Just how hot was July? Hotter than anything on record

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193723648/just-how-hot-was-july-hotter-than-anything-on-record

by jshen • 3 years ago

66 84 3 years ago

I heard an excellent quip on the Dan Le Betard radio show (which is in Miami for context) with a bunch of 20 something contributors, which kind of went like this?

"Hey, Sara, did you know this was the hottest summer recorded?"

"You mean the summer that in 20 years we look back on as being a nice comfortable summer?"

Which brings home the reality: the global temperature is going to keep going up, no matter what. The train is moving faster and faster, and it is a biiiig train

bgun• 3 years ago

It’s not the hottest summer of your life, it’s the coolest summer for the rest of your life!

AtlasBarfed2• 3 years ago

... why is this flagged? This is the exact quote I was looking for.

archerx9• 3 years ago

We had a cold summer in Switzerland, I am disappointed because I was promised some heat! I got hail, rain and cold summer days instead.

secretsatan4• 3 years ago

I'm happy it's been cooler this year, summers have been getting too warm, my flat does not keep cool well. I always liked the summer storms here though, especially if you have a good vantage point to watch them roll in.

tetris11• 3 years ago

I've lived in roof apartments all my life (my bedroom in my parents house was a loft conversion), but for the first time moved into an apartment on the second floor.

The difference is night and day. No longer do I sweat in summer, freeze in winter, and stay up all night listening to the rain (albeit I do sometimes miss the soothing quality it had). I think roof apartments are going to get a lot less popular in the next decade

yourusername• 3 years ago

I think most of Europe above (and in) the alps was cool and wet this summer.

dagw• 3 years ago

Except the northern parts of Sweden (and Norway?) which had a really nice summer.

odiroot• 3 years ago

Same here in South England.

shawabawa3• 3 years ago

July and August haven't been great, but June was the hottest June on record

morsch2• 3 years ago

July wasn't record setting in Switzerland, but still 1-2C hotter than the long term average 1990-2020. So no, not cold.

https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/ueber-uns/meteoschweiz-blo...

archerx9• 3 years ago

People are downvoting me for pointing out facts that I have observed that are contradicting the NPR narrative? I thought hacker news was better than this. Very disappointing.

secretsatan4• 3 years ago

Well, the article is about Europe, and Switzerland is one of the smaller countries in Europe, to say you're contradicting the narrative is a bit of a stretch.

lm284697• 3 years ago

You gave an anecdote about how you personally felt as if it was a valid counter point for scientifically measured continent wide record breaking temps

Of cours HN will trash you... what did you expect

cjalmeida2• 3 years ago

Yeah, we're better than weighting in anecdotal data when there's plenty of high quality measurements from multiple sources readily available.

joemazerino2• 3 years ago

Considering the top comment is also an anecdote about 3rd world polluters being the least guilty or "being mad at climate change deniers" are you really surprised?

throw2020201• 3 years ago

You had hopes for HN? This place shouldn't be taken seriously. Both the upvoting/downvoting system and the majority of users are dumb.

dzonga• 3 years ago

what makes me mad - is the seasons are now so screwed up and unpredictable. that life is barely enjoyable anymore.

what also sucks is the effect on 3rd world countries - which due to lack of industrialization are low polluters.

but the biggest thing that makes me -- mad are the climate change deniers.

saikia812• 3 years ago

cool heads prevail. The division is a political ploy. I understand you anger as I feel it too. Don't let the hate poison the conversation. Sadly we need patience for unity, and unity to solve this long run.

mdekkers4• 3 years ago

solve this long run.

What “long run”

0xb0565e487• 3 years ago

Why does that make your life barely enjoyable? Curious to know what kind of lifestyle or living you have that the weather would have such a big impact on you.

gmerc5• 3 years ago

At current temperatures outdoor exercise in Singapore even after dark is waaay less enjoyable than even a few years ago. It will be unenjoyable soon.

sh4rks• 3 years ago

Being in nature and sunlight is arguably one of the few truly enjoyable activities on this planet

archerx9• 3 years ago

Third world countries are the biggest polluters from ruining their rivers and in emissions.[1][2]

but the biggest thing that makes me made is people posting misinformation on the internet while acting righteous about it.

[1] https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons... [2] https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/most-polluted-rivers-...

not_a_shill• 3 years ago

but the biggest thing that makes me -- mad are the climate change deniers.

Don't say things like "life is barely enjoyable anymore" if you have any aspirations of changing their minds. (and you should if you care about the environment)

It's primarily an in/outgroup deal and what they perceive as melodrama just makes the divide worse. These people usually hunt/fish/enjoy the outdoors too. You can connect with that.

jokethrowaway• 3 years ago

Way colder than average in Europe, except for Spain which hit 40+

Sea temperature has also been pretty low for this time of the year

lm284697• 3 years ago

Sure sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_European_heat_waves

archerx9• 3 years ago

I live in Europe and it has been a colder than normal summer. Two/three weeks ago kind of felt like autumn already and we got pelted with hail at the end of July. Have I just been feeling the weather wrong or something?

gmerc5• 3 years ago

I guess france, greece and Germany don’t count.

And we complain about LLMs hallucinating.

anigbrowl5• 3 years ago

July has been pretty mild in California, while the rest of the US baked in misery. Geography interacts with the weather and interacts localities in different ways. The cooler temperatures and higher levels of rainfall (eg in Ireland) are also attributable to climate change, when you take things like mountain ranges and the gulf stream into account.

RagnarD• 3 years ago

Given the age of the earth - 4.543 billion years - the roughly 200 years of human recordkeeping, even assuming a true statement, makes that 4.4e-6 percent of the age of the earth. Or put another way, the record doesn't account for the other 99.99956% of earth's history. Just a reminder.

saikia812• 3 years ago

This is not a random sampling issue. There is a pattern over years, that any engineer can recognize.

lm284697• 3 years ago

"Earth used to be a molten rock so what's 5 degrees more, nothing to see here"

That's how this argument sounds

adammarples• 3 years ago

It's obviously not quite such a nonsense statement, 99.999% of human history is in that range, too.

gmerc5• 3 years ago

I’m always surprised why people make this argument.

Is this argument “it’s normal and not man made?”

Is the argument just normal grammar Nazis stuff, intentionally latching on to the ability to redirect context?

Is the argument that earth will be fine, implicitly dismissing we should care about our species sustainability?

Why oh why I wonder.

“Just a reminder, “Just asking a question” and “I find this interesting”… are basically smokebombs people throw into a conversation- but why?

“Just asking a question” here…

archerx9• 3 years ago

The argument is it is easy to manipulate statistics for both fun(power/control) and or profit!

willcipriano4• 3 years ago

Back in my day science wasn't so defensive. They would simply explain how they can use this tiny amount of data to draw the conclusions they are presenting.

mattbrewsbytes• 3 years ago

Maybe its not an argument at all and someone is just pointing out statistical facts? Any inference from that statistic is entirely in your own brain, with your own thoughts, interpretations, biases, etc.

I program computer chips and have a high school level of earth science under my belt so I have a hard time understanding how we extrapolate out things like 1 degree increase in temp means we're cooking the planet and there's no turning back. What I would like someone to explain is how our 200-300 years of measuring things can be extrapolated out to have any certainty around future or past events.

I (and I assume others) aren't asking to "smokebomb a conversation". I genuinely see headlines and understand we haven't been taking measurements for very long in comparison to Earth being here, and actually wonder these things. I would love to read thru something that presents it all in layman's terms (with references) that can describe how we arrive at any conclusions. I'm not denying that the temperature is increasing or that humans have a detrimental effect on the atmosphere. When I read mainstream media "reporting" on things I am knowledgeable about they get lots of details wrong and often come to wrong conclusions. Knowing that, I'm more like a 5 year old that keeps asking "how do you know that? / why?" Thanks for reading thru my brain dump.

svrtknst• 3 years ago

For a long stretch of time, carnivorous dinosaurs roamed the Earth. For a long time, it was molten rock.

Would you like dinosaurs or molten rock in your apartment? I wouldn't.

c222• 3 years ago

The record accounts for more history than you are giving it credit for [0].

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

fanatic2pope• 3 years ago

Also a reminder that human record keeping is not the only way we can know what range past temperatures were.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natu...

anigbrowl5• 3 years ago

I like how you pretend not to know about the existence of ice core samples or geology. Honest people make their best arguments first, shills their worst.

circlefavshape2• 3 years ago

Ireland had the wettest summer since records began :(

macinjosh2• 3 years ago

The Media: When it’s really cold , weather is not climate. When it is really hot it is definitely climate change.

secretsatan4• 3 years ago

That's very not true

anigbrowl5• 3 years ago

False. When Texas was hit with an unusually cold weather event a couple years ago, causing the power grid to fail, plenty of reports highlighted this as an example of climate change. Don't be obtuse, it sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn't persuade anyone.

joemazerino2• 3 years ago

Actually the Earth is known to have had hotter conditions in the past through extrapolation. It just doesn't line up with the Current Thing so it's inconvenient to talk about.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11647-climate-myths-i...

skulk2• 3 years ago

No, it's not inconvenient at all to point out that the earth warmed in the past and mass extinctions resulted (according to the article). In fact, it's a great data point. Did you even read the article you linked, or just don't understand what a mass extinction means for humanity?

nick-of-time• 3 years ago

The last time global temperatures rose anywhere near this fast, it resulted in the extinction of 90% of macroscopic species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

Just how hot was July? Hotter than anything on record

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