing with the most important unsolved (and seemingly not even realized) aspect of it: the human mind.

I think we need to start thinking very differently about this problem - one approach (applied to a different domain) is described in this[1] post, I think it would provide more value than more and more scientific statistics, which seem to be accomplishing very little.

[1] Sociotechnical Lenses into Software Systems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282715

kkjjkgjjgg17• 5 years ago

I mean people trying to show or prove the effects of climate change. Whether you believe in it or not, there supposedly are specialists working in that area. At least that is usually the argument, that there are experts who worked it all out whom we should listen to. So I think those can be called "climate change circles".

crispyporkbites• 5 years ago

+6 degrees above the 30 year average in the north pole this year

I knew it was up but that is a LOT

marstall• 5 years ago

I'm presuming that the foundation here is solid and well-intentioned, but there are many different data sources that could be powering these visualizations so a clearer citation would be helpful (beyond what is provided, just the orgs, Berkeley earth+nasa).

mistermann2• 5 years ago

I'd like to see some innovation in reporting on the human side of the puzzle....how people perceive the problem of global warming, how they feel about it, what is behind how they feel about it, etc.

Maybe it's just me, but preaching to the choir with ever more impressive science is not moving the ball forward very fast, and if you trust the science, moving the ball forward quickly is an ability that is crucially important.

bowmessage• 5 years ago

I really like this website. Well presented and informative.

I have been daydreaming of creating something similar that enabled testing weather hypotheses that are often thrown around by the media.

E.g., "Heavy Vancouver Rainfall Due to Climate Change". It would be great to get rainfall information for that area graphed over the last X years.

Does anyone have pointers to useful datasets or APIs that could aid in creating such a tool or website?

neffy• 5 years ago

Here is one (artic temperatures):

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

It's also quite useful in terms of seeing one aspect of the anomaly, in terms of temperature shift (compare 1958 with anything in the last 5 years)

Nexus1• 5 years ago

Great visualization of climate change metrics. Like the idea and the implementation.

esarbe3• 5 years ago

Maybe visualizations like these will finally get the message through to the last bastions of ignorance.

Or maybe not. If at this point you are still pretend to be skeptical about the data, it's probably more to do with willful blindness rather than intellectual rigor and no amount of data will ever convince you otherwise.

Truth is that lots and lots of people benefit from that continued 'doubt' delaying further actions. Even though in the end we'll all suffer the devastating consequences - the political upheavals, the social unrest, the ecological destruction - there are still people that are so obtuse as to think that this will not tough them.

Party 'til the house burns down, I guess.

laichzeit0• 5 years ago

I have a feeling that the climate change charts induce a similar knee jerk reaction as IQ scores or vaccines. Most people have an ideology they subscribe to and will argue using facts and reason in order to support it. I have yet to witness a religious person be reasoned into atheism. I suspect the applies for the above mentioned categories, whatever side of the fence the person happens to be on.

zdragnar2• 5 years ago

Charts and visualisations are a great way to trick people. Not only is the source data obscured (and so readily cherry picked) but it opens up all sorts of tricks around visual perception.

I also suspect most people yet to be convinced will immediately think back to Al Gore's infamous hockey stick chart when presented with visual simplifications of deeply complex climate data.

At the heart of the matter, looking at such a chart isn't meant to inform you, it is meant to elicit an emotional response, and they have been trained to respond with skepticism.

ogwh• 5 years ago

Website briefly flashes then disappears on mobile apparently.

a2x• 5 years ago

Hey ogwh, are you still having this issue? Can you share the browser and version you are using?

seventytwo• 5 years ago

Add a chart that shows the global subsidies the fossil fuel industry gets over time.

Tracking Crucial Metrics of Earth's Global Warming

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