Three loud climate warning signals

https://www.axios.com/three-climate-warning-signals-9f930b4e-110a-4225-9eb9-c63a22993b82.html

by samizdis • 5 years ago

130 127 5 years ago

axios.com

neffy2• 5 years ago

And here's number four:

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

Comparison of the longterm mean temperature in the artic with each year going back to 1958.

vaylian• 5 years ago

HTTP 404

edit: Never mind. I had to disable the HTTPS everywhere extension.

alserio• 5 years ago

Just like the snow in the arctic

samizdis• 5 years ago

I'm not getting a 404 (from the UK), but here's an archive link:

https://archive.md/Ih5eQ

dash2• 5 years ago

So what should I be looking at here? Is it that the red line (mean temperatures) is much above the green line (climate, ie average over previous years)?

DangitBobby• 5 years ago

The green line is mean temperatures on the same days of each year from 58 to 02. The red one is 2002 onward.

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

I'm no expert, but to sell this to the skeptics (if they'd even buy it), I guess an analogy would be, if you wanted to preserve an ice cube in a freezer where the temperature is -20C, incrementally rising the temperature won't matter, until it does: when it reaches the melting point of the ice.

Are we at melting point now? Or very very close to it?

neffy2• 5 years ago

Well above. Witness the rising sea levels caused by the glaciers melting.

abainbridge• 5 years ago

That would only work on some. The skeptic I know acknowledges that the world is getting warmer but doesn't believe this is a problem. I do believe it is a problem and find it hard to convince him.

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

Skeptics gonna skeptic, no matter what now. Only thing left is to prepare for the crashing and brutal transition, and explain things to skeptics but not for their benefits but in the hope it tips off in the right direction the hesitant people who are silently listening to conversations. Like with covid.

VHRanger• 5 years ago

The problem is that it's a continuous event.

A lot of places are on the margin where 1c or 2c matters a lot. This margin moves up the more we increase heat.

But more than that, the volatility in the climate system increases at a much greater rate than the mean temperature.

Extreme weather events will continue to get more frequent

thow-58d4e8b• 5 years ago

While this is a good argument, people's revealed preferences point in the other direction

The countries that are closest to that margin, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Iran, are actually perfectly happy with pumping more fossil fuels. Bin Salman was actively trying to sabotage COP26 talks. Brazil continues the deforestation, with Bolsonaro being perfectly happy with it

Florida beach front properties are not dropping in value. Migration towards Sun Belt in the US is a real thing. At the peak of summer heat, significant chunk of Europe's population temporarily moves to the hottest parts of the continent. Despite the global warming prospects and economic disparities, Greeks, Italians and Spaniards aren't flocking to Scandinavia. etc., etc.

jmclnx• 5 years ago

What is happening is more melting is occurring in Summer then what freezes during Winter. This a net loss of ice.

In the past, over a period of time, an equilibrium existed, CO2 broke that equilibrium.

notabee2• 5 years ago

To add to this, there are also feedback loops involved. Sea ice is very white (high albedo), and as it melts at the margins it is replaced by sea water with a much lower albedo that absorbs more light and heat energy. So as the ice goes, the water around it warms ever faster. Once the ice is mostly gone, that will accelerate global warming by an appreciable amount simply through loss of reflectivity. That's just one of many feedback loops that make things more complicated than "move the CO2 thermostat up or down again".

ben_w3• 5 years ago

Hm. I don’t think that’s a good model. The temperature isn’t the same everywhere, and the line on the ground between “fine” and “not fine” moves around much more within any given year than the average between years.

First time I visited the USA was Dec 2014-Jan 2015; strong and opposite temperature anomalies across the USA, so I found people surfing in California on Christmas Day[0] while around the same time Trump was tweeting sarcastically about the snow in NYC disproving global warming.

[0] for all they know that might even be normal for California, I’m not American

mcv2• 5 years ago

It's not just about the melting of the ice. I mean, it is. Point 2 in this list is about an ice shelf that itself is mostly floating (so that melting in itself doesn't really contribute to sea level rise), but this shelf blocks a glacier on land, preventing a massive amount of land ice from sliding into the sea, and from what I understand, it sounds like once the shelf collapses, this glacier flowing into the sea could lead to quite rapid sea level rise. And that glacier is connected to other glaciers that could soon follow, leading to the collapse of all glaciers across West Antarctica, which would be quite serious.

And that shelf is already melting, and cracks are appearing. It's currently kept in place by an undersea mountain, but when it melts too much or breaks up, it could lose that grip, and things can start moving very quickly all of a sudden.

The fact that global temperatures are undeniably going up and are continuing to rise, isn't exactly helping with keeping all that ice in its place.

adamrezich2• 5 years ago

it's a hard sell for skeptics because basically every major politically-charged doom-and-gloom x-years-from-now climate change prediction has ended up not coming to pass thus far[0]. obviously it's not like it's literally impossible for such a scenario to occur but at some point when a boy cries wolf enough times over the decades it's hard to take any headline phrased like this one immediately seriously at face value.

[0] https://extinctionclock.org/

lanstin• 5 years ago

Most of the predictions issued by climate scientists have been correct or overly conservative. We are also seeing just the same amount of warming that Exxon predicted in 1970 in their se ret study.

At some point climate “sceptics” are like the people avoiding vaccines. Dumb babies indulging in sophistry while ignoring real actions that can alter reality in massively useful ways.

Glench2• 5 years ago

Don't forget there's also the millions of people dying from fossil fuel-based air pollution every year! https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/david-wallace-wells/ten-...

retrac2• 5 years ago

Great point. There'd be compelling reasons to stop poisoning ourselves ASAP even if we weren't boiling ourselves alive in the process.

Ontario phased out coal electricity for a mix of natural gas and renewables in the early-mid 2000s. Climate wasn't the primary motivator. Regular air pollution was. Smog has essentially disappeared from Toronto. I haven't had burning eyes and a scratchy throat on what would have once been bad summer days in almost two decades personally (atmospheric NO2 levels): https://files.ontario.ca/2086-figurea35-en.jpg Atmospheric mercury levels alone have fallen by 40%. I didn't even know so much Hg in the environment came from coal ash!

An independent assessment conducted by Toronto Public Health in 2014 suggests that improvements in Ontario’s air quality have translated into significant health benefits for Ontario residents. Toronto Public Health found that improvements in Toronto’s air quality from 2000 to 2011 have reduced air pollution-related premature deaths by 23% (from 1,700 to 1,300 per year) and hospital admissions by 41% (from 6,000 to 3,550 per year) in Toronto alone.

retwe321• 5 years ago

This argument is mostly against cities though. Nowadays humans don't need to be tightly packed into pollution centres. Efforts should be made to make city living as expensive as possible since it's harmful for the environment. Internet has made cities pretty much obsolete anyway.

HPsquared• 5 years ago

On the ground there can often be a conflict between air pollution and climate goals.

Widespread adoption of diesel engines (in place of gasoline) has increased particulate and nitrogen oxide pollution. Wood burning (compared to other fossil fuels) is a similar story.

donkeyd• 5 years ago

This is something people who oppose EVs seem to forget (or ignore). Especially in cities, the air would be so much cleaner if only EVs were allowed. Every time someone lectures me on the CO2 cost of producing electric cars I explain this, but nobody seems to care about cleaner air.

Glench2• 5 years ago

Sounds frustrating! I totally agree — I used to bike around the city and the pollution was pretty noticeable — smelled terrible in congested areas and seemed to make it harder to breathe. I really value the nourishment of clean air and I'm sure many many more people will too as we wean ourselves from fossil fuels.

I'm also wondering if you're familiar with or would like this book by a climate scientist living in Texas who's documented what's worked for her in talking about climate change with people who are resistant: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Saving-Us/Katharine-H...

belorn• 5 years ago

People tend to ignore or simply not care when the death is spread out. It is why Fukushima scare people more than coal power plants, or why an airplane crash get more focus than the constant car crashes on the motorway.

Risk perception is a topic that should be taught in schools.

wiz21c• 5 years ago

If you remove vehicles EV or not, you win on all sides. I guess those who are against EV think about. As someone who suffers from air pollution, I'd welcome EV happily, but knowing that it's just a part of the (very) long term solution.

I remember that Trump was not much in fighting about climate change but much more into fighting against air pollution. On that account he was not completely wrong. Air pollution kills many people as others said.

jandrese6• 5 years ago

EVs are cleaner in more ways than just the exhaust too. They produce much less noise pollution for one. Another advantage is that because EVs can use regenerative breaking they wear through much less brake pad material each year, and brake dust is a huge issue in city air quality, especially since brakes are still manufactured using asbestos.

slibhb• 5 years ago

I find there's something fishy about talking of "millions of people dying from pollution".

It raises a simple question that isn't easy to answer: what do we mean when we say someone died of something? Under what circumstances do we say that? If someone gets hit by a car, they were killed in a car accident. If an 80 year old dies of cancer, cancer killed them, but it's a little different than a car accident (and also different than a 15 year old dying of leukemia). Even more different is something, like pollution, that is a factor in someone's death.

When it comes to pollution, I think a better framing would be to talk about pollution lowering life expectancy. That seems more honest unless these people are choking on smog and asphyxiating.

retrac2• 5 years ago

A similar argument can be made about cigarettes and lung cancer. One cannot point at a tumour, even in a heavy smoker, and say with certainty "well, that's from the smoking", as opposed to air pollution, or just bad genetic luck. (Or quite possibly a synergy of all three.) When you look at it statistically, it's like what you say, smoking lowers your life expectancy on average.

Yet if you took two large and matched cohorts, one smoking and one non-smoking, after 50 years the smoker population would be much smaller than the non-smoking. On the population level, I think it's reasonable to attribute those missing people to having died from smoking, even though individually we can't say much.

dTal• 5 years ago

The way these things are usually talked about is "QALYs" - quality adjusted life years, which count time spent with debilitating chronic conditions less. If lost QALYs / average lifespan > 1 million, then characterizing it as "millions of people dying from pollution" is probably not unfair.

It's worth noting however that this kind of accountancy can lead to mathematical conclusions that make us uncomfortable - e.g. it is better to murder a child than to cause everyone in the world to wake up 1 second late (3 times better in fact) since the total lost time to everyone exceeds the expected lifespan of the child.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

Years and years ago (around Gore v Bush) we hit a few "point of no returns" and I started to look up what can we actually do if we are past a point of no return. I found some relief in the idea that we could pump chemicals into our atmosphere to balance out the "bad" chemicals.

I have a pretty naïve understanding of this and I was aware at the time that this was a bit of a nuclear option because its unsure if this would work and once we do it there isnt really any going back. But this is an option right? At some point some country that has been impacted by climate change enough will start to dump something into the air to counteract climate change.

I havnt thought about this in years but someone asked me recently and I brought this up and they questioned it a bit and I realized I didnt actually know how it would potentially work.

notabee2• 5 years ago

This is an entertaining video on that topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSu5sXmsur4

Maursault• 5 years ago

Horrifying. Chemistry has and continues to do enough damage. I hope instead for a different, non-chemical kind of solution, like massive but skinny heatsinks stretched from the poles into space, in tandem with a new carbon-negative economy bent on natural habitat restoration, along with negative birth rates. An easy fix for the planet is to eliminate humankind... but the solution really it doesn't need to be this extreme. Eliminating just the men will have the same effect. And, in fact, we can be even more surgical and merely eliminate or sterilize the extraordinarily small percentage of men that cause 99% of the problem. It's probably like only 200 guys. We should find them and stop them.

westcort3• 5 years ago

A firehouse flow worth of limestone slurry sprayed into the atmosphere from a plane could offset global warming, by some estimates. I wonder why this isn’t being done yet.

mistrial93• 5 years ago

.. because some real decision makers can detect idiotic nonsense?

snarf21• 5 years ago

We are only at a point of no returns in terms of continuing as-is. We won't need to dump anything into the atmosphere, the Earth will clean itself given time and opportunity. I think the mostly like outcome is that in the next 100 years we will start to see massive and more severe droughts and flood. Water will become the most valuable resource and that will affect the ability to provide food. There will be massive famine because the rich countries will hoard while the poor ones starve (exponentially more so than today). I think that in 100 years the population of the Earth will be less than 2 billion and trending down. Eventually the Earth will recover just fine, it will just take 5,000 years.

Any talk of going to Mars is just silly click bait. If we had to, we have the technology to support several million people completely underground, growing food via hydroponics. The Earth isn't going to 0 population outside of an asteroid or nuclear event of major proportions.

lettergram4• 5 years ago

It’s kinda funny that project veritas released a clip showing CNN and media were going to start selling this issue (for profit) and now it’s happening...

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/part-1-cnn-director-admi...

It [COVID] will taper off to a point that it's not a problem anymore. Climate change can take years, so they'll [CNN will] probably be able to milk that quite a bit…Climate change is going to be the next COVID thing for CNN…Fear sells

Some other factoids:

- 20,000 years ago an ice sheet covered a large portion of North America

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet

- 10,000 years ago the Sierra was green

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-tu...

- generally, I agree with world is warming. Is that bad? I’m actually unsure. There’s a lot more data on this; it’ll definitely Impact our lives — but is there anything we can do about it? Seems like a trend going back tens of thousands of years.

sleepysysadmin2• 5 years ago

You're not allowed to question climate change like this on HN.

generally, I agree with world is warming. Is that bad? I’m actually unsure.

The eemian period was around 115,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian

It was about 2 celcius warmer compared to today. Sea levels were ~6-9 metres higher. Which puts significant amount of current day valuable land under water. Flipside, this increase in warming also unlocks significant parts of the Canadian arctic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:All_palaeot...

You can also see that it's always sudden spikes up to peaks. I suspect it's related to solar cycles.

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

When the solar cycle ended in ~1820 and we went into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Maximum

This is also why so many graphs showing climate change tend to start around 1820. Including data before 1820 would just muddy their conclusions.

JacobThreeThree• 5 years ago

You're not allowed to question climate change like this on HN.

What's there to question? The carbon credits markets that are being implemented definitely won't be manipulated by Wall Street like the commodities markets are.

Nothing at all could go wrong with financializing periodic elements and allowing entities like Goldman Sachs to create carbon credits out of thin air.

ben_w3• 5 years ago

What we saw 20k years ago was the end of the most recent Milankovich cycle. The warm period in that cycle is fairly brief compared to the whole, and quickly goes back to the cold period again.

What we’ve already done is likely to prevent the next cold period, even if we stop emitting completely tonight.

What we’re doing now under the “business as usual” scenario is about the same scale of impact as that cycle, but in addition.

Also the main gas, CO2, demonstrably makes us significantly dumber in the concentrations we expect from a business-as-usual scenario.

And yes, there are things we can do about it, and are doing some of those things. The better question is: can we make it profitable to do enough about it, because the greenhouse gases hang around so long it is not sensible to hope for altruistic solutions.

micromacrofoot• 5 years ago

We already know that a warmer planet means rising sea levels, and as a species that tends to congregate near the sea... this is definitely a problem. If mitigating CO2 emissions buys us any amount of time, it's worth it.

jandrese6• 5 years ago

The Project Veritas that is famous for making up stories out of whole cloth or grossly distorting statements until they no longer resemble the actual situation? Is your supposition that they have suddenly done a 180 and started telling the truth for no apparent reason?

Why should I take anything that comes out of Project Veritas seriously when they have a long track record of lying or putting so much spin on a story that it flies apart?

lettergram4• 5 years ago

Your statements are inaccurate and there’s nothing to back it up as far as I can tell.

Project Veritas is currently suing everyone who makes those claims and has yet to lose. NYT in particular has done some insanely shady stuff

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BvRaQk5yeao

Just listen to the CNN employees own words, you don’t even have to assume project veritas is doing anything. It’s pretty clear.

hatware3• 5 years ago

Oh look, another article asking ordinary citizens to shoulder responsibility for something that is almost entirely perpetrated by corporations.

Yawn.

gruez2• 5 years ago

Are corporations emitting carbon for fun, or are they doing it at the behest of "ordinary citizens"?

postsantum• 5 years ago

Behest of ordinary citizens is easily swayed by media, which are owned by corporations. Enjoy your nuclear hysteria while important people keep visiting Climate Change Conferences in their private jets

user-the-name4• 5 years ago

They are doing it because it's cheap and legal. Nobody is asking corporations to do it. We are allowing them to get away with it.

We need to stop allowing it.

hatware3• 5 years ago

Neither.

I believe they are doing it to make money. Which is perfectly alright.

Isn't the government supposed to _evaluate_ and _regulate_ the market in order to account for the externalities created by X, Y, and Z corporations? If they are not doing this, what do we do? Cause we've been voting the same cronies in cycle after cycle, with the same result.

What is the definition of insanity? Our reality.

camgunz• 5 years ago

They actively corrupt democratic governments and disseminate misinformation in order to keep making money by destroying the planet. Exxon infamously supports cap and trade because they know it's politically non-viable [1]. Confident no consumer is asking them to do this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v1Yg6XejyE

acuozzo• 5 years ago

The issue is that, in many cases, corporations create the problems that their products solve.

Stroads, for instance, only came about after a ton of corporate spending on propaganda and lobbying to increase demand for automobiles.

If you contaminate the water supply of a city in order to create demand for your water purification product, then is the resulting consumer demand your fault or theirs?

rocgf• 5 years ago

I honestly never understood this argument.

Corporations don't just emit greenhouse gases for the fun of it, like some sort of villain, they do it because they produce the stuff that we, the "ordinary citizens" buy like mad every Christmas or whenever we have $200 extra in our bank accounts.

Corporations will do anything permitted by the law and that's no secret. That includes evading taxes, sub-living wages or pollution. Ordinary citizens allow this by buying the products of those corporations and by not voting for more green policies.

To assign the blame solely on corporations and remove "ordinary citizens" from the equation is short-sighted at best.

user-the-name4• 5 years ago

Well, look, you said it yourself:

"will do anything permitted by the law"

Exactly. So start changing the law. Blaming consumers will get us nowhere. Change the law. Enforce the law. Force corporations to act.

hatware3• 5 years ago

I don't think that spreading the externalities of climate change onto ordinary citizens socialistically is the right approach.

For you, the buck stops at whatever citizens currently exist on the planet/continent/country/state/city/town.

For me, the buck stops at the corporations and governments who are more than responsible for the current mess we are in. You do realize these chucklef*cks are still flying around on private jets, right?

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I think I've seen a sociology video talking about a pyramid. The base needs the top and vice versa.

I don't like citizen going crazy on corporations (which I despise often). Because most of the product they buy are conscious and free decision. Blame corps for tapping into human reflexes (rule 1 of any commercial anything).

jbotz• 5 years ago

Corporations will do anything permitted by the law ...

A bit off-topic, but corporations will also do things not permitted by the law if the potential penalties are likely to be significantly lower than the potential profits.

And, of course, they also expend significant resources to shape the law to serve their interests, and appear to be significantly more effective at this than "ordinary citizens".

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Ordinary citizens could always opt out of supporting this situation by killing themselves, but on an individual basis I don't think that would make much of a difference, and killing yourself before someone can kill you is a pyrrhic victory.

The reason people blame corporations is because it's very difficult to find the people who own them, and because they have a realistic view of power.

mcv2• 5 years ago

What do you mean: yawn? At the very least, you could vote for a government that lets those corporations pay for their pollution. One way or the other, you do have a responsibility here, because the way the system works right now, corporations only care about short-term profit, and right now that means they pollute. They need to feel the consequences of this pollution financially, or they'll never change.

And it needs to happen soon too, because we've already squandered 30 year of doing nothing.

usui• 5 years ago

Just because the OP yawns at a trite post doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t care about the issues you mentioned. The only thing that isn’t cared about is deflection of responsibility.

wing-_-nuts• 5 years ago

I don't recall reading that. Could you post some quotes to back your claim?

jandrese6• 5 years ago

Everybody, corporations and individuals, need to do their part to fight climate change. We are all living on the same planet. If corporations aren't doing their part they need to be called out, but that is no excuse for you to shirk your duty.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

... And the countries that are enabling this pollution.

It's interesting to look at the long term trends, especially when looking at some of the largest economies on the planet.

Comparing the US[0] and China[1], the US has:

- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)

- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)

Meanwhile for the same period China has had

- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)

- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007

If a country decides to impose a burden on itself by doing the right thing and going green (like the EU and US are doing) then China can just bring on more coal plants online to bring the price of their goods down and crush the competition. Nobody in the western world can compete with that.

It's time we start holding governments accountable and impose tariffs and immigration quotas on misbehaving countries.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

brandmeyer2• 5 years ago

Climate change is a slow-moving problem, and the situation with the Thwaites Glacier is no exception.

From the scientific article's[1] own plain-language summary: "The Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf is the floating terminus of the Thwaites Glacier, one of the fastest changing glaciers in Antarctica and contributing as much as 4% of global sea level rise today. This floating ice shelf is stabilized offshore by a marine shoal and acts as a dam to slow the flow of ice off the continent into the ocean. If this floating ice shelf breaks apart, the Thwaites Glacier will accelerate and its contribution to sea level rise will increase by as much as 25%."

So, this specific ice shelf's collapse would increase global sea level rise by up to 1%. Over the coming decades, the dominant driver of sea level rise will continue to be thermal expansion of the ocean itself. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet in total may contribute 3 m of sea level rise... over a period of 13 thousand years[2].

[1] https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/978762

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4655561/

echelon• 5 years ago

So Miami gets submerged 13,000 years from now and not within the next 50?

My coworkers laugh when I tell them I'm looking at Miami real estate. It doesn't look like it's going anywhere but up in my lifetime, though.

gmuslera• 5 years ago

The yearly average global temperature is moving slowly (but at increasing speed. we are increasing emissions, old emissions accumulate for centuries, and we are already triggering positive feedback loops).

Extreme weather is not, both in severity and in frequency. Doing big averages from a far, safe distance hide you the fact that is not so safe at local level, and the increase frequency turns every place into a dangerous to be one eventually.

Sea rises slowly in average, but still there was plenty of floods this very year. You don't have to wait till the ocean catches you, an atmospheric river could ruin your life too.

brandmeyer2• 5 years ago

Climate change is a big problem, but harping on ice-sheet collapse is a strategic mistake. We know a priori that ice sheet collapse is one of the longest-term threats. None of us will experience impact from them in our lifetime, and focusing on them hands the deniers their own talking points to them on a silver platter.

Extreme weather events, wet-bulb temperature shifts, arable land changes, and habitat loss are near-term threats that are already having impact.

falcrist3• 5 years ago

You can grab global average temperature data from NOAA[1] or NASA[2] and play with it yourself.

Things immediately jump out at me, such as: Of the top 20 hottest years on record, the only one that isn't from the past 20 years is 1998. The year that got bumped out of the top 20 is 2008, which sits at 21st place. That seems like a pretty clear trend to me.

[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/globe/land_...

[2] https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...

soco2• 5 years ago

And then come people saying "oh but there were always ups and downs". Hockey stick or not, natural causes or human causes debate aside, what this argument forgets is that insects and animals and plants and by extension humans will suffer through this a lot and we know we can mitigate it by lowering our own emissions. So why not doing it, even if the catastrophe would be from natural causes? Don't we want to avoid a natural catastrophe even if it's natural? Everybody agrees we should blast an incoming asteroid and nobody proposes to let it hit because "yeah we had already a few during history"...

5560675260• 5 years ago

Alternative to suffering from rising temperatures is adapting to them. Lowering emissions is also going to cause suffering and might be as effective as blasting (into general direction of an) asteroid with a water cannon.

ipspam• 5 years ago

If we are coming out of an ice age, should this not generally be true?

The more accurate the measurements, the more records ascertained.

falcrist3• 5 years ago

We're not coming out of an ice age. Changes in temperature are not only much faster than they have been in the past, they're rapidly accelerating.

bell-cot2• 5 years ago

We are talking about the behavior of a species which repeatedly hunts extremely valuable prey species to economic extinction, builds houses and raises children on the slopes of smoldering volcanoes, etc. And displays neigh-zero regret - let alone long-term learning - when such antics go horribly wrong.

No way in hell will Homo Sapiens change its behavior (at anything resembling a useful scale) based tiny-looking shifts in a few climate statistics. Nor harmless-looking events on a distant and neigh-uninhabited continent.

A better question: How fast could Mr. Musk's fleet of Starships deploy enough giga-scale solar shades to reduce Earth's total insolation by (say) 5%?

arrrg• 5 years ago

This is too defeatist and doesn’t acknowledge the progress already made.

Being too needlessly cynical about what is possible is also dangerous. Basically you are forming a coalition with deniers and stand in the way of meaningful progress.

I agree that the challenges are immense and (as is pretty clear to everyone, I think) adapting to the changes will always be part of it. Does not mean that making progress on prevention is meaningless.

Let the people who do not want those preventive changes work on adaption alternatives.

bell-cot2• 5 years ago

Well...I see "keep the Earth at least (say) 80% as habitable as it currently is" as an "absolute must-do" engineering requirement. Praising progress already made, proclaiming faith in humanity's potential to unify toward that goal, etc. - those are social niceties & tactics. Extremely useful in advancing one's own social status within certain segments of the population. Not so useful in actually meeting the must-do requirement.

Certainly my own experience with big, tough "must-do" projects is that there's damned little overlap between the folks who jump up to do 95% of the posturing and talking, and the folks who show up and do 95% of that actual hard work needed to succeed. And that second crowd has fairly underwhelming respect for most of the first crowd.

verisimi2• 5 years ago

Why though, is there such a disconnect between what we personally experience (colder weather) and what we are told (global warming)?

Must I take the science on trust?

rkk3• 5 years ago

You can still experience cold weather in a system that is warming.

Are you personally sensitive to small average temperature changes over decades?

verisimi2• 5 years ago

Its very hard to read personally - you have to take a long view. It seems to me that some years are warm, some years are cold. The beaches I went to as a kid seem to be at the same height.

But this is really a question about the science. And we do know that they a/ don't have a perfect record, and b/ edit the historical record they have.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160322230859/http://blogs.tele...

"Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP): ……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."

(Fwiw, these sorts of articles are hard to find. All you can easily find online is confusing info, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c... is an exercise in obfuscation)

immmmmm• 5 years ago

there was a plot the other day of the "Temperature Anomaly (rel to 1980)" over Europe in the morning: the adjusted scale was going from -30 to +30 °C.

i know climate change has the effect of "shifting and widening gaussians", still an anomalous temperature differential of 60 Celsius was a bit of a shock.

euroderf2• 5 years ago

The only scene missing from John Carpenter's "They Live" is the one where the aliens and their collaborators talk about how great the terraforming is progressing.

Method-X• 5 years ago

Was this a deleted scene, or do you mean it should have been a scene?

euroderf2• 5 years ago

Shoulda!

cletus• 5 years ago

I'm a climate fatalist: it really doesn't matter if climate change predictions are true or the degree to which they're true because there is absolutely no way humanity, as a species, will do anything about it that inconveniences a large number of people in any way.

The ugly truth is that people are quite willing to let other people die or simply to live in abject poverty to preserve their way of life, even if it's just temporarily.

We've seen it with Covid: a significant number of people won't get a vaccine with, at best, extremely minor risks of side effects, certainly much less than driving a car or flying on a commercial airplane, or wear a mask even though it demonstrably hampers transmission.

There are a multitude of reasons for this (both Covid and climate change). It's a scary situation. Historically, it's better to bet against the Mayans: the Mayans predicted the end of the world so what is the point in betting they're right because the world ends. For some, it's simply easier to pretend none of this is happening. But a lot of people are just struggling to get by.

There are two things we need to do to actually address climate change, in my opinion:

1. We need to elevate the standard of living of the baseline of people such that they aren't struggling, they aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck and they aren't at constant risk of financial ruin (eg unexpected medical expenses). People will care about these things when they aren't completely focused on basic needs like food and shelter.

A key part of this is that the ultra-wealthy need to start paying for the politically stable world that made their wealth possible and continues to do so. The ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution and nobody wants that.

2. The solution to emissions is economic not altruistic. You want to replace fossil fuels for energy? You need something cheaper. Nothing else matters.

So, as for the warning signs in this post: I can't speak to how meaningful they are. I am 100% convinced however that it doesn't matter because no one will listen or, more importantly, change their behaviour to a sufficient degree.

I am always skeptical of "the sky is falling" predictions however. Climate, in particular, has a bad track record for failed predictions. The Earth has been around for 4+ billion years and it's been a lot warmer than it is now, even very recently (ie within the last 100,000 years) so I'm skeptical about claims of runaway climate change, as just one example.

4 billion years is a long time for runaway conditions to occur naturally. We simply don't have adequate knowledge of what mechanisms will kick in in extreme conditions.

rob_c• 5 years ago

And if we accidentally make the planet nicer for everyone by cleaning up and having the rich spread the wealth and caring about others....

oh wait, this is driven from countries with a lower value on human life so I guess this explains it....

sleepysysadmin2• 5 years ago

And if we accidentally make the planet nicer for everyone by cleaning up

This is for sure happening. The huge push to electric cars for example is because we must get off oil. Not because of climate change but rather practicality. We have ~50 years of oil left. Today people are driving around in 20 year old rust buckets. Those people aren't buying EVs until they have had a good time depreciating. So we're decades from true adoption. Long before that we are going to have oil prices skyrocket due to scarcity. Iran is talking nuclear deals because they ran out of oil. Or at least oil they can access.

More importantly, even russia and china are siding with the usa and eu saying iran is the one in need and needs to change. It's hard to predict what is about to come about their nuclear talks. Afterall, Iran is basically in an economic depression right now. Their inflation is trucking around 50% annual. Their prime lending rate is ~18%. This is what happens post-oil if you haven't moved your economy off of oil.

and having the rich spread the wealth and caring about others....

Are they not? The rich effectively pay for the government. The net-benefits to the non-rich are greater than they pay in taxes. The rich are who pay for everything and are spreading their wealth.

oh wait, this is driven from countries with a lower value on human life so I guess this explains it....

The poor person in those undeveloped parts of the world arent even driving 20 year old rust buckets. They are operating with like 2 cycle motors that barely function. The sooner we move away from oil, the less likely there's a huge economic fall out for others later.

robomartin2• 5 years ago

The ice pack at the poles provides proof enough that temperatures have risen. That isn't something that anyone can dispute.

What bothers me as an engineer is that I can't see how anything over a 150 year span at a global, hemispherical, continental, national or even regional level can be calculated to an actual accuracy of 0.1 degrees C and, even worse, enough precision to support conclusions with one digit after the decimal point.

For those who might not be clear in the difference between accuracy and precisions, here's what I hope is a simple explanation you can remember (works for me).

How close are you to the absolute correct number? "Absolute" starts with "A". This is accuracy. You are trying to cut a piece of aluminum to 1 unit in length. If every piece is about 1.2 units you are not very accurate. If every piece is about 0.95 units, you are far more accurate. You are closer to your target, absolute or real measurement.

Precision is related to grouping. I remember this by thinking "Group ends with P = Precision". Think of this in terms of how closely grouped your measurements might be.

    Absolute > Accuracy
    Group > Precision

Imagine you have to make an aluminum bar 1 unit in length. Here are various outcomes from making five bars and their accuracy/precision classification:

        Accurate and     Precise: [1.000, 1.005, 0.999, 1.002, 0.998]
        Accurate and NOT Precise: [1.000, 1.050, 0.959, 1.022, 0.978] 
    NOT Accurate and     Precise: [1.200, 1.205, 1.199, 1.202, 1.198]
    NOT Accurate and NOT Precise: [1.220, 1.105, 1.127, 1.272, 1.298]

Sorry for the detour.

I read a number of documents [0] [1] (and more on that second link) describing the NOAA data used for most of these studies. I would not be honest if I didn't say that I can't help think there's a lot of stuff that feels less than correct.

I also revert to the simplest ideas (call it an Occam's razor impulse) that tells me that measuring temperatures over such long periods of time to these purported degrees of accuracy and precision is simply impossible. 0.5 degrees C over 150 years?

The only way this happens is if you takes averages of averages of averages, eliminate a bunch of readings and pretty much ignore some of the reality of such readings. And, BTW, you keep significant digits when, perhaps, you should not.

Here's a simple example in the spirit of Occam's razor thinking:

Take a look at this picture [2], source [3].

It is very easy to see that both where and when a temperature is measured can have a massive effect on the readings. Focusing on the peaks (both low and high), there's a roughly 3 degree C difference between the location with the lowest curve and the highest. Even if limited to temperatures from the same location, if your measurement is displaced by one hour the difference can is in the 1 to 2 degree range. If I measure the "Technical Services" location at 14:00 and "Music Hall" at 12:00 I get the same temperature. If I lump these measurements with measurements made at different location at different times, and average multiple times to aggregate across regions and time, well, there's no telling what the end result actually means. In this context, you'd be lucky to be able to claim results accurate within 1 degree and a precision of + or - 1 degree from there.

The evidence is clear, melting ice does not lie. However, these studies seem to be lacking something very fundamental. I can only put my finger on trying to extract accuracy and precision from data that cannot possibly support reporting at those levels. To make matters worse, most of these graphs plot deltas with respect to averages from what I will call hot periods.

What do I mean by this?

The graph in question does not plot a 150 year history with respect to the mean temperature spanning 150 years. They tend to use a contemporary average (I don't remember, let's say it is from 1980 to present day) as their baseline. Of course, with respect to this baseline everything before the reference period will look like an ice age (being dramatic). In my opinion, this makes for a more dramatic looking graph. Not necessarily a more truthful presentation, just more dramatic.

Someone mentioned in anther comment the idea of what you'd have to do to convince those skeptical about climate change. Well, for starters, the data and graphs presented has to be unimpeachable. Anyone can rightly ask "How could you possibly know the temperature in 1880 or 1910 to an accuracy of 0.1 C?". And they would be right to question such a claim. Not sure how to fix this. Just pointing out something that seems troublesome to me.

[0] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/papers/Jones-etal-1999.pd...

[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/anomalie...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322719908/figure/fi...

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/June-hourly-temperature-...

aw16211072• 5 years ago

I'm not a climate scientist, so take this comment with a hefty serving of salt.

measuring temperatures over such long periods of time to these purported degrees of accuracy and precision is simply impossible. 0.5 degrees C over 150 years?

"Impossible" seems like a bit too strong of a statement. In terms of the raw data, temperature stations have been around since the mid-to-late-1800s or so, and the equipment back then seems more than accurate and precise enough to provide good readings [0]. After that, it's "just" a matter of good record-keeping and accounting for other possible sources of temperature change.

As for other sources of uncertainty - I think climate scientists are well aware of those questions, and devote quite some time to analyzing uncertainties in the temperature record (e.g., [1]). You can probably find much more detailed information with some additional searching.

I'd expect that the reasoning and/or math behind the estimates is available (e.g., Berkeley Earth's methodology is available at [2]). There may be paywalls for other datasets; haven't gone looking enough to know.

If I lump these measurements with measurements made at different location at different times, and average multiple times to aggregate across regions and time, well, there's no telling what the end result actually means.

Are you sure that is what is actually done? The first two sources you provide seem to contradict the scenario you describe.

As described in your first link, the need to remove confounders from data is well-known in the field:

The most important [confounders] are (1) changes in instrumentation, exposure, and measurement technique; (2) changes in station location (both position and elevation); (3) changes in observation times and the methods used to calculate monthly averages; and (4) changes in the environment of the station, particularly with reference to urbanization that affects the representativeness of the temperature records.

Multiple techniques have been developed to identify and remove effects not caused by climate (e.g., Peterson et al. [3], referenced by your first link).

In addition, your first link describes why absolute temperatures are not used:

Anomaly values overcome most of the problems with absolute temperatures such as differences between stations in elevation, in observation times, the methods used to calculate monthly mean temperatures, and screen types.

This would mean that absolute temperature measurements from different locations and times are not naively combined as you described.

Your NOAA link more or less backs up the use of anomalies instead of absolute temperatures for the given reasons.

In general, I'd suspect that there are answers for most of the questions you bring up, but buried in one paper or another.

[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-05-28-000528...

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JD02...

[2] https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/3469/2020/essd-12-34...

[3] https://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Peterson_...

robomartin2• 5 years ago

"Impossible" seems like a bit too strong of a statement.

You might be right. Rather than a statement of fact, this is my opinion based on some four decades in engineering spanning a range from consumer to military/aerospace work. The measurements taken as factual in these models, from my perspective, defy what is possible across 150 years around the planet.

If you read through descriptions of the methodology you come across passages with a summary that looks like "average of the average of the average of the average". You can't just keep doing this without suffering a loss in significant figures. You would literally have to have accuracy and precision information on each sensor and for each measurement to then be able to propagate all of this carefully. Furthermore, you really need to know the standard deviation in order to understand the uncertainty in the measurements.

If we have a set of measurements in region 1 and the average uncertainty in the measurements is 0.5, while, in region 2, it is 0.3...what should this mean when you combine them with other regions in order to fabricate (because it is being fabricated through computation) a number to represent the entire northern hemisphere. To that point: A number representing an entire region, state, country, continent or hemisphere MUST HAVE an uncertainty attached to it. There is no such thing as "The northern hemisphere is at 18.2 degrees", that would be a silly statement to make.

Anyhow, I don't want to beat this one to death. Nothing is going to change. I just feel very uneasy with the way some of this data is presented. I can't remember ever seeing these presentations with a statement that quantifies the uncertainty in the numbers. When you do that, it is easy for the audience --particularly if they have no relevant training-- to assume the numbers given are an accurate and precise rendition of some measurement, when, in fact, that is never the case.

What would the graph presented in the article look like with error bands? Don't know.

An example of this is the typical graph for global air temperature that shows-up for most searches [0]. Not only does this not have any indication of measurement and propagated errors, it also resorts to calculating the temperature anomaly with respect to the average from 1961 onward rather than the entire period. Th graph would look very different if the average from 18xx onward was used. In fact, we would likely have to explain why and how everything from the 1920's and beyond is red.

You will occasionally find graphs that do seem to compare to the average of all data [1]. This one, of course, looks a lot less "violent" than the other presentation. Using a late average pushes 75% of the graph into "it was cold" territory and makes it look like things went to hell after about 1980. One should not be blamed for thinking that one approach fits a desired narrative far better than the other.

Anyhow, not sure what else to say. I am not convinced I am right. In order to get there I would have to do weeks of work reverse engineering the data and methodologies. No point in doing that. I am naturally very skeptical --which, I think, is a good thing-- so I'll stick to not being happy with the way things have been presented so far and hope to find something better in the future.

[0] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/imgheat/gl...

[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/imgheat/te...

jiggawatts• 5 years ago

It makes me laugh how IT people comment how the government has done nothing about this predicted, slow-moving catastrophe.

What have you done about switching to IPv6?

adrianN3• 5 years ago

We're doing okay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#/media/File:IP...

jooize• 5 years ago

I want to build on a piece of land a personal ecosystem that can sustain at least one adult human under extreme weather conditions.

Three loud climate warning signals

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