We know and have known the earth is warming. Since there is some natural variability, we don’t set a new record every year. But if there wasn’t, we would. And so it shouldn’t be a surprise to us when we do.
It's not concerning that we are setting a new record; we know that's bound to happen. It's the pace of increase that's pushing us towards uncharted territories. We didn't anticipate these rapid changes.
It is not uncharted. The Vikings were doing agriculture in Greenland, the Romans grew wine in England as far north as Lincolnshire, bison were roaming at altitudes that cannot be found at today.
There were periods in the past warmer than it is today. Climatologists once knew this, it was uncontroversial. But when they realized they could raise the importance of their field by predicting disaster, this history became problematic and was erased.
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.
The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."
Right - global warming as a function of climate change, it's not the climate that is collapsing, it's the ecology that ~8 billion people depend on to survive that is collapsing :)
Can you name some of those specific scientific doomsday predictions, that didn't come to pass? Not a prediction from some random internet dude, but an actual scientific IPCC prediction?
The climate models have, in fact, been accurate. Temperatures, sea ice, and so on, and marched up over the decades, as predicted. Buy worryingly, it appears those models were too conservative. Heat is now increasing faster than predicted. That's why this is news.
It’s not necessarily the reports themselves. It’s cnn and the media at large that take these reports, twist them and turn them into fear porn to fit the necessary mind control narrative. The reports are fine for the most part.
We are currently in a slow-motion traffic accident of our own making that we are only just starting to notice the effects of. But the "accident" has already happened, the rest is now just the physics playing out.
Some people have been saying as loudly as they can "watch out". They haven't been crying wolf, it's just a very slow wolf, but it's teeth are sharp.
> The ice caps still exist, half the world's countries aren't underwater
Is your understanding of climate collapse is limited to the one issue, the melting of the ice-caps, and concomitant sea-level rises?
That's a narrow view that doesn't remotely cover the complexity and scale of the problem. However, addressing that one, single issue:
> Arctic sea ice area (SIA) has been declining rapidly throughout the year during recent decades with a steeper decline since 2000
> Our observationally-constrained projections based on attribution results also suggest that we may experience an unprecedented ice-free Arctic climate in the next decade or two, irrespective of emission scenarios. This would affect human society and the ecosystem both within and outside the Arctic, through changing Arctic marine activities as well as further accelerating the Arctic warming and thereby altering Arctic carbon cycling.[1]
But as I said, it's a bigger problem than the polar ice melting. It's about the ocean absorbing CO2 and acidifying, inhibiting the growth of the shells of molluscs that live there; it's about over-fishing; it's about coral bleaching; it's about the ocean temperature spiking; the jet-stream; ecosystem encroachment; 200 species a day going extinct -- we're on day 189 of this year, so that's ... 37,800 since January 1st; it's about the increase rate of catastrophic fires.
Even if it "feels" relatively normal today, it's just the water temperature rising so slowly the lobster doesn't realise it's being cooked ...
Not trying to deny anything but with the length of records and a random distribution you’d still expect “hottest year” to happen pretty often. (Somebody please do the statistics)
With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often.
In other words… setting records means something, but less than one would expect by default.
The more valid statistic is something like n of the last 30 years have been the warmest on record, or something along those lines.
It must have been so nice to experience the climate in the 1890s, imagine summers which were just nice and short, winters with beautiful, high quality and consistent snow falls and more permanently snow capped mountains.
There are also natural long period climate cycles that global warming is on top of. Solar changes, small orbital and axis changes, long period climate resonances caused by many other things as well.
Basically everyone ever for thousands of years experienced different weather patterns as adults than as children. Also perception of weather as an adult and what actually gets remembered…
Climate is not naturally static and you can’t attribute every change to humans. There is a lot going on.
I'm not sure which random distribution you mean ... But if you assume a normal distribution with constant mean, and, say, 100 years of records, the chances of you still getting the hottest now are very very small
It's important to keep in mind that the sensationalism we see in this sort of reporting is generally far removed from the actual science.
Most of this stuff is built on models that are constantly being improved with more data, or in some cases being skewed to meet a predetermined desired outcome.
The earth is in the final stages at the end of an ice age.
It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact. We exited a major glacial period and have been, for 11000 years, ending an ice age (a period with glacial ice at both polar regions).
CURRENTLY, the period of time we are living in, is considered interglacial despite glaciers still covering significant portions of earth. The expectation is a return to major glaciation. This would be horrible. It is also the predominant condition throughout the history of earth.
> It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact.
Who is not recognizing that fact?
Where people are disagreeing with - and you've heard this before, don't act like this is new - is that us leaving an ice age doesn't explain the rapid rise in temperature we're experiencing. Previous ice ages haven't ended this abruptly. So what does your comment add here?
People keep throwing in things like this as if it was an actual insight instead of a distraction.
The state of climate will not have a direct effect on your life, the span of years you are alive. Not to a significant degree.
It can have an indirect effect on your life by the introduction of harmful regressive policies designed to "account" for a changing climate and assign blame to everyday people.
Everyday people do not cause any of the drivers of climate change. Large corporations, governments and militaries do cause these drivers.
So what I'm adding here is sense.
It makes no sense to cripple an economy and destroy the middle class when it is clear there will not be global cooperation in addressing climate change. To be clear we are talking about the fact that BRICs will not cripple their growth and economy for the sake of this guilt complex.
Most countries can't even make a measurable change in comparison to these groups.
> The state of climate will not have a direct effect on your life, the span of years you are alive. Not to a significant degree.
The state of the climate already has a direct effect on my life by making summers way hotter than normal. I hate the warm temperatures over weeks, and my grandparents literally haven't known these kinds of summers until the last couple of years. This wouldn't have shifted so fast if it was just the exit of the ice age.
And that's just me disliking warmth. There are people living in areas that now literally are getting too hot for humans, which they weren't previously. There are people living through catastrophes which most likely would have been less severe if not for climate change.
> It can have an indirect effect on your life by the introduction of harmful regressive policies designed to "account" for a changing climate and assign blame to everyday people.
It's having a worse effect just by itself!
> Everyday people do not cause any of the drivers of climate change. Large corporations, governments and militaries do cause these drivers.
And to work towards that fact you spread climate change denial in the form of "we're just exiting an ice age"?
Yes it is and your anecdotes don't mean much. You are saying the winters are less severe. The growing season is longer and it is generally more habitable.
>people living through catastrophes which most likely would have been less severe if not for climate change.
Disentangle some emotion from the facts. People are dying less than ever before due to catastrophes. People that die from natural disaster today, largely have encroached on land that was always disaster prone and built massive infrastructure. The cost of natural disasters today is a direct result of populating and constructing in areas that are prone to tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fire and flooding. It is almost completely preventable.
>you spread climate change denial
False. This is a blatant lie as my comment states clearly, I believe the climate is changing. We are exiting an ice age.
The solutions promoted by people like yourself, are going to cause greater harm than good because you choose to believe the climate should not change! Yes, you who choose to make foolish argument and use phrases like "climate change denial". Yes, you are in denial that the climate is allowed to change.
'The weather should be just the way it was when my grandparents remember the good old days' -you
No, sorry it is you and your internal strife with change that is the problem. Petition the government to change the ways companies and militaries pollute the environment. Leave the rest of us alone with your carbon tax bullshit that we must pay for.
>>> The state of climate will not have a direct effect on your life, the span of years you are alive. Not to a significant degree.
>> I describe the direct effect the state of climate is having on my life
> Yes it is and your anecdotes don't mean much.
What?
> The cost of natural disasters today is a direct result of populating and constructing in areas that are prone to tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fire and flooding. It is almost completely preventable.
False, natural disasters are happening more often and are more intense, leading people who didn't "encroach on Land" to suffer for it. Just look at the heat in large parts of Asia.
> False. This is a blatant lie as my comment states clearly, I believe the climate is changing. We are exiting an ice age.
I'm sure this felt very clever when you typed it, but you and I both know that I was referring to anthropomorphic climate change, which you are actively denying.
> The solutions promoted by people like yourself, are going to cause greater harm than good because you choose to believe the climate should not change!
Wrong. You know that is not my position, didn't act like you think it is.
Hey, I don't know you at all or your position. I don't assume anything other than the comments you make. You do seem to assume what I believe.
>you and I both know that I was referring to anthropomorphic climate change, which you are actively denying
I'm not denying anything about climate, I'm denying the severity of outcomes you claim. There is a major difference.
You should look into some data about natural disasters.
They cost more now. That's about it. Don't take some news infomercial segment as truth. Go read the statistics.
If someone makes a claim that something is "more severe" because the damage costs more to repair, then that is technically a factual statement. It doesn't further the position that the event was actually more severe than weather in the past.
The slight changes in weather you've experienced will not make your life shorter. You experience some discomfort because you aren't acclimated to warmer temperatures.
I'm claiming that the predictions of doom due to man made climate change are a farce. They are designed to get at you, emotionally.
It has worked.
The return to an ice age, even briefly (such as the Little Ice Age) would be truly catastrophic with today's population.
They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades.
Also, depending on where and how you measure, it will naturally be 'hotter' because the world is getting more urbanized. And cities are artificially hotter.
> People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever.
I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint. Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic?
It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about.
> I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint.
I didn't make a straw man complaint. Also straw man isn't a complaint. It's a fallacious form of argument.
> Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic?
You completely missed my point. I don't know if it is intentional or not. Maybe this is a language issue?
> It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about.
No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'.
> No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'.
... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ...
We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose, and most likely quite a bit before that. It's even explained in TFA:
> While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century, they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ...
> ... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ...
Yes. Either you don't understand what a straw man is or it really is a language issue. Is english your native language? You completely missed my original point. And you missed the point of my response.
> We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose
Civilization? We are talking about the 'hottest year on record'. Do you know what 'on record' means? It's only a few decades though many people mistake it to mean 'since forever'. It doesn't mean since civilization began. Also, civilization is about 5000 years old. Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. So even if it is the 'hottest' since civilization began, it really doesn't say much.
> '> While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century'
That's my point. Do you know what that means?
> they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ...
From 'on record' to agenda driven weasel words like 'almost certainly' and 'probably'. I remember it was 'almost certainly' and 'probably' likely that the world would end due to global warming by 2020.
I'm having flashbacks to a famous decades old climate denialism talking point heavily pushed by the Koch pro oil media think tanks.
One so famous that it was studied in depth by a prominent US physics professor [1] and (then) climate skeptic using some Koch funding.
The results of the 2013 Berkeley Earth land temperature data analysis on urban heat islands answers your concerns:
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. [1]
and
The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies. [2]
You missed the followup. People investigated BEST and discovered it was doing the same things with the same sorts of mistakes as other climatological temperature datasets. For example they classified the weather stations at Bangkok airport as "very rural". Like always with climatology the process they used to do all this is non-replicable, so people could see the mistakes but not diagnose how they happened or attempt to fix them. Plus, although Berkeley Earth claimed UHI was unimportant, basic checks like comparing the warming of cities vs more rural stations showed huge differences.
There's also the issue that BEST has diverged drastically from satellite observations. It's not possible for both sources to be true simultaneously as they claim to be measuring the same thing.
It's not hugely surprising that they claimed to investigate these concerns and then simply duplicated the bad methodologies that were being criticized in the first place. Berkeley Earth is run by a guy who has said, amongst other things,
"I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium."
In the same article where he said that he observed that anyone who took issue with the Mann hockey-stick history rewrites were attacked and people had engaged in mass resignations simply because papers disagreeing with it were published.
There's a fundamental philosophy of science issue here that can't be resolved with the "one more study" approach. Climatologists don't attempt to improve their source data quality. They don't build and operate weather station networks, they rely on others that were built for other purposes. Although the changes they claim to be monitoring are very small (like 0.1-0.2 C per decade) they don't set up the instruments they need to obtain such precise and accurate measurements. Instead they suck up data from literally any thermometer they can find and then apply algorithms that they claim correct the bias and corruption. This isn't scientifically valid. If scientists have doubts about their source data they're supposed to use error bars, but when did you ever see a temperature graph that had error bars? They never do because many of the stations they use report uncertainty intervals of anywhere from half a degree C to even 5 degrees C. These CIs are much wider than the size of the claimed trend and would thus destroy any ability to detect warming from the ground station network. So, they rely on this algorithmic approach, but that isn't convincing due to how frequently they decided their previous algorithms were wrong and rewrite the history of the climate.
> They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades.
It's the hottest it's ever been for human civilization, and it's going to keep getting hotter and hotter.
Rather than AC, which just deepens the problem by increasing our energy burn rate, we need more passive solar design. Plus more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
Also: Reduce upholstered furniture, books and similar, take trash out more regularly, remove all cardboard from groceries as soon as you get them home.
> Also: Reduce upholstered furniture, books and similar, take trash out more regularly, remove all cardboard from groceries as soon as you get them home.
What? I don't understand what any of these things accomplish, let alone a common element between them.
Perhaps. But if you don't want to be a statistic counted among the dead in the next heat wave, I recommend taking your trash out, getting rid of cardboard, etc to make the temp and humidity in your space more bearable.
During my divorce, I and my two teenaged sons moved in with relatives and the three of us occupied a single bedroom for nearly a year. We slept there, we kept all our possessions there and we stored SOME of the food we ate in that room, separate from the kitchen pantry for the rest of the family.
This was in Georgia, which is very hot and humid in the summer, and initially we had trouble sleeping because the room just stayed too hot and humid, especially when it was warm.
I have no idea why we did this, but one day we took all the cans of sodas out of the cardboard boxes and threw the boxes out and took other food items out of the cardboard boxes and repackaged some of it in Ziploc bags. And suddenly the room was cool and dry enough to be comfortable.
We thought we were imagining this. Like "Noooo, that can't be."
But there happened to be a thermometer in the window of this room and on subsequent occasions we were able to determine by repeating this that the temperature consistently dropped five degrees Fahrenheit whenever we removed all the cardboard from the food supplies stored in our room.
So it eventually became policy to take everything out of the cardboard box and throw away the cardboard box right after we got all the groceries home. We still do this.
Removing cardboard, etc, drops the temperature and humidity and most likely it is because cardboard et al is more or less slowly rotting. Kind of the same reason hay bails catch fire.
That's... fascinating. I'm immediately sceptical (I mean... insta-rotting cardboard causing a localized 5 degree temp increase? Really?) but I absolutely love that you and your kids found at least a small scientific outlet in what sounds like a rough time in everyone's lives. Practical real-world demonstrations of how you can use your brain to make your own life better are invaluable, especially in those teenage years when it seems like the entire world is trying to get them to conform into one thing or another.
You sound like a truly great parent and role model. Best of luck to you and your family.
No, you're right. This is the internet, and I should know better. Absolute cynicism and utter disregard for your fellow humanity is definitely the way to go. Thank you for teaching me the error of my ways - I'll try harder to be a worse person next time.
Silly me, I thought you were one of those well-meaning but misguided fools who imagined a girl needed vacuous pats on the head while not being taken seriously at all in order to encourage me to stay and add to gender diversity here, and never mind that I've been a member for 14 years and seem to probably have the most karma of any openly female member here.
I'm reasonably sure I couldn't even raise the temperature of the room by five degrees if I straight-up burned all that cardboard, but who knows. More testing needed.
Agreed. It reads like they opened the fridge for awhile to remove the cardboard and that cooled the room down. Problem being that the fridge will then heat the room more to cool itself back down.
I will do exactly as you say, and delete my account nd never come to this nasty site. Your wish is my command. But in all seriousness this site is very awful and mostly filled with like minded close minded intellectuals that are pushing the mainstream narrative and cannot stand any real diversity of opinion. So rhe joke is on you, funny guy. You should go join a circus.
There is one coal fired plant remaining in the UK (Ratcliffe-on-Soar), roughly 1.5GW total capacity. A substantial portion of UK electricity consumption is now domestic wind, clean hydro from Norway, and low carbon nuclear from France.
Roughly 61% of electricity used came from low carbon sources over the last 12 months. The coal plant in question will be retired next year (October 2024).
Oh this is a lot less bleak than the title of the article suggested, as you can see I didn't actually read it. Anyway the irony is still palpable, I could almost taste it in the air when I saw the headline
The angle the press went with is that solar doesn't work when it's too hot so we need to fire up the coal. Except that day solar produced a third of the UKs power, one of its best days of the year and we didn't actually use coal after all. The entire premise of that press push was a serious distortion of reality.
Can you please provide detail on how mentioning the existence interests of the source you provided is ad hominem? This is a new definition of ad hominem I don't think I've encountered before.
Anyone who believes cnn at this point I feel sorry for. They’ve discredited themselves numerous times. They and media more generally are known for selling fear and pushing certain narratives because fear sells. And operation mockingbird was never really concluded. Psy ops are now more ubiquitous than ever.
And it’s less hot now than the last few years where I live. And I don’t live in a big city. Big cities are hot as hell, and should be abandoned or completely redesigned because they are unlivable hell holes.
It's not "cnn". This has been widely reported by diverse scientific groups. Countless sources.
And it doesn't matter what the weather is like where you are. We're talking climate here - broad trends over broad areas, over time.
Truly, if some folks don't understand climate change at this point, and fall back to psyops and similar nonsense, there isn't much that can be done for them.
Really? So you say “believe science”? And science is settled? I have been to a bunch of colloquiums on this subject and this science is far from settled. Anthropogenic greenhouse effect is actually a forth order effect, right there after a third order natural greenhouse effect.
And do I need to remind you which ones are the first and second order effects?
And psy ops are definitely effective, just look around yourself. Or at the mirror.
If you have ever had to deal with an air conditioner isn't cooling because of low freon, you'd know that the problem is because the coils get.. too.. cold. They get so cold that water in the air freezes around the coils to be the point there is little air flow possible. Why?
When the freon is low, the freon expands too much into the coils. More expansion, more temperature drop in the coils. Additionally, the compressor has too little freon to compress to sent out to the radiator. The local coil's temperature has gone down, but the overall temperature of the system has gone up. This is the difference between weather (local) and climate (overall average). The weather of the coil is cooler, the climate of the A/C system is hotter.
Global warming is creating changes in the energy flow, both atmospheric and oceanic. Consequently, you may have locally cooler temperatures because hotter temperatures in other create blocks energy movement that would otherwise heat your area.
Accounts without much posting history here get rate limited, as do accounts that we've penalized for posting too many low-quality comments or getting involved in flamewars. Unfortunately, your account is doing mostly the latter; in fact, flamebait on divisive topics is literally all it has posted so far.
That's not the intended use of the site, and we end up having to ban such accounts. (No, not because we disagree with your views—we basically don't care about that. We're just trying to have a specific kind of forum here.)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. But please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> A few hundred years ago before the industrial revolution the earth or at least part of it were hotter.
Which is it?
Was the mean global tempreture higher ("hotter" overall) or was it the same mean global tempreture with the usual climate cell to climate cell washovers making some a bit warmer and others a bit colder.
The assertion of AGW is that mean global tempreture has been essentially constant for some 200K years and has only recently 'suddenly' started to rapidly change (by environmental stability timescales) over the past century as a result of human activity pulling up billions of tonnes of formally buried carbon sequested in fossil fuels.
> And it’s less hot now than the last few years where I live.
It's a good thing that the statement being made isn't about your locality. I'm confused as to how this addresses the topic, since no one is making claims about all localities heating up at a universal rate, and the only people spreading the fallacy that climate change means "everywhere heating all at once equally" are the people who know very little about the topic in the first place...
But hey, the temp is lower where you live so I guess the topic's closed!
Climate change is THE psy op. I know a thing or two about it. I myself was in the climate change camp/cult for a while. The hot weather this summer is driven primarily by the El Nino which is a natural cycle. So yes, we’ll have weird and in some places (especially densely populated cities) hot weather for about 2-5 years, but then I predict temperature will go down.
Greenhouse effect is a third order effect, maybe a second order, but that’s a huge stretch. I am being generous.
Edit: I don’t like being robbed on the ability to reply and being gaslit at the same time. “You posting too fast, slow down, thanks” my ass. If anything, it just gives me more reason to believe that there’s a narrative and any and all dissenting voices are being supressed. Under fair conditions, I’d debate anyone on this subject because as I have said previously, I can see through the bullshit. Consider this my last comment on this subject. I now have to go and save the planet from more psyops, like the war in Ukraine is not a proxy war and was unprovoked. Bye!
> Edit: I don’t like being robbed on the ability to reply and being gaslit at the same time. “You posting too fast, slow down, thanks” my ass. If anything, it just gives me more reason to believe that there’s a narrative and any and all dissenting voices are being supressed. Under fair conditions, I’d debate anyone on this subject because as I have said previously, I can see through the bullshit. Consider this my last comment on this subject. I now have to go and save the planet from more psyops, like the war in Ukraine is not a proxy war and was unprovoked. Bye!
Honestly, this site is so awful you should probably just delete your account and never come back. That'll teach us!
Phew, then global temperature should be going down aaaaany minute now: "Since 2000, El Niño events have been observed in 2002–03, 2004–05, 2006–07, 2009–10, 2014–16, 2018–19, and beginning in 2023."
