2023 Will Be Remembered as the Year Climate Change Arrived (msn.com) 159
This summer 80 million Americans were experiencing 105-degree heat. And tonight the Washington Post identifies what was unique about 2023's weather: "the heat's all-consuming relentlessness.
"It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared..." Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of "global boiling," as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, November 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels.
Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records.
In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it "mind-boggling." The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600. In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce... At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub...
One explanation for 2023's extreme heat is El Niño — a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year's heat — amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels — is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there's not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat. That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame.
This year, then, will wind up as the first — and almost surely not the last — in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid.
The article includes two more sobering statistics:
"It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared..." Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of "global boiling," as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, November 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels.
Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records.
In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it "mind-boggling." The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600. In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce... At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub...
One explanation for 2023's extreme heat is El Niño — a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year's heat — amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels — is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there's not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat. That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame.
This year, then, will wind up as the first — and almost surely not the last — in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid.
The article includes two more sobering statistics:
- "The University of Maine's Climate Change Institute logs daily global temperatures going back to 1940. From this July on, almost without fail, every daily temperature in 2023 topped the daily temperature from the same date in any of the prior 83 years."
- "In Brazil, the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon's main tributaries, fell to its lowest level since record keeping began more than a century earlier."
The year 2023 will also be known for El Nino (Score:2, Insightful)
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"Climate change" is propaganda to help companies that otherwise wouldn't make it. Usually from "do as I say, not as I do" type people like Al Gore flying to climate change conferences in their private jets.
Exactly. Why am *I* (someone who is definitely *not* a liberal Democrat) playing with solar power? Why did I invest nearly $15k into building my own mostly self-supporting energy system?
Three reasons:
1. Crazy libertarians like energy independence, just not being forced to do it at gunpoint.
2. I should "break even" on the investment in about 12 years--and not only is that right around the time my kids will be moving out, but that move will reduce my electricity usage significantly causing my to more th
Re:The year 2023 will also be known for El Nino (Score:5, Informative)
I love how the information in the breathlessly hysterical article isn't even correct.
The "105F" temperature recorded came from select weather stations located near airports and other traditional "hot spots". Just like the 110F "ocean temperature" readings - taken from a single harbor dock in Florida, which were 20F+ hotter than actual ocean temperatures after a week of high temps...
Plus, of course, ignoring El Nino.
Watch, next year goes back to record snowfall...
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Did I fucking say anything about thermometers which are wrong?
No, I mentioned thermometers - weather stations - which are intentionally located in artificial hotspots. They're measuring the temperature correctly, they've just been positioned strategically to skew upwards. Then the media latches onto a specific station's readings and writes about it breathlessly for a week, causing people who are bad at rational thought to breathlessly talk about the sky falling.
This has been well documented for decades and
US Climate Reference Network (Score:2, Informative)
Re:US Climate Reference Network (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: US Climate Reference Network (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yes because it was posted here and this is a USA centric site. Unfortunately for you every country is posting the same stories about their own countries, so no your USA "example" does not hand wave away the results.
Europe just broke the previous record for hottest summer on record, the previous record was the year before. Interestingly it wasn't just broken slightly, it was broken by 0.66C, which is more than the entire margin set by the previous 9 records.
Australia had the hottest winter on record. Likewis
Luckyo's climate denier troll site? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are you bothering to link that?
Re: US Climate Reference Network (Score:3)
Actually, it agrees with the global data and shows warming at the anticipated rate per decade (which isn't much in the short term this network has been operating).
https://climatefeedback.org/cl... [climatefeedback.org]
Probably not (Score:3, Insightful)
As things get progressively worse, nobody will have time to remember when things started to get harder to ignore. Not that this will stop the usual deniers from continuing to deny.
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Not that this will stop the usual deniers from continuing to deny.
So you have read the comments here already, I see.
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No need. These people are basically so deep in denial that they must be utterly panicked by now. Fear of changes, mental inflexibility, an in-group deeply stuck in denial and the like. All pretty unflattering qualities and not conductive to survival.
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Hahaha, you wish. Most insightless comment of the year so far.
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And even more insightless! Nice!
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not conductive to survival.
How typically you, always finding a silver lining even on the darkest cloud. :)
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Was that the one that brought the human race down to less than 1000 breeding pairs?
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This is only the beginning. (Score:4, Insightful)
GET. Global Ecological Tilt. That's the name I consider appropriate for what's happening and what has been foreseen and warned about for decades. What we observed in 2023 was the cascading effects finally kicking in and giving us a taste of what's to come. If anybody thinks last year was though, they better prepare for incoming, because it's only going to get worse. The ecosphere lags a few decades behind when it comes to anthropocenic effects and once the damage is done its very hard and tedious and takes centuries to tilt back. The truth is that even if we get an eco turnaround happening within the decade, things are so out of whack as of now that humanity will still have to do a considerable amount of damage control if we don't want modern civilisation to perish. And that looks to be the best case scenario from where I'm standing.
Just saying.
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Well, no.
You cannot move people from places that become uninhabitable due to heat to places that are colder because there's already people there. Simply because it's easier to make a place habitable by heating it up than it is to make a place habitable by cooling it down. And then there's the arable land issue. Land that becomes unsuitable for growing anything because the temperatures (and humidity) changes is not compensated by land becoming arable with increasing temperatures because the soil isn't. Getti
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Humans can move. Well, in theory. We usually call them refugees, because you'll find that there are only a handful of countries that have about the same amount of landmass that will become uninhabitable as there's landmass that becomes more agreeable to human living conditions.
Now, last time I checked this is generally a bit of a touchy subject for most people. Both those that have to move and those that they move to. Generally both sides don't exactly like that one bit.
And then there's that thing about far
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Don't worry about this, as soon as the sea levels rise, less land becomes inhabitable and the people start struggling for the few remaining resources, that population problem will solve itself nicely.
And if we keep rising the temperatures another 5 or 10 degrees, and with some effort we can reach that, I'm absolutely convinced we have the power to do so, so if we manage to do that, that problem will reach a final solution.
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Don't worry about this, as soon as the sea levels rise, less land becomes inhabitable and the people start struggling for the few remaining resources, that population problem will solve itself nicely.
Maybe, but there is still going to be 10 billion people on the planet in 2100.
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Depends entirely on how the next 86 years pan out. I have a hunch that it's gonna be way, way fewer people.
If I have my way, the count is 0. Now, that's hardly attainable, but one can dream.
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Depends entirely on how the next 86 years pan out. I have a hunch that it's gonna be way, way fewer people.
76 years, but call me if it changes direction in any case. Most certainly not going to happen in my lifetime.
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76, yes. I'm drunk, sorry if my math is slightly off.
And it's quite unlikely that I will see it. Hell, it would be a considerable miracle if I see 2050. But still I'd like to be the last human to shut off the light and call it quits.
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Pretty much, yes.
That's why I keep saying: I'll be dead 30 years from now. I have no kids. What's your excuse to trash the planet?
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Right. So... I'm supposed to get a LAW and blow up some concrete trucks?
I can't do jack. And I don't want to anymore. At this point, all I want anymore is watch the world burn and the idiots who keep saying "there is no change and you just want to take away muh freedumbs" suffer.
I'm a simple man with simple tastes.
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That's easy to say but there is no solution given, so what is it? Please stop having kids everybody?
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See that's not the point you think it is. When 5% of the population on this planet is creating 37% of the pollution, the problem isn't that out of that 75m that were added about 500k are actually going to contribute in any major sense to the pollution of the planet. The problem is that 5%, get rid of them and you've nixed almost two-fifths the CO2 we're producing.
It's not a population issue, it's a management issue.
You can't blame climate on food shortage when the real issue is continued population growth which consumes massive resources
Well you know what? You can rid us of yourself and help out your cause.
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The people that scream the most about climate change are flying in jets and have massive properties so it's all just for show profit
Well it's easy to say that when you're basing that mostly off of the folks you see on TV. You should perhaps turn off the talking heads. There are indeed people who work on this stuff that you've never heard of because, they're not jumping in front of a camera to let you know they did something.
That said, yeah, with everything there's always those that jump on to score points. It's literally any movement. From Conservative to Liberal, there's always folks looking to take a movement to make themselves lo
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You sound pretty angry because you think you know everything
I think you got the "you" wrong in that. I mean you just told me
They came from small vilages and used little resources
like, everyone not in the US is in a mud hut and uses spears for hunting or some shit. I mean, let's keep the "who doesn't know what" in perspective here. LOL. I mean goddamn, it's the opposite of angry. I laughing my ass off at you and the obliviousness that's just dripping from you is even more so. Like holy shit, how sheltered have you been? Because goddamn, it shows. LOL.
But as you get older you will realize you don't know what you don't even know
Well you know, me being in my early sixties me getting older wi
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Heating requires some wood and a place to burn it in.
Cooling requires electricity and specialized equipment that can push the heat from your home outside.
Which one do you think is easier to accomplish? Note that most of the "extreme climate" areas are also unsurprisingly low in technological advancement.
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You are assuming an infinite supply of wood. Trees have a finite growth rate. A bit of research shows;
"The old rule of thumb is that a well managed woodlot will yield about 1 cord per acre per year"
"In a milder climate such as the Mid-Atlantic or Southeast, estimate one to two cords per 1,000 sq. ft. of home. "
"For colder climates, such as the Northeast and Midwestern states, using wood as a primary heat source, we recommend having 2-3 cords per 1,000 square feet"
"there were 2,299,740 households in the sta
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Welcome to the laws of limited resources. Whoever can't heat their place will just freeze to death and we'll get an equilibrium.
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By the way, www.degreedays.net has a calculator for heating and cooling.
St. Cloud MN has 8362 heating degree days using 65 F as the base.
Mesa AZ has 1699 cooling degree days using 80 F as the base. Not quite 1/5 of the MN value.
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Like to see a citation on more people dying of cold then heat. Locally, cold spell causes about one death a day, usually the homeless in their tents. Heat wave, it was hundreds of deaths a day, mostly people in their apartments.
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Reading the articles, things seem more complicated then a quick look would suggest. From the Washington Post article about the study,
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Well, in the case of kids, like a recent case, might just be lack of experience.
Re: This is only the beginning. (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:2, Interesting)
There has been undeniable evidence for some time, yet there are still MANY climate change deniers. Even the ridiculed forecasts from 20 years ago have turned out to be remarkably accurate... but facts and reason no longer matter in this world.
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Actually, the general opinion on the right is that climate change is real as well.
Just, that, it's too late to do anything, so don't do anything.
In other words, climate change denial worked, until it doesn't. Now it's too late to do anything about it, so f*ck off.
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The loudest conservative proclaimers are still declaring that a) it's natural and b) we don't need to do anything about it, the system will self-balance. Panics screw up markets, and they don't want that.
Re: Nope. (Score:2)
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I'm wondering how much longer they can keep the market in the dark about the situation. You see the insurance industry being one of the first to move in response to climate change, because their whole business rests on averaging disasters over long periods. They believe their own actuaries over the politics.
The real market disruptions will be a few decades out, when the market has either collapsed or priced enough people out of food and shelter. People will start crying out for socialism just like they did
Re: Nope. (Score:2)
-Bucky Fuller
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Which is even more of a nonsense stance than denialism was.
It's never too late to do something as every reduction we achieve means less problems down the road. Sure, we are going to experience some negative effects from global warming no matter what we do but how bad those negative effects get depends on our actions going forward.
Re: Nope. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Nope. (Score:2)
2003 is the year climate for 2023 was decided (Score:3)
Given the current amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere, the amount of CO2 we are still emitting today, and the stability of CO2 in the atmosphere, any change we do now will have an impact in ~20 years. This is why every IPCC scenario is the same for the next 20 years: it only starts to diverge (toward +1.5, or +2 or +3 or +4) after that point.
Which means the acceleration we are seeing now is due to what was emitted in 2003 and onward. This is not really news then. If we start counting what happened in 2003 as news, we might as well talk about the Pentium 4.
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By your logic what we do today will decide 2044?
Yes. What we do today decides if in 2044 the trend in temperature increase will go up, stay the same, or go down.
Even if you magically stop ALL emissions today or if we go full-throttle on fossil fuels burning, the IPCC scenarios are the same for the next 20 years (first order approximation).
During the COVID pandemic, the levels of CO2 decreased by ~5%. The actual impact on climate change was negligible. If we want to have some kind of impact, we would need 5% reduction in emissions every year (on top of th
Re: 2003 is the year climate for 2023 was decided (Score:2)
Re: 2003 is the year climate for 2023 was decided (Score:2)
Then we'd better get busy ... (Score:2, Troll)
... figuring out how to sequester carbon, and switching to nuclear power, along with (where possible and practical) renewables.
Or - we can just emote, call people "deniers", try to make political hay, etc.
Could as well be the year the messiah arrives (Score:2)
Just like with this, a lot of people will just pretend it ain't him.
Not in my back yard (Score:2)
We've all been reading about global warming for decades at this point, and seeing evidence elsewhere of videos of receding glaciers, polar bears swimming due to lack of ice, etc, etc, as well new global temperature records being set every year.
Still, if you want to ignore all the evidence elsewhere and only look in your own back yard, then for anyone living in New England in the US, we've been staring it in the face for almost 10 years with lack of snow and sustained cold weather - no sledding, no ice skati
2023 Will Be Remembered... (Score:4, Interesting)
B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet
Here's something, here's something you're never gonna fff-forget, baby
You know, you know, you know, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
You need an education
Got to go to school" - BTO
Betteridge's Law (Score:3)
Nope.
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The title of this article wasn't a question, though. Betteridge doesn't apply, although I'm sure that there would have been plenty of people who disagreed with it if it was a question.
I see (Score:2)
1930s (Score:2)
No, the 1930s will be the year forgotten when climate change arrived.
Climate is changing! True! (Score:2)
Both sides should stop cherry picking (Score:4, Insightful)
The skeptics love to point out how this or that area had record low temperatures "proving" that global warming is a hoax. That is cherry picked data, and therefore a load of crap. It's the same thing when global warming believers cherry pick data.
I don't think this is a good way to communicate (Score:2)
I've listened to TFA and some climate change specials on MSM and there is simply too much noise and too little useful information. Too much cherry picking shit like the temperatures in Phoenix which routinely sees temperatures in the 110s.
Too much how bad Brazil is because "global warming" never predictable consequences of their own gross mismanagement of natural resources.
Too much focus on climate records while ignoring UHI.
Too much partisan nonsense linking climate change with southern border drama.
If yo
Re: I don't think this is a good way to communicat (Score:2)
Meanwhile in the rest of the world (Score:2)
Significant cold spells in Germany and China. It's called global warming, not American urban heat island warming.
"Arrived" ? (Score:2)
Climate change has been studied enough not to summarize it to only one year.
Could have been prevented if (Score:2)
As I expected (Score:2)
All the MAGAts and libertidiots desperately denying.
I'm waiting for the heat wave to hit where they live, and there's a power outage for a week, oh, and they haven't maintained their own personal generator (if they have one), and they *roast*.
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If the area is suddenly more habitable then there's likely to be a lot of migration to the area, can it support that, is there infrastructure ready? If you are in a position to do so, make long term land investments as it becomes more valuable.
If you don't live in that area, time to sell land investments in areas that are getting less habitable!
Re: Not here though (Score:2)
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virii
I didn't realize anyone still used that particular misguided piece of pedantry in 2023.
From Wiktionary [wiktionary.org]:
virii
(proscribed) plural of virus
Usage notes
- The plural virii, though common, is based on a misunderstanding of Latin. [...]
In short: when you write virii, you signal to those who do know latin that you're a pretentious ignoramus. Don't.
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When you complain about "virii", you signal to those who know English that you're a humourless pedant. Don't.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
"virus" in Original Latin and "virus" in today's language (English or not), has different meanings.
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Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain...
And if we all believe it really, really hard, it will happen!
Anything I forgot?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
When I was born up until grade school we were worried about global cooling.
No, we weren't. Only a tiny minority of scientists ever believed in that, and that idea was discredited and moved on from very rapidly because there was no supporting evidence.
AGW is exactly the opposite of that in literally every way.
Stop spreading the global cooling theory myth. It does everyone a disservice, including you.
global cooling was rejected even at inception (Score:3)
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Re: Really? (Score:2)
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In the 1970's, there were about 7 papers discussing global cooling and they all had 1 thing in common, CFCs. The concern was that the concentrations of CFCs in the air were altering the atmospheric albedo and thus reducing the amount of solar radiation hitt
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
When I was born up until grade school we were worried about global cooling
I remember this, that has been proved false, even in the 70s. I also saw somewhere Oil Companies funded these cooling papers.
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/scientists-never-warmed-to-the-idea-of-global-cooling/
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I think we should be past the point of arguing with every crank and simply shame them horribly as morons like the flat-earth believers or suicide cultists.
So much energy is wasted on people unable to be reasoned with if not simply because they are incapable of reasoning at the basic level required to comprehend what you are arguing. The morons left over do understand primal emotions like shame, peer pressure, etc. Or simply overpower them like had to be done with fascists. You can't ever get consensus; the
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you topped caring about what the science had to say in the early 1980's? You heard one thing then so that's whats happening for the rest of time.
What's funny about the acid rain example is that most people actually got on board about the problem and actually did something about it and it mostly worked! (Acid Rain Program Results [epa.gov])
So from your own example "fuck it" isn't really viable nor true, it's just ideological nihilism.
Also the actual scientists (no disrespect to Leonard Nimoy) since the time you were both in fact in school were making pretty accurate predictions even since the 1970's about the warming factor
Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections [harvard.edu]
You were given wrong info as a toddler and the fact that you take your vague toddler recollections as accurate scientific consensus over say, the actual scientific consensus is a little less than convincing.
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"So you topped caring about what the science had to say in the early 1980's?"
Yeah, when he was 5 years old. A real critical thinker!
"You were given wrong info as a toddler..."
No he wasn't, he's just lying to you now. He can't even remember what he was told as a toddler, none of us can. And as a toddler, he was 10 years too late.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
This reads more like a story you made up as a troll in about 30 seconds. If you are 46, you weren't "worried" about global cooling in grade school. You would have been born in 1977, after global cooling was no longer a thing. And acid rain was a problem, and it got solved. And global warming is a thing, and climate change is a more accurate term for it that is used more pervasively now because of liars like you.
"I can vaguely recall mentions of global cooling as far back as really early 80's..."
No you can't, and why the backpedal? In the early 80's you'd have been no older than 6 years old, barely old enough to form memories at all, and certainly not memories of events 10 years in the past that you could not possibly have been exposed to. Ask SuperKendall for some tips on how to lie more believably.
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