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The World Was Cooler In 2021 Than 2020. That's Not Good News. (wired.com) 146

2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news?

No. One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It's the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing the top layer of water toward Asia, causing deeper, colder waters to rush to the surface to fill the void. This in turn influences the atmosphere, for instance changing the jet stream above the United States and leading to more hurricanes in the Atlantic. The sea itself cools things off by absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have had an additional influence, but not in the way you might think. As the world locked down in 2020, fewer emissions went into the sky, including aerosols that typically reflect some of the sun's energy back into space. "If you take them away, you make the air cleaner, then that's a slight warming impact on the climate," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a Thursday press conference announcing the findings. But as economic activity ramped back up in 2021, so did aerosol pollution, contributing again to that cooling effect. The 2021 temperature drop "may be possibly due to a resumption of activity that produces aerosols in the atmosphere," Schmidt said...

Today's findings are all the more alarming precisely because 2021 managed to overcome these cooling effects and still tally the sixth-highest temperature. And while global temperatures were cooler in 2021 than the year before, last year 1.8 billion people lived in places that experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded, according to a report released today by Berkeley Earth. This includes Asian countries like China and North and South Korea, African nations like Nigeria and Liberia, and in the Middle East places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. "We talk a lot about global average temperatures, but no one lives in the global average," says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. "In fact most of the globe, two-thirds of it, is ocean, and no one lives in the ocean — or very few people at least. And land areas, on average, are warming much faster than the rest of the world...."

Last summer in western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, absurd temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit killed hundreds of people. According to Hausfather, the heat wave in Portland, Oregon, would have been effectively impossible without climate change, something like a once-every-150,000-year event.

It's a fascinating article, that looks at trouble spots like Antarctica's sea level-threatening "Doomsday Glacier" and a warming Gulf of Mexico, mapping the intensity of 2021's temperature anomalies along with trend graphs for both global temperatures and land-vs-ocean averages. It touches on how climate change is impacting weather — everything from rain and floods to wildfires and locusts — as Bridget Seegers, an oceanographer at NASA, points out that "Extremes are getting worse. People are losing their homes and their lives and air quality, because the wildfires are bad."

But Seegers somehow arrives at a positive thought. "There's just a lot going on, and I want people to also feel empowered that we understand the problem. It's just this other issue of deciding to take collective action....

"There's a lot of reasons for optimism. We're in charge. This would be a lot worse if we're like, 'Oh, it's warming because we're heading toward the sun, and we can't stop it.'"

(Thanks to Slashdot reader Sanja Pantic for sharing the article!)
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The World Was Cooler In 2021 Than 2020. That's Not Good News.

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  • by sectokia ( 3999401 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @09:52PM (#62176345)
    Reached its highest ever 2021. Coincidence?
    • I can't help but notice that 2 decades into the 21st century, we are dealing with a 19th century problem.

    • I'm a hipster. I was on this world *before* it was cool.
  • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @10:08PM (#62176369) Journal
    A one-year variation is neither good or bad. Average temperatures over a year fluctuate based on weather patterns. Averaging over the year reduces these variations but does not eliminate them. Climate change is only visible on longer time scales. Look at the average global temperature over a few decades and the trend is clear and concerning.

    If every time there is a slight downward fluctuation in temperature, you try to do some analysis that makes it sound worse and do not do the same thing when there is an upward fluctuation to perhaps make it seem less-bad you are introducing a bias. The long-term trends are bad enough to concern anyone - just stick to them and explain what a statistical fluctuation is.
    • by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @10:21PM (#62176391) Homepage

      A one-year variation is neither good or bad. Average temperatures over a year fluctuate based on weather patterns. Averaging over the year reduces these variations but does not eliminate them. Climate change is only visible on longer time scales.

      Wish I had mod points, +1 insightful.

      It would be good if more people (on both sides of the debate) would keep this in mind; one year, or even two or three years, is not really the issue. Climate change is a long term thing, the issue is the long term trend. The slope of the line is what matters... any single year's data point is just noise.

      The press, however, does love writing about breaking records. "Hottest year ever!" is a headline. "This year's data continues on a trendline that's been going on every year for the last few decades" is not. But the record years aren't really the issue, the issue is the long term trend.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JanSand ( 5746424 )
      The optimistic viewpoint that humanity is in charge of vital actions to keep the planet livable strikes me as most peculiar as humanity has fully demonstrated its full incompetence to understand and act accordingly. If the fox is not only currently in charge of the henhouse but encouraging herds of foxes to enter, we hens should not feel any sense of security.
      • The optimistic viewpoint that humanity is in charge of vital actions to keep the planet livable strikes me as most peculiar

        Really, why? There is plenty of evidence that species can - and indeed have - radically changed our planet given by the fact that the air is full of oxygen. Before photosynthesizing algae evolved the Earth's atmosphere was radically different and yet one of the most primitive lifeforms there is completely changed the entire planet by emitting a waste product it had no use for. Is it really so hard to believe that we can't do the same?

        Of course, keeping the planet liveable is not entirely under our contr

    • Your premise has promise but you can't just look at a few decades and call it a trend when there have been hundreds and thousands of years of different climate trends. Beyond that, I have a huge problem with the author claiming that "we are in charge". Are you? I highly doubt that.

      • Your premise has promise but you can't just look at a few decades and call it a trend when there have been hundreds and thousands of years of different climate trends.

        The Milankovitch cycles are well explained by various physical phenomena such as precession of the Earth's axis of rotation etc. These do indeed tend to happen over thousands of years. However, the recent data show a rapid upward trend in temperature on the scale of decades that is not at all consistent with these natural cycles and which is far more rapid.

        As for being in charge think of it like driving a car. There are certain things you have no control over which may cause you to crash but there are a

  • by willy_me ( 212994 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @10:23PM (#62176397)
    If we have a colder year it just means that more heat went into the ocean. And as the ocean warms, it expands. People have been told that melting glaciers are the main cause of the rising sea level. They are wrong, it is actually the thermal expansion of the ocean. So when scientists say that we want to limit the temperature rise of the ocean to 1.5 deg C, they are really saying they want to limit the rise of the ocean to ~ 0.6m. And that is ignoring glaciers and ice in Antarctica.
    • That is it. During the freeze in early 2021, like -20 in midwest, I checked out the anomoly: Way below average in US, way above average in arctic. Extent sea ice is actually surprisingly high this year, but its crazy thin: https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/... [wpmucdn.com]
    • They are wrong, it is actually the thermal expansion of the ocean.
      At the moment perhaps (but I doubt it).
      In future: definitely not.

      If al ice in Antarctica and Greenland etc. melts we have a sea level rise of 150m - 200m. Has nothing to do with warming ocean.

      • All of the ice in Antarctica and Greenland is not going to melt. For that to happen the temperature rise would have to be extreme. As the temperature rises and weather patterns change there will be melt but there will also be other places that glaciers start to build. Not enough to compensate for the melt but enough to make it so these dire predictions have no chance of becoming reality. But the fact is we do not know exactly how it will work out - and that is the biggest problem.

        The ocean is an aver

      • If your sea level rise statement were true, the average elevation of Antarctica+Greenland would be about 5 km and all of the amount above current sea level would have to be ice. That's about twice the actual figure.
  • by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @10:25PM (#62176401) Journal

    This would be a lot worse if we're like, 'Oh, it's warming because we're heading toward the sun, and we can't stop it.'"

    If we want to cool things down, we just need to move a little further away [youtu.be]!

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @10:30PM (#62176407)

    I'm skeptical of this conclusion.

    https://earthobservatory.nasa.... [nasa.gov]

    Mt. Pinatubo released a large amount of aerosols high in the atmosphere and it still took 15 months to create 1F of cooling.

    • It took 15 months for europe to drop. right now, this is measurements on America's west coast. So where is the influence coming from? China
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yea, sure, "China". No connection to all the crap the US is putting in the atmosphere. It is just those evil commie CO2 molecules. Fine capitalist CO2 would never cause anything like global warming.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Budenny ( 888916 )

          The idea that US emissions are any different in their effect from Chinese ones is of course ridiculous. But it is a readily verifiable fact that China is emitting around 10 billion tons of CO2 a year, which is about double the US emissions of around 5 billion. And its rising.

          And it is obvious that if 5 billion tons is having an effect on global temperatures, 10 billion must have a larger effect. Perhaps even double?

          The other big difference between China and the US is that China doesn't seem to think ther

        • When you have massive localized heating like this, you look to the west. What is west
        • Do you have a CLUE of how winds work? If America's emission was causing heating, it would be east coast America, and Europe that would see it.
          Look at the westerlies [wikipedia.org]
          What winds flow into west coast of North America? It is NOT American.
  • Temperature rises: bad
    Temperature falls: bad
    More hurricanes: climate change, bad
    Less hurricanes: climate change, bad

  • It seems that the aerosol/dust effect is currently cooling earth by around 1C. Take into account that 1.5C is pretty much "locked in" without that effect being taken into account, and that the aerosol/dust will need to go away, we already have 2.5C ensured. That comes with some of the really nasty effects and a lot of people dead or needing to flee.

    All that talk about limiting it to 1.5C is just a smokescreen so some people (enemies of all of humanity is too kind a term for them) can get richer than they al

  • by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Sunday January 16, 2022 @02:56AM (#62176749)

    I'm not seeing any reasons, to be honest.

    If the global pandemic only shaved off around 4%-7% of emissions, with the economic impact it had - and as soon as we saw lifting of lockdowns etc. in various regions, the output ramped back up and again - how do we globally, make these reductions willingly?

    We don't, because it quite simply isn't going to happen.
    In case those who are so optimistic hadn't noticed, many third world countries have no options but to continue burning fossil fuel.
    These are the same regions where just 10-15 percent of people have been vaccinated, whilst 60-70 percent have been in wealthier nations.
    Do the math - do you really think wealthier nations are going to foot the bill for the sheer scale of a transition away from fossil fuels, when they couldn't even foot the bill for global vaccination programmes?

    Hell, no.

    We're absolutely going over 1.5c and will probably see 2c before the century is out or higher, depending on tipping points.
    It's going to be a case of "last chance saloon", as humanity rushes into some sort of grand scale terraforming project to reduce CO2 or find another way of cooling the planet.

    If we were to stop ALL CO2 emissions tomorrow, we're looking at 20 to 30 years before we even notice a global temperature decline - and in fact, there would be an increase, as the effect of global dimming is no longer prevalent.

    It is going to require engineering at an unprecedented scale to solve this problem, so, it's more likely humanity is going to have to live with the consequences for centuries to come - and it's a potential civilisation end scenario - if we can no longer grown grain at scale, game over.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Budenny ( 888916 )

      You're definitely right on one thing. Global emission reduction is obviously not going to happen. It was obvious to many of us before COP26. It was obvious as long ago as Paris to anyone who looked at the numbers. But after COP26 it is undeniable.

      People can try to spin it, but the big and growing emitters have not signed up to targets in tons that will result in any reductions. Anyone thinking clearly about this has to accept that the world is headed for emission totals well north of 40 billion tons a

      • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
        European nations have basically signed up for net zero by 2050, although not accounting for imports. That wipes about 5Gt off the slate. Ditto for the USA if it also commits - another 5Gt. It's unlikely that you could do this sooner than 2050. India is looking at 2070. In terms of global reduction, it depends on what emerging nations do. If they all end up with a similar commitment to that of India then we might avoid anything worse than around 2C above pre-industrial levels. However, it's going to need a l
      • This is a global issue - and it's a chaotic one, as the results of a warming planet are not felt equally.
        It isn't just about drought, it's about ALL extremes and the guaranteed impact of an increasing number of extreme events.

        The worlds food production, in terms of the "bread baskets", is flexible.
        If one of the main regions has a poor harvest, others can take up the slack.
        What happens when multiple regions do?

        It's about the averages.
        The so-called "once in a generation" extreme weather event, the "once in a

  • by takochan ( 470955 ) on Sunday January 16, 2022 @03:16AM (#62176769)

    The erruption of Hunga Tonga volcano this morning was absolutely massive, and on the scale of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Like in 1991, so much ash has been blown into the air all the way up to the stratosphere.

    This will likely result (like in 1991), cooler temperatures around the world for the next few years (folks in northern climates probably remember the year without a summer in 1993).

    Also look to much more rain in California over the next few years (ending the drought) due to colder temperatures, like happened last time as well.

    You'll also get airplane windows that are hard to see out of as they will all get scratched up again, like they did in 1992-1994 flying through all the ash in the upper atmosphere.

    • Not clear from the information I've seen so far.

      The Hunga Tonga volcano certainly shot a lot of ash and water vapor into the atmosphere, but so far I haven't seen any of the reports saying it put sulfates into the atmosphere. Sulfate aerosols are the cooling mechanism of explosive eruptions like Pinotubo.

      Possibly some later reports will give more information.

    • (folks in northern climates probably remember the year without a summer in 1993).
      If you mean e.g. Germany, the 1990s were all extremely hot years.

      • (folks in northern climates probably remember the year without a summer in 1993). If you mean e.g. Germany, the 1990s were all extremely hot years.

        And now we have the eternal summer, and if anything it's made people take climate science less seriously

  • I think the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters" [amazon.com] by Steven Koonin does an excellent job laying out the actual science behind climate change. Do yourself a favor and give it a read, especially if you have any concerns about catastrophic climate change.

    On a slightly different note, there's a thread here about how a change in a trend of only one year's duration means nearly nothing since it's so short. In global climate terms, the minimum meaningful time period fo

    • I think the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters" [amazon.com] by Steven Koonin does an excellent job laying out the actual science behind climate change. Do yourself a favor and give it a read, especially if you have any concerns about catastrophic climate change.

      Thanks, will check it out

    • Yeah,
      then go check out Patrick Moore's Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom
      Then Bjorn Lomborg.

      And in the end read the IPCC report. Shouldn't take longer than the 2 books.

    • he minimum meaningful time period for detecting a long-term trend is around 10,000 years.
      Nope it is not. Otherwise you never really would detect trends.

      That's roughly half the period length of the ice house/hot house cycle that the globe has been repeatedly going through for as far back as we can measure it.
      That is nonsense. Perhaps you want to look up how long a typical "ice age" and a typical "warm period" is.

  • It is more than wearing thin that the world is in crisis. Especially when the only solutions offered are a tax scam, or going green, which is panning out to mean raping the planet further for a different set of raw materials than this popular last century.
  • Damn it. If this keeps up we'll have an epidemic of people putting up their thumbs going "Eeey".

  • This is un-falsifiable crap, and therefore not scientific. This is exactly the BS Marxists and Freudians was spreading and which caused Karl Popper to emphasize falsifying in his critical rationalism.
  • Extreme climate change means storm swells,
    so surf's up dude

  • I've been saying for 10+ years that the weather would be turning cooler. And it will CONTINUE to be cooler, until 2050 or so. And no, it ISN'T good news, since more people die of cold than of heat, and this will be ESPECIALLY problematic as everybody is preparing for heat, and the cold is likely to catch people off-guard.

    Cold is especially bad because it will limit crop development, and lead to famine.

  • "Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same numbers to draw different conclusions" --Evan Esar (b. 1899)

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