Earth Broke Heat Records 12 Months Straight (theweek.com) 224
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that the past year saw record-breaking heat, with global temperatures surpassing all historical measurements. According to Copernicus, May marked the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, and exceeded a key Paris Agreement temperature target. The Week reports: The stretch is a "stark warning." In a separate study published Wednesday, a group of 57 scientists found that human activity was responsible for 92% of 2023's warming, which increased at a rate "unprecedented in the instrumental record."
While averting catastrophe is "still just about possible," the decisions made by global leaders "especially in the next 18 months" will determine whether the planet can be saved, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a special address. "We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell."
Without serious efforts to reverse global warming, "this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said. "The 11 months in a row that tied or broke the 1.5C barrier did not yet constitute a breaching of the Paris target, since the benchmark refers to a timescale of multiple decades," notes Axios. "Still, the fact that the climate is now exceeding the target with greater regularity, and is projected to continue doing so, is a sign of the matter's urgency."
While averting catastrophe is "still just about possible," the decisions made by global leaders "especially in the next 18 months" will determine whether the planet can be saved, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a special address. "We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell."
Without serious efforts to reverse global warming, "this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said. "The 11 months in a row that tied or broke the 1.5C barrier did not yet constitute a breaching of the Paris target, since the benchmark refers to a timescale of multiple decades," notes Axios. "Still, the fact that the climate is now exceeding the target with greater regularity, and is projected to continue doing so, is a sign of the matter's urgency."
Oh wow (Score:2, Funny)
Crazy
Guess we need more batteries? More immigration to Canada?
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Have you been to Canada lately? India is way ahead of you.
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Well, that's not *quite* true. Qatar, Oman, and UAE all generate more per person, and for much the same reason: oil production. By far the largest source of CO2 emissions in Canada are emissions from oil and gas production. If you discounted that Canada's per capita CO2 emissions would be pretty much exactly the same as the US.
If you look at where the oil and gas is actually *going*, about 80% of its oil production and 45% of its gas production is exported to the US. So in a way, Canada's high CO2 emissi
May Change (Score:2)
I meant even more. Per capita, we Canadians produce more CO2 than almost any other country
True but given climate change that might not be the case for long as the energy needed to heat our homes in winter decreases while, in warmer countries, the energy needed for air conditioning increases.
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Robots and illegal aliens.
"Emm ee aitch!" (Score:3, Funny)
SCIENTISTS: Hey, robots are gonna eat everybody's lunch someday soon.
SKEPTICS: Meh. They can't even pass the Turing Test, and my dumbass cousin can.
[Someday soon comes.]
ROBOTS: [pass the Turing Test easily]
SKEPTICS: Meh. That otherwise photorealistic video of me committing child genocide has six fingers on one hand and nine on the other. Nothing to worry about. Stop bothering me about this.
________
SCIENTISTS: Hey, global warming is going to cook the world economy to death someday soon.
SKEPTICS: Meh. It's not like we're hitting a new heat record every month for three years.
[Someday soon comes.]
GLOBAL WARMING: [hits a new heat record every month for three years, gains sentience, passes Turing Test easily.]
SKEPTICS: Meh. Stop bothering me about this.
Re:"Emm ee aitch!" (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of that meme with the dinosaur watching the dinosaur-killing meteorite blazing through the sky and exclaiming "oh shit! The economy!"
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Reminds me of that meme with the dinosaur watching the dinosaur-killing meteorite blazing through the sky and exclaiming "oh shit! The economy!"
To be fair, that dinosaur-killing meteorite would thoroughly screw the economy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What, you have a climate crisis and still insist on global shipping?
What, you have a climate crisis and still allow air travel and private jets?
What, you have a climate crisis and still allow rich folk can own numerous 10k sq ft homes because?
What, you have a climate crisis and still think uncontrolled breeding is okay?
What, you have a climate crisis and still think forcing everyone to return to the office is a good idea?
What, you have a climate crisis and still think fast fashion is acceptable?
Seems like a
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Living that way would cripple his ability to get the word out. Do you actually think he doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming, or are you just tired of hearing his message and want him to shut up?
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Gore can't get his message out without flying private jets and living in a mansion?
Are you stupid or trolling? It's hard to tell on /.
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I'll go live in a tepee, start substance farming and stop driving a car as soon as Al fucking Gore does.
Luckily, you won't have to. Global warming isn't a problem that can be solved by individuals, it takes actions at the government level.
Re: "Emm ee aitch!" (Score:2)
Re:"Emm ee aitch!" (Score:4, Insightful)
Some countries are doing much better than others at dealing with climate change, and none of them are Warhammer 40k style fascist governments.
20 years ago people were saying there was no hope of getting to where we are today. 10 years ago people were saying that electric cars would never catch on, solar panels would only ever be a tiny fraction of generation, windmills can't float, and so on.
There is no reason to give up, in fact experience tells us that if we keep pushing we can accelerate this. We have found what works - economic incentives. They don't require anyone to believe in climate change.
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Well, 10% of cars sold in the US last year were pure electric. Since that's 10x the market share electric had five years earlier, that looks a lot like "catching on". I think the adoption rate would be even higher, but the early edge of the pragmatist adopters is blunted by many of those buyers buying plug-in hybrids, which have also seen healthy market share growth.
In our house we're all set for electric; we have level 2 chargers installed, but we've gone with plug-in hybrid because at present plug in h
Re:"Emm ee aitch!" (Score:4, Insightful)
>The crap that is peddled as "AI" right now is a toy, and realistic people know that it will remain that way.
"I think there's a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM.
Care to guess at how wrong that particular future technology prediction was?
>Human beings are very flexible, when the climate changes so will our behaviors. Some areas will become less habitable, other areas more. There isn't going to be some sort of apocalypse that causes the destruction of the planet, there just isn't.
True, the planet will survive.
Most of the ecosystems we rely on and most people never even think of on the other hand? Nope, WAY too rapid of a change for things to adapt. We are already seeing the beginnings of a mass extinction event, and it will only get worse as the average temperature keeps raising and shifts energy patterns on the planet.
And we can't "just move north", as it takes thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to turn barren DIRT into enough SOIL to grow crops in. And that's assuming you don't grow crops in it in that time. As in 200-400 years on average for a single centimeter / 1/2 inch of soil long, and you need feet of soil to support cropland.
So yeah, lets make sure to do nothing at all since we can't fix every little thing. I'm sure the best idea we can come up with is sticking our heads int he sand after shrugging and thinking "Not my problem, that's for future earth inhabitants to worry about"...
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>The crap that is peddled as "AI" right now is a toy, and realistic people know that it will remain that way.
"I think there's a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM.
Care to guess at how wrong that particular future technology prediction was?
John McCarthy, creator of Lisp, and other prominent computer scientists steadfastly believed that we were only 3, maybe 5 years away from having general AI, in the late 1950s. Thinking about general AI goes all the way back to Church. There was a revival of the ideas in the late '70s through the '80s, and after hundreds of millions of dollars and millions of hours poured into it, turns out it is still a hard problem. The stuff we are doing now isn't like general AI, it's just enormous statistical models tha
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The planet will survive and more than enough biodiversity for life to continue will survive. Life on the planet has survived far, far more catastrophic events in the past, and humans have survived numerous catastrophic events as well. We are making a mess of the place, that is true, but on the scale of an entire planet the capacity of life to recover and carry on is quite a bit greater than the damage we are capable of causing.
Isn't this a bit defeatist though? Shouldn't we set goals for civilization that are higher than just survival? Like we got ourselves into this through our own progress and ingenuity, I see no reason we can't use those same things to work the problem the other direction.
We sure did make a mess of it but we are capable of cleaning up our own messes, or least we should be willing to.
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Isn't this a bit defeatist though? Shouldn't we set goals for civilization that are higher than just survival? Like we got ourselves into this through our own progress and ingenuity, I see no reason we can't use those same things to work the problem the other direction.
We sure did make a mess of it but we are capable of cleaning up our own messes, or least we should be willing to.
Definitely we should, but the requirements for that are very similar to the requirements for survival. Even now, whilst we use fossil fuels, the limits for much of what we do are the availability of energy. That means that the way to do better is the same as the way to survive. Massive investment in renewable energy. If energy becomes cheap enough then even extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and using it to make fuel or other products becomes reasonable. At that point we are back at the ability to run some
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Absolutely, I am all abord the nuclear fission train (not literally, we'll get there)
And hey there's even some good news on that front. I like the Energy Secretary saying we need 200GW by 2050, I'd like to go for even more but it's a start, gotta get some wins on the board.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/bri... [whitehouse.gov]
https://docs.house.gov/billsth... [house.gov]
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Well, yes, but that means either subsidizing nuclear power, which isn't popular on either side of the political spectrum, or a carbon tax which makes fossil fuel prices internalize their externalized costs, which would be a shock to the system.
Rationally speaking there's no reason to prefer subsidies to taxation as a solution, but it's a lot more politically achievable to give companies money than to make them pay.
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And Isaac Asimov wrote fiction in which a futuristic society has intergalactic spaceships that rely upon microfiche and pneumatic tubes to store and transfer information. What's your point?
If you asked scientists to predict whether computers would ever help mankind travel to the moon, they would have said, "No, there's no way a huge c
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Tell me you've never heared of Joel Salatin without telling me you've never heard of Joel Salatin.
Re:"Emm ee aitch!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Human beings are very flexible, when the climate changes so will our behaviors.
Of course they are. When in the late 16th century in Central Europe the "Little Ice Age" started with failing crops, humans did in fact adapt. They started the Thirty Years War, killed each other, and in the end shrank the population about 30%. Now the crops were sufficient again for survival.
Some areas will become less habitable, other areas more.
We have a word for that: mass migration. And it does not bode well for the peace.
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Nowhere did I say that the changes would be pleasant or easy.
Sure, but if there is an easier and more pleasant path we can take, why not do that?
Warfare and strife is a part of the human experience, we wouldn't be human without them.
That's debatable, since we're judging from about 5000 years of experience which is about 2.5% of our species' existence. It'd be more justifiable to say that warfare is a consequences of the civilization we've built. However, even if you're right in practical terms, which you probably are, and we can't avoid *all* wars, that doesn't make choices that increase the frequency of war rational. War, like death, is something to
nvidia is now a $3 *trillion* dollar company (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why old people piss me off. Stuff changes and they just pretend it didn't. Construction isn't like it was 40 years ago when us old
AI and automation is coming. Automation is already here [businessinsider.com]. And just like with climate change a bunch of bubble boomers who feel safe because they've got a fe
Re: nvidia is now a $3 *trillion* dollar company (Score:2)
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Some areas will become less habitable, other areas more. There isn't going to be some sort of apocalypse that causes the destruction of the planet, there just isn't. There absolutely may be disruption, even serious disruption, in the way that some populations live, but people will adapt and go on with their lives.
You're right, it's not like the world is going to "explode" but I think you're downplaying the disruption here.
People in areas which are more negatively affected will start to migrate to areas which are either neutrally or positively affected. The issue which needs to be solved is how the people already living in those neutral or positively affect areas will deal with the influx of migrants from increasingly inhospitable areas seeking help and refuge. As smaller and smaller areas of the world become habit
Re: "Emm ee aitch!" (Score:3)
"Unless the plan is for the people living in the neutral or positively impacted areas to simply close their borders and let them all die?"
Look around. That clearly IS the plan. It's a dumb plan though, because no place will go untouched, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous are even more dependent on international trade than the rest of us.
Re:"Emm ee aitch!" (Score:5, Insightful)
News: A rapid change in lowering CO2 will cause more damage to the environment than a slower transition.
Lowering CO2 in the atmosphere is unlikely to happen at all, much less a rapid change in lowering CO2. The best people are working on now is reducing the rate at which we increase CO2 in the atmosphere. So I'm not sure why you'd be worried about actually lowering CO2; that will be a very long term thing, if it happens at all.
Even that is very problematical; slower transition to reducing the rate we increase CO2 is possible, but will take a lot of work.
Eco-panicers have yet to figure out that we need to remain focused on CO2 and methane and keep transitions steady/p>
"Eco-panicers" already seem to be pretty focused on CO2 and methane. And the current transitions seem to be pretty slow and steady to me. There's too much sunk cost in infrastructure and too much cultural inertia in "this is they way we've always done it," to change anything fast.
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>>News: Low sulfur ship fuels are causing the earth to warm more rapidly.
Fair point, is there a better way to get something into the atmosphere to reflect heat, that does not cause acid rain or fisher loss?
You make a point, but offer no real solution
>>News: Battery manufacturing causes 5 years worth of CO2 emissions from to a typical car on an ICE all at once.
FYI, if CO2 is being generated in a single point source (battery factory) then is it easier (less costly) to capture it at single source,
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>>Eco-panicers, blah blah blah
You need to work on vocabulary and delivery if you want anybody to listen to such crap
You need to look at why that's being said in the first place and ask, "Why would
We're Number One! (Score:2)
Slashdot's response (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, a mixed batch of posts from straight denialism, through 'not our fault, so do nothing', and ending with 'doing something is bad'.
Jesus, it's like you all WANT the planet to be drastically less livable for humans.
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It's amazing to watch the wheels turn on supposedly educated people when their political dogma starts getting in the way. How things are justified and tweaked as to not upset their world view.
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I think a lot of them just figure they will be dead before it gets really bad, so don't want to do make any changes at all to their lifestyle. Even changes for the better, just because someone said they should and they don't like taking advice.
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Yup - if the choice is between making $$$ and saving future generations that's an easy choice to make.
Re: Slashdot's response (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot's response (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just a small number of people making a disproportionate number of posts. Denialism works by normalizing fringe ideas through exposure.
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Science is not a democracy, but if 97% of the people working in a field disagree with you you're almost certainly wrong.
It's you who doesn't understand what "consensus" means in a scientific context. It means burden of proof. Not everyone has to believe the "consensus"; in fact science depends on people who disagree trying to knock it down. But the burden of proof is on the contrarians.
There was a time when Galileo was punished for saying things that were true. He was literally the only person who believed what he was saying.
You seriously need to study some actual history, because you literally got everything wrong about that story.
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The baby boomer mantra.
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That's fine. Blame the boomers all you like. But the the need to act is now falling squarely on the shoulders of those born after 1980, and to a lesser extent, 1970.
Who's to blame is emotionally satisfying to determine. But it's of little value for the future.
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You absolutely are not wrong but in the case of baby boomers it's not like the Greatest Generation and as though they are all dead or close to it, they're just retiring which also means they are at close to their peak in terms of wealth and as we all know older people tend to vote in higher numbers and if you look at any of the election breakdowns the over 65 crowd is basically a flip-flop of the 18-45 crowd.
So yeah the current prime age generation is supposed to figure it out but sometimes it can feel like
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Actually recent surveys show the 18-29 crowd more conservative than millennials.
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Imagine if our parents and grandparents had behaved that way.
Oh wait. Ok, imagine how much nicer we could have it if previous generations had behaved better.
We're all going to die, which means 100 years from now more or less a completely new group of humans will have to deal with the world we're leaving them. 8 billion plus any change from current population levels. That's a lot of people to selfishly fuck over.
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What have you personally sacrificed for the benefit of future generations?
They don't get anything from virtue signaling.
Re:Slashdot's response (Score:4, Informative)
The Medieval Warm Period wasn't a global warming event; it was only warm in Europe, as can seen by this reconstruction of global temperatures [wikimedia.org].
Now, you're also talking about *averages*, and that can be misleading too as a proxy for liveability. Washington DC and San Francisco have *exactly* the same year-rold average temperature, but San Francisco has a much more liveable climate because the difference between the hottest and coldest month is only ten degrees vs forty two in Washington. Likewise Seattle has a much more moderate climate than Boston despite having almost exactly the same average temperature; Boston is subject to short but intensely bitter cold snaps and brutal (by Seattle standards) heat waves.
Now in optimistic scenarios the average (which we now know is a lousy proxy for liveability) temperature in Europe will be just a tad warmer than it was in the Medieval Warm Period, but the climate will be much more extreme, with more extreme heat and cold events and drought. Under pessimistic scenarios even the average temperature is expected to be significantly hotter than in the MWP -- +4-8C warmer vs at most around +2 for MWP.
We've really missed the boat on slowing the rate of climate change to natural levels. It's just not doable anymore. But there's still a huge difference between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, so there's still good reason to stay optimistic.
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That's a pretty graph.
Constructed from what?
And why would only Europe experience a warming period?
And point remains: Europe was a much happier and more prosperous place when warmer. Irrelevant if it was global or not.
Doesn't matter. (Score:2, Insightful)
Those who are board with the idea of man-made climate change (including me) didn't need this article. Those that are not aren't listening. There aren't a whole lot who haven't bucketed themselves.
One of these groups has a built in mechanism that absolves them of the need to do anything at all. "It's not happening", and "It's happening but it's just natural" both are easy escape routes where no action is needed. And thanks to the complexity of the system and the inherent inability to "prove" definitively to
Doesn't Matter because Not Climate (Score:2)
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I'm on team "It's happening but I can't do anything about it because I'm not the leader of India or China."
Seriously, the US could probably cease to exist tomorrow and the rest of the planet is still screwed.
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Oh, hey. There you are. Was just talking about you.
People don't really understand (Score:2)
That the collapse of almost every lost civilization on Earth has been precipitated by climate change.
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That the collapse of almost every lost civilization on Earth has been precipitated by climate change.
Even before the industrial revolution? No, impossible!
The current dogma is that modern man is the cause of all the world's ills, pointing out that there exists a history to Earth that extends so far into the past that it is literally difficult to imagine for a human...you aren't supposed to do that! :)
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Shush. Climate change and a shortage of safe spaces is the cause of every collapsed civilization.
one thing I've learned about humans (Score:2)
Most don't act until things are on fire.
Re: one thing I've learned about humans (Score:2)
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"They can only read the writing on the wall when their backs are up against it."
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I don't watch news. Fill me in!
The thousand or so won't let us... (Score:2)
In order to fix this we'd need to convince the thousand or so people globally who own virtually all of the wealth to be happy with only owning most of the wealth. Since those people will have zero issues paying to avoid the major impacts of climate change, it's simply not going to happen. Sure the global governments can attempt to force them to part with some of their wealth to "save the species", but the thousand or so will just spend a bit more to ensure governmental leaders can afford their own climate
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Global warming is the fault of the billionaires?
That means the rest of us have no responsibility and can ignore it? Cool.
DUPE! (Score:2)
This is OK. (Score:2)
Politicians: "This is OK."
I'd agree with the politicians (Score:2)
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400k people have died in the war in Yemen. Not theoretical people. Real dead people from bullets, starvation, and disease.
That's just one small country most people never heard of and can't find on a map. Does that bother you? Are you concerned about real people dying right now today, every day?
It's a lot easier to virtue signal about a few million potential future deaths than do something right now about real ones.
On top of Yemen we can of course add the hundreds of thousands in Ukraine, and in general
Yep, so? (Score:2)
Nobody with some actual intelligence is surprised. This is entirely expected. We are on-track for about 2.5C "locked in" already (taking some effects like less air pollution from burning fossiles into account) and probably will get more than 3C. At that time, most societies will not be able to adapt anymore.
Re:True, but not news (Score:5, Insightful)
Although this article is accurate, I'm not sure it's news.
The purpose of this article, and others like it, is to a) drive traffic to the site that paid Slashdot to post it, and b) browbeat the weaker-minded into adopting the WEF agenda without questioning it.
Its simply propaganda, of the good old fashioned kind Goebbels championed.
He'd be so proud of the monster social media has become.
Re:True, but not news (Score:5, Funny)
Someone is getting ripped off if they're paying slashdot to affect public opinion.
Slashdot used to be a bigger deal (Score:2, Troll)
I think we're just on a list of "go here and spam propaganda" sites and never got taken off when the volume dropped off.
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Which old men did you catch running troll farms?
Were they also: white, boomers, 1%ers, and Republican?
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Especially since CO2 emissions accumulate and remain in the atmosphere for a long time due to the nature of CO2 (it's an oxide and doesn't break down easily).
Reducing CO2 emissions is like pressing the brake pedal and having the car start to slow down 20 years later. This is why every IPCC scenario (+1.5C to +4.5C) shows essentially the same trend for the next 20 years; they only begin to diverge after that.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Reducing CO2 emissions is like pressing the brake pedal and having the car start to slow down 20 years later.
It's more like turning the motor off while you've got a stuck accelerator at 140mph.
Reduce the CO2 emissions all you like- you're only going to stop speeding up.
Slowing down is going to go at the rate nature lets it.
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It's news because people continue to deny what literally every scientist is saying. It's not simply the change but the rate of change. There is no better graphic to explain than this one. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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I kind of agree, but not treating it as news is what got us into this situation. A lot of people said, "Change that happens in 50 years isn't news today." But it is news today because now -- literally the next 18 months according to several research groups -- is when we can do something.
Not Climate, Weather (Score:2)
I think climate articles...
This is not an article on the climate (despite what it claims) it is an article on the weather. One hotter than expected year (even including climate change expectations) does not mean that the climate is warmer faster than expected any more than a cooler than average year means that climate change is overrated.
The mean temperature each year is increasing due to climate change but, on top of that, there are fluctuations even on a global scale due to effects like El Nino (which happened this past year) w
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Something happening that you expected to happen is still news. We knew the eclipse was going to happen years in advance; it was reported as news in the run up, it was reported as news as it was happening, it was reported as news after it was done.
In this case we're talking about the most significant event of our generation. The fact that it is happening slowly and pretty much as predicted doesn't change that.
It *does* make people sick of hearing about it, but would it really be better if we all put it ou
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It's not accurate, we have measured much hotter temperatures on earth.".
The actual statement was: "global temperatures surpassing all historical measurements." The Earth has been hotter, but before historical times (and before measurements were being recorded.)
Not in recorded history.
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Your link mentions 100,000 year cycles. Don't you think it's a bit alarming that we're seeing 100,000 year fluctuations in human observable time?
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Your link mentions 100,000 year cycles. Don't you think it's a bit alarming that we're seeing 100,000 year fluctuations in human observable time?
This. What people pointing to historic fluctuations being normal don't take into account is both the unprecedented extreme speed at which it is happening now, making it much much much harder for natures ecosystems to adopt. But also, humanity. The difference now is that there are 8 billions humans on this earth, with a fragile and inter-dependent ecosystems. Few are anywhere near food self sufficiency, and fewer still are self-supplied on all the elements and components needed for the products and lifestyle
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I think people take this the wrong way around. These graphs don't mean we shouldn't do anything, they mean we should do more in terms of prevention, flood barriers, food safety and such.
Even just the middle ages were warmer than now, the current temperature is not even special on 1000 year timelines as far as we know. On a 400k year timeline it looks even less spectacular. I think the bigger problem is that we don't know where the growth will end and that we've been building up places around the world that
Re:Elementary, my dear Watson (Score:5, Informative)
Any kind of temperature fluctuation these days and everyone is like "Whoa! Climate change!".
The article under discussion here is about a twelve consecutive months of record high temperatures globally. While I agree that too many people look at a single day's, or a single week's, weather and say "global warming", the particular data discussed here is not a single day (nor week), and is global, not local.
That's fine. But people forget that it's not just human activity that's at play here https://www.climate.gov/news-f... [climate.gov]
You're confusing climate changes at vastly different speeds. The current warming trend is showing up on a scale of decades. The climate change in the article you reference occurs over a hundred thousand years. In the very first paragraph of your link:
Yes, over geological epochs, climate change is not just human activity, but this climate change is very clearly attributed.
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You not an unrecognized climatology genius with unique insights being silenced by the establishment.
If the scientific consensus of people with relevant degrees says it's us, shows us the cause and effect chain, and gives us a prediction of what tomorrow will likely look like based on our actions... You should ignore your own beliefs and listen to them, or take the long hard road and get the required education and experience to make an informed argument that the consensus is wrong.
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What the problem is here is that the interested amateurs aren't aware of the vast amount of actual data that underlies climate science, and are only aware of the data that floats up to the top of the popular press, the average temperature.
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Sure because that data and the code used to analyze it has been kept hidden.
Michael Mann sued for defamation but fought tooth n nail to not release his data or code. Why not release it? We have to take his word? That's not science.
Not a fluctuation [Re: Elementary, my dear Watson] (Score:5, Insightful)
What is 12 months in the scope of hundreds of thousands of years?
A global average over twelve months is a data point that is not local and is not short-term. I was responding to your post saying "it's a fluctuation." No, it's not a fluctuation; it is one data point (which itself is an average of tens of thousands of individual measurements), but that one data point lies firmly on the graph. e.g., https://berkeleyearth.org/glob... [berkeleyearth.org]
Even a century would probably not mean much, to be honest. Could as well fall under a local maximum on the plot.
This is one data point in a series.
I'm not saying that current warming is not caused by human activity. I'm saying that we may not have sufficient data to make that judgement
Yes, we do.. This cannot be emphasized enough. We have literally terabytes of data. The public, of course, looks only at that one figure, "is the global temperature increasing?" (because that's the one they care about, and the others are too much detail) but that is far from all the atmospheric data we have. In particular, attributing the current warming trend to the greenhouse effect can be looked at by examining the heating of the lower atmosphere (bottom of the troposphere) and the upper atmosphere (top of the stratosphere). The "fingerprint" of the greenhouse effect is that the lower atmosphere is heats, the upper atmosphere cools (because what greenhouse gasses do is impede heat transfer upward). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10... [pnas.org]
The other point to keep emphasizing is that we measure all of the inputs and none of them are large enough to account for the measurements. If you think "what if it's something else," you have to come up with a plausible hypothesis "what is this something else that could be causing it," and literally tens of thousands of people have looked for that and so far all of the other hypotheses have been falsified by massive amounts of data. (Do remember that your alternate hypothesis also has to explain why greenhouse gasses wouldn't cause the measured effects, as well as explaining all of the other measurements, not just average temperature.)
and that the current trend may as well be a statistical fluke within a very limited span of time and not representative of the trend in long term. Every kind measurement suffers from those sort of fluctuations.
And scientists understand statistics, know how to deal with statistics, and use statistics every day in every experimental subject. (In fact, one way to know that what you're reading is science and not fringe is to look and see whether error bars are quoted.)
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12 months is a trivial blip.
There may be GW and there may be AGW and we might be dead in $random_scary_number months but 12 months of data is not long term in a chaotic system the size of our planet.
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12 months is a trivial blip.There may be GW and there may be AGW and we might be dead in $random_scary_number months but 12 months of data is not long term in a chaotic system the size of our planet.
Twelve months in a long term analysis is one data point, As I said in my initial post in this topic, it's not really news, and I'm not really sure why it's interesting enough to bother posting to /.. The new data point is one more of the same.
But the point of the article is that this data is more of the same. It is consistent with the rising curve. The rising curve, which this data point continues, is significant. Didn't I say that? Yes, I did:
A global average over twelve months is a data point that is not local and is not short-term. I was responding to your post saying "it's a fluctuation." No, it's not a fluctuation; it is one data point (which itself is an average of tens of thousands of individual measurements), but that one data point lies firmly on the graph. e.g., https://berkeleyearth.org/glob... [berkeleyearth.org]
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What is the "correct" temperature of the planet?
Without a baseline we have nothing to target or goal for.
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Because without a baseline number how do you know the temperature is high?
The text from the article: "global temperatures surpassing all historical measurements."
How to determine if the temperature is surpassing all historical measurements:
1. examine current temperature.
2. examine historical measurements.
3. Compare the them.
That's how you know.
Error bars [Re:Not a fluctuation [Re: Element...]] (Score:3)
I always have a problem when I hear of data going back to the 19th century. Obviously we didn't have anywhere near the precision nor the level of monitoring we now have with increased automation.
Correct, the farther back you go the more uncertainty you see in measurements. You can quite clearly see this in the error bars on temperature. Here, for example, is the BEST team's reconstruction of land temperatures: https://berkeleyearth.org/wp-c... [berkeleyearth.org] Compare the error bars on the right of the graph with those on the left!
Clearly we are comparing Apples to Oranges with a human reading an analog mercury filled thermometer, recording it on paper, then a couple centuries later someone converting it to bits vs a precise digital measurement recorded in an automated fashion. I do a bit of data analysis and that would give me great pause as to whether trust it.
This is what historical climate reconstruction and paleoclimate reconstruction spend their time worrying about. Pretty much all of the groups doing these reconstructions have extensive
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I hope you were paid for that claptrap (Score:2, Insightful)
99% of scientists agree that our current increase is man made. Any other natural process is negligible by comparison. Suggesting "it's not just human activity at play here" is a trick to signal to people that they don't need to do anything about climate change since we're doomed anyway. It's a trick the oil industry uses and if you're not getting paid to say it please stop.
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Science is not democracy. We don't vote on the truth.
What is that 1% scientist saying and why?
Anyway, 99% was a made up number and completely untrue but it sounds good when you repeat that lie.
Re: I hope you were paid for that claptrap (Score:2)
"Remove politics from science"
Thanks for showing us that you understand neither politics nor science.
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That was deep, bro, way deep... now pass that doobie!
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Do you have year by year and month by month temperature data for anything older than the 20th century?
How do you know the average global temperature always takes millennia to change and hasn't wildly fluctuated on similar time scales in the past?
The data does not exist. You can not know that either way.
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You believe we didn't have reasonably accurate thermometers before the 20th century?
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No. Your ideas are stupid. The alternative solution is simple: ignore you.