February breaks global temperature records by 'shocking' amount
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/global-tempe...
Keep in mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age until last October to reach the first 1.0 degree Celsius, and we’ve come as much as an extra 0.4 degrees further in just the last five months.
As of Thursday morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in recorded history, and likely the first time since human civilization began thousands of years ago.
The month did not break the record for hottest month, since that is only likely to happen during a northern hemisphere summer, when most of the world’s land mass heats up.
Thursday in "As of Thursday morning" referring to Thu Mar 3, it seems.
Is there per-city/region data that goes back a significant number of years to do this sort of study?
In the case of last month in particular a lot of the biggest anomalies were in the arctic where there are no urban cities (see the map in the Guardian article).
It's like you are assuming harvests would go bad everywhere. Actually there are places where you can't grow food right now where you would be able to grow food next once the temperature increases.
Change is not that an issue, the rate of change though...
I find the terms "Nature", "Earth", etc really ambiguous in these kind of discussions. Sure "Earth" will be fine, will still orbit the Sun, even if it gets as hot as Venus. Cockroaches or water bears will inherit the Earth.
But people worried are not really worried about "Nature" (at least I am not) but rather about the very people that are sharing the same and only habitable, in our reach at least, planet.
Europe is considered in a major crisis for 3-4 millions Syrian refugees, now imagine if tomorrow there are 100 or 200 millions refugees moving all around the world.
In the end, it is only a "people" issue.
I live in Australia. An island inhabited by a few hundred thousand people using stone-age technology until colonisation. Now there are 25 million of us here.
Yes Europe is having a problem with a few million refugees, but it's less of a problem than it had from 1939-45. And it recovered from that pretty quickly. We're used to a level of peace and comfort unparalleled in human history, and perturbations of that feel like TOTAL DISASTERS to us. We can cope and adapt to much greater events than we would ever believe watching the news.
And yes, Nature will cope. So will we.
Do you have a source for that?
Feel free to ignore the point and my comment if you feel it insufficiently supported by peer-reviewed articles.
I'm sorry I'm unable to assist your learning by giving you a solid reference.
From [0]: > As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming. [0] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page...
Rate is change is actually pretty slow in this case.
Really? All the articles and papers say the contrary. Do you have anything to back your claim?
I'm not a climate change denier nor skeptic, but I think the general population are too pessimistic regarding this change. Pessimistic in a sense that we always extrapolate the future with present technologies.
People in 1950 predicted the same pessimistic doomsday by the year 2000; and what happened? People adapted and overcame the situation. Of course if technology hadn't changed since 1950 we would all be "doomed" by the year 2000.
So by saying that we only have 10 or 15 or 30 years more before we all die as a species, because of what we did to the Earth is non-sense. People will always come up with new technologies and they will adapt to the situation.
Pessimists have a very unreliable track record, I'm not saying don't worry about the climate now, but I would love that everybody would recognize the danger, face it and have a more optimistic outlook for the future.
Who specifically is saying this? I’ve read a lot of predictions and speculation by climate scientists, but never anything remotely like “less than 30 years before we die as a species”.
> People in 1950 predicted the same pessimistic doomsday by the year 2000
I haven’t seen these supposed pessimists’ reports from 1950 predicting “doomsday” by 2000. Maybe you can link to the specific prediction you are referring to?
This historical summary from the American Institute of Physics might help, https://www.aip.org/history/climate/public.htm
Most of the work in the 50s–70s led the experts in the field to say, paraphrased, “there’s something serious going on here, and we’d better study it carefully ASAP and figure out how to mitigate our impact, or things could get bad.” The topic wasn’t really a serious concern to the general public until the 1980s, by which time there was starting to be broad agreement among experts. Since then, we’ve filled in a lot of additional details, and there is a strong “scientific consensus” that global warming is a real effect, caused by humans, which will have dramatic consequences if we continue down our current path.
> Who specifically is saying this?
In this thread, madaxe_again: 'Our extinction is coming, and the only tragedy is all the other life we'll take with us.'
> I haven’t seen these supposed pessimists’ reports from 1950 predicting “doomsday” by 2000.
The so-called 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' has been predicting Doomsday since 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
My prediction? In twenty years we'll look back on global warming like we do on D&D suicides, satanic ritual abuse and militias: just another instance of mass hysteria.
He probably meant which scientist (s), not "which random guy on the internet".
- The doomsday clock thing wasn't unfounded paranoia, there was real danger of nuclear war in the 1950's.
Then, are you saying that there is no climate change and temperatures are not raising?
Of course climate change is real; my point was that people tend to overreact to it. They don't see that new technologies and especially new policies are coming up daily just to fight climate change.
Technology is not stagnant in this area, just as how it wasn't stagnant in the 50s 60s 70s 80s etc.
People always come up with new ideas and will adapt to changes.
> Of course climate change is real; my point was that people tend to overreact to it.
How is people overreacting?
The goal of the news should be to inform, not to comfort.
There's literally nobody to vote for who even has climate on their agenda - it's just not important to the man on the street.
Now, where your middle eastern neighbour puts his penis, and what plants the kids next door burn and inhale - THAT matters!
Many people who would support an independent presidential candidate decide not to because the thing they want the most, above all else, is to keep their pet enemy party out of power. They'll even vote against their own interests and politics to try to achieve that. Yet their pet enemy party (democrat or republican) always wins every now and then regardless. So it's a futile effort with no long term value.
Tell me about that realistic alternative again?
Besides that, what makes you think you can't for for a party that isn't "realistic"? Do you only want to vote for a party that will probably win? Then it's not really you voting on your own preference, you're instead acting as an amplifier for what other people want.
It's a misconception people have assuming their vote is wasted on a minor candidate and somehow contributes to the success of a major one. A single person's vote is negligible no matter who they vote for. When all the people who want candidate X vote for candidate Y instead, then there's a failure of the system.
The electoral system here is really broken, from the gerrymandered constituencies to the FPTP voting system. On the note of FPTP we had a referendum to vote for STV - and propaganda successfully convinced the voters to stick with broken but known. Part of the reason I am so sure we will end up voting to leave the EU. Independent candidates very occasionally win a seat but the deck is so severely stacked against them they may as well not exist. UKIP, who I do not support, are the most successful "outsider" party that has arisen in recent years - and despite a substantial share of the popular vote were decimated in the election.
We are seeing a rise in voting for outsider candidates, but at the current scale it actually helps the incumbent powers, as the opposition vote ends up fragmented.
If we want to save humanity we may need to completely rethink governance, as the current incestuous relationship between powerful governments and powerful interests is literally killing us.
Our extinction is coming, and the only tragedy is all the other life we'll take with us.
We're just not that great, and our behaviour is "primate basic" to the extreme.
Children playing with matches.
Seems like a good description of the state of the world right now.
As for bickering and blaming others, sure it is annoying but somehow it has led humanity to an era where life is vastly better than it has ever been for more humans than ever before.
So it's weird, yeah.
Yes... they somehow impose carbon taxes, go to climate summits and make up protocols to agree to but none of them believe in climate change.
The US wouldn't even ratify Kyoto.
We are violently tribal. We are biased to short term reward over long term gain. Crack those two and you're well on the road to panacea.
If we don't overcome them, we don't adapt, we don't survive. The universe is pretty big - something out there will hopefully make it through the great filter, if not us.
Sure, from a selfish and anthropocentric point of view I want us to survive and prosper, but the reality is that we may not. We're not infinite and indefatigable.
Right now, we are on the path to certain doom. This can change, but whether it will in time is down to getting pretty much all humans everywhere to pull together.
Suggest you check historical levels of CO2 before sinking into permanent depression.
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPWmFNAwhvajgpMfPzgX4au...
Colored showing rates of warming or cooling (red=+++, black=--
I think if an emergency happens, we'll be capable enough of mitigating it in the short term until we sort out new agricultural land, move cities, etc. You can move a city in a couple of decades - see most big Chinese cities for proof.
As far as I'm concerned, "blame the government" is really a poor excuse.
A poor person in China cooks with coal instead of electricity from wind or solar because it's cheaper and energy costs represent a huge fraction of his daily expenses.
A well-to-do person in Connecticut doesn't mind that his electricity bill is much higher because of carbon taxes or renewables mandates because energy costs are a much smaller fraction of his expenses, and well-worth a cooler world for his children.
I am convinced that a richer world is much more likely to both reduce CO2 and better adapt to rising temperatures than a poorer world. It will also have the virtue of being a nicer place to live.
This is a long way to say the goal of policy should be reduced carbon intensity, not reduced growth.
It shouldn't. The climate has always been changing. Do that thing that humans do: be adaptable.
I imagine that if lots of people are dying, humanity — that is, the quality of being humane — will not make it: it'll be a riot of chaos, cannibalism, murder &c. Mankind might make it, but humanity won't.
Well, what should be said is that weather is not climate
> Here they're cherry picking an anomaly.
How so?
When you do that then you find Feb was well above the long term trend line, but not by a staggering amount (i.e. it's similar to things we have seen before): https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/surprise-but-not-sho...
It does confirm that there was never any 'pause', it was just natural short term cycles (la nina) masking the long term trend. We will likely be above trend for a bit due to el nino, as happened in 1997/1998. Longer term it will average out. (Average out to a steady increase in temperature that is).
Have a read and have a look at the graph here and compare and contrast...
And, to be sincere, the site the link pertains to is just another denier site and not even a very smart one
Since when do we make conclusions based on outliers? We need to see something like a 5 years trend before we can confirm if the Feb temperature is really unusual or part of a real increasing trend.
The guardian should know better.
And also, don't we have ice core samples going back thousands of years? This should indicate more about the occurrence of large scale variations in temperature.
I'm not going to argue minutea because I don't have a spare life that I can devote to climate science. I just assume they are getting it right.
Yes, but even if this point is a significant outlier, there is no telling that it's not random variation (p-values only talk about probabilities, they never prove anything not imply causal relationships) and on top of that you don't have a model to predict the future. Forecasts out of existing data values/limits are usually extremely unreliable.
It's fair to say forest fires this year are going to be pretty bad. I'm personally not looking forward to another August where we can't see the sun for the smoke.
The most important comparison to compare Earth's current temperature to is called the 'Holocene Optimium' which is the current high point (10kya) in the glacial/inter-glacial cycle. It's thought to have been 0.5C-2.0C warmer than today.
Earth having been around for millions of years, how statistically significant is a 29 years period in the grand scheme of things?
What was your point again?
To clarify: my point is, even only taking into account only the period during which it has been inhabited by mankind, Earth has probably reached hotter and colder averages than what we've experienced over the past half century. Mankind did fine.
My point was that you're dead.
In a Sauna for a few hours. You will die. Statistics and average lifetime are not relevant.
Note the times - on the order of minutes.
You don't need a pressure cooker to kill a person from heat. The 70°C of a traditional sauna will do just fine.
Realistically I accept that this debate is not 'winnable' in any traditional sense. Even if the governments crack down on CO2, and the temperature drops back to non increasing fluctuations there will be no acceptance from some people who will always insist that it is/was a conspiracy the same as the moon landings and the UN. I suppose the only way that one side could convince the other is if the CO2 keeps increasing and the weather doesn't end up killing us all. Sorry for the digression.
I usually spend like an hour at 75 degrees celsius with some moisture. Which is totally non-lethal.
People are concerned about negative effects, not just surviving.
The age of the Earth isn't relevant at all. Imagine tossing a coin to see if it's a fair coin. How many times do you have to toss it to be fairly confident it's fair?
Now, how old is the coin?
I am personally in the camp of plant more trees. It is a fact that sunlight falling onto a plant causes the energy to be converted into cellular metabolism and sequestering CO2. A desert however will absorb and then re-radiate a lot of that heat. We need to stop deforestation and take advantage of the higher c02 levels to grow more plants. Hell lets start some geo-engineering projects which will be useful for when we need to terraform other planets.
That may be one way to address it, but there's a lot to be done to have any effect there. Most of the places where massive deforestation is happening is where the most corrupt officials are.
There are many things that we can do to attempt to tackle the issue of a developing hostile climate. however trading carbon credits is not one. We need simple engineering solutions, but biological CO2 sequestration is quite efficient. especially algaes, plankton, grasses, insects, etc.
For convenience. It allows you to compare the last two 30 year periods: 1951-1980 vs 1981-2010
I'm almost left speechless by the scale of this goalpost-moving. The earth will continue to exist and won't notice any climate change. It's mostly a ball of iron and rock. We, on the other hand, have a population that is heavily reliant on the climate not changing too much, and in so many different ways.
Keep in mind that the climate doesn't just 'get warmer'. It also has more extreme weather events - like a pot simmering on a stove, add a bit more heat and it gets a bit more violent.
How statistically significant are each of us "in the grand scheme of things"? Not very. There will be no Hollywood biopic about my life, nor likely yours.
If you believe in an eternal afterlife of joy in a heavenly garden, then even a billion years of life on a single planet is statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of things. (Or, like Secretary of the Interior Watt; if you believe the Rapture will come in our lifetime, then why have an environmental management policy at all?)
If we are but a colony of some Galactic Confederacy, then again we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
If the Sun should go nova tomorrow, and destroy all life on Earth, is that really statistically significant in the grand scheme of things? No.
Yet despite all of that, I still think I'm significant enough that others - who are all just about as insignificant as I am - should still care about not littering, about keeping poisons out of my water, about keeping disease causing bacteria out of my food, about keeping CFCs from the ozone layer, and keeping the Earth's climate stable and in the current climate regime.
But of course, how statistically significant is one more piece of trash in the grand scheme of things? Not very. So why not throw that trash out the window?
In other words, I reject your qualifier "grand scheme of things" as meaningless, at least not without further clarification of which grand scheme you mean. Policy decisions must have a more concrete goal, with a more meaningful time span than the heat death of the Universe.