Warmest March in Global Recordkeeping
wunderground.com
wunderground.com
There is a way to get us down from 408ppm back to a safe level like 350ppm, and that is Bio Energy with carbon capture and storage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture...
By all means, we should work to make it an economical alternative. I suggest that a higher proportion of GDP in first-world countries go towards this type of basic research. But until then, it's not going to happen.
Here's why you are wrong.
China is adopting solar on a massive scale. In fact it's the Chinese solar industry that broke the grid parity barrier.
And yes, their people are and will demand cleaner air.
And most importantly, new solar is cheaper than new coal plants, even in India.
And as far as countries like Nigeria, I propose that the developed world begins to enact sanctions against reckless polluters to incentivize social nation state behavior.
I think that we will find, just as transnational oil companies have found, that the governments of countries like Nigeria are easily swayed by outside money.
And this idea that controlling carbon will slow economic growth is ludicrous.
What do you think having NYC and Miami flooded will do to growth? What about 100 million refugees from Bangladesh. Look at the problem of Syrian refugees for Europe.
We did one thing right, and we got solar pv cheap just in the nick of time.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/15/march-tem...
It's very disappointing this isn't a major story (outside the remaining climate denial outlets, such as Fox/Murdoch/WSJ). I don't recall seeing it covered in the NY Times, for example. Perhaps I overlooked it, but it should have been a big enough story that overlooking it was very unlikely.
I think climate change news now that would get coverage would be actions being taken (as opposed to observations being made). What actions will Texas take after this season to mitigate the risk of flooding? What actions will California take to insure reliable water sources across both drought and excess modalities? I think we've reached the "Ok, so what?" phase.
Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax.
Ted Cruz also thinks climate change is a hoax.
Hillary Clinton thinks climate change is not a problem and that we should increase our greenhouse gas output as fast as possible.
Bernie Sanders considers climate change to be of critical importance and will act as a leader to curtail our greenhouse gas output. He is also the least likely leader in the race right now.
The story is not just about adaptation. The story is about how the US political leadership is passionate about increasing the rate of climate change and calling the entire science of climate a 'hoax'.
I'm not sure where you get the impression that Hillary Clinton thinks climate change is "not a problem". Her website certainly states otherwise: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/climate/
Her campaign finances are a good indicator of how she will act if she is elected - much better than what her website says right now, or at any time. If she wants to really stand behind what that page says, she should stand up and say:
"Oil companies are destroying our planet's life and our health here in the USA. I will no longer take money from them. I will no longer vouch for new oil technologies."
And then she should do those things. Until then, her website is probably full of lies and I do not trust her word at all.
1. New technology leads to greater efficiency therefore reduces carbon output - So what's wrong with that? And Obama proved blocking pipelines does not stop the oil from flowing - right?
2. Taking money from oil companies doesn't mean much other than she's not anti-oil, which as a leader who understands the current dilemma, is probably not all that bad.
Obama came out of his first election pumping money into coal which was just a waste of money. Obama blocked keystone yes, but that just pushed it through via train cars and trucking (which adds more pollution). Also, Oilsands production only dropped by 0.1 percent during the whole price plummet, so not much happened there- did it? So was Obama a good investment on that front?
If you want to change the world for the better we, the people of the world, have to stop choosing to consume so much of it, but no one wants to discuss that, not even in politics.
My thesis is that stories about taking action would be considered "newsworthy" with respect to this topic, the lack of action is not.
So do we as a species just give up on every one else because they are incapable of adapting? With that line of thinking we will never be better then the animals that only react to their environment and don't really plan for the future.(save the few specific cases due to evolutionary pressure)
I'd ask that if we must discuss politics, let's avoid hyperbole and be careful to make accurate statements. All the quote above communicates is that you are angry about her position/actions re climate change, or that you simply want to damage her in others' eyes.
Dr. James Hansen of NASA has written that the Keystone pipeline would be "game over for climate" [1]
So I think it's fair to say she doesn't really treat climate change as a pressing problem, unless forced to by political expediency.
She also opposes the most sensible solution, a carbon tax.
I think the difference between her recently stated positions, and her actual political DNA, as well as that of her financial patrons, makes her a wolf in sheep's clothing on climate.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-...
Even now with Europe at the brink, she still wants a no-fly zone to protect the moderate mujaheddin and to continue the anti-Russia/Assad chessgame she put into action.
She also later decided her initial Keystone support was wrong, and changed her mind.
So I'm going to say her judgement is not very good.
As far as Dr. Hansen goes, his stance is pretty simple. Look at the weird climate effects we are seeing at >400ppm carbon.
Climate was more stable and hospitable at 350ppm, he proposes leveling off emissions and then reducing them greatly by 2050. Pretty basic, rational stance in my opinion.
The amount of carbon the Keystone pipeline would deliver would blow us right past our targets.
Have either one of them ever said that there is no such thing as climate change, as your statement seems to imply? Or, do they just question the details of how the evidence is presented and emphasized, the tradeoffs in the proposed responses, and the perverse incentives involved?
Cruz:
OK, you are incorrect, actually. The scientific
evidence doesn't support global warming. For the
last 18 years, the satellite data - we have
satellites that monitor the atmosphere. The
satellites that actually measure the temperature
showed no significant warming whatsoever.
...
Climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific
theory for a big government politician who wants
more power. Why? Because it is a theory that can
never be disproven.
In fact, the second one - "it is a theory that can never be disproven" makes it clear that he understands that climate change is constant and has always happened.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/26589529219124838...
I suppose you could interpret these as not necessarily saying "there is no such thing as climate change", if you wanted to be denser than a neutron star.
That tweet from Ted Cruz is bizarre. We've removed 3.6 million square miles of forest (from the original 6 million)[1], not to mention the billions of tons of CO2 produced annually through fuel combustion. What does the fact that humans expel CO2 have to do with it?
[1]: http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/rainforests/in...
Wow. Wow.
Much of the climate data goes back thousands of years or more.
Published today, and showed up at the top of my NYTimes Now app
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?e...
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?e...
edit: source appears to be http://www.noaa.gov/11th-straight-month-globe-was-record-war...
The JMA measurements go back to 1891 and show that every one of the past 11 months has been the hottest ever recorded for that month.
Cliff Mass thinks it'll be better than last summer though:
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-warmest-april-day-...
Yeah, yeah, weather!=climate; sit down, Captain Pedantic, I'm making a point here. As one who has walked this earth for over 50 years, I've observed that records of course are broken fairly regularly, but not with the frequency I see recently. Seems like every week I wake up to a new record, whether it's monthly, seasonal, or just today. It's a trend? Is climate change real? Dunno, not a climate scientist. But it sure seems like things are getting warmer, not just today, but generally.
As crass as it may sound, I really wish Hacker News would talk about all the money that can be made by building startups that aim at mitigating the effects of climate change, about the routes to renewable, sustainable energy sources (also worth untold trillions of dollars), etc.
Instead, HN seems to mostly be composed of climate change deniers.
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Edit: HN tells me I'm not allowed to reply to rsync's comment below. Here's my reply:
> You don't have to be a "denier" to be annoyed by hearing that the "most (X) ever" is based on ~150 years of observations.
The post author was not expressing annoyance. They expressed that the climate is not changing due to human activity:
> Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures.
That is not "a reasonable comment and a reasonable sentiment." It's an extremely damaging falsehood that does not have a place here on HN.
You don't have to be a "denier" to be annoyed by hearing that the "most (X) ever" is based on ~150 years of observations.
Plenty of well meaning, properly liberal, progressive thinkers that you would (presumably) approve of are also annoyed by this.
It's a reasonable comment and a reasonable sentiment.
Don't let your emotional attachment to the "us vs. them" narrative or your addiction to righteous indignation blind you to the simple (and obvious, non-controversial) objection (the parent) has.
One poster says it's the rate of temperature growth that is important. Agreed, however, that is not in the article.
What really disturbs me is your use of the pejorative "denier". Is a denier anyone who is skeptical of your dogma? Galileo was a heretical "denier" for his theory that the sun was the center of the solar system. Denying a theory is a necessary step in the scientific method.
Plus, it would help undecided people like myself have more data points and logical arguments to consider on both sides.
> Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures.
No we shouldn't expect this kind of temperature rise. Not like this. This quote is entirely nonsensical, it has no logical backing at all. The rates of temperature rise we are seeing right now are not to be expected based on our last ice age receding. The fallacy here is "made shit up and pretended it was truth".
> Also, the "record" in this case only goes back 130 years, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old
The record is a real record. Putting it in quotes implies that it isn't a record. That's false. Also, this implies that the age of the earth is relevant to how we act today. Does NYC or SF care about the temperature of the Earth during the formation of our solar system? No. It's not relevant.
> so to try and make some sort of global warming generalization based on .00000000028% of the evidence is fallacious.
Nobody is making that generalization, or using that scale of evidence. This is a fallacy because the post author has pretended that the IBM article quoted said that they (Weather Underground) used .00000000028% of available evidence to draw their conclusion. Again, this is false.
Also, noting the fact that the record only goes back 130 years is merely pointing out how little statistical significance climate models based on "the record" have.
Your post is rank with hypocrisy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature
Beyond that, people have attempted reconstruction from other evidence. For instance I found an attempt at a 2000 year reconstruction using tree ring data here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/moberg2005/moberg2005.ht...
Assuming this reconstruction and others is sound, it is apparent that there definitely is a fair bit of natural temperature variability. But the recent temperature rise in the last 50 years certainly seem like aberration, in terms of rate of change.
This violates the HN guidelines, which we warned you about once already. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing it.
Please let the people willing to do the work work, and put in some effort to educate yourself if you want to get involved.
Also, the reality of climate change isn't a "point of view" any more than saying that "the earth orbits the sun" is a point of view.
So while it's true that you can work the equation from either reference frame defining each as orbiting the other, the center of mass will more than likely lie in or closer to one or the other, and with that you can define which is orbiting the other canonically.
Whereas "the sun and the planets all orbit the earth" has astonishingly little predictive power.
Not a geocentrist myself, but it did have good predictive power.
"To summarize, Ptolemy devised a system that was compatible with Aristotelian philosophy and managed to track actual observations and predict future movement mostly to within the limits of the next 1000 years of observations. The observed motions and his mechanisms for explaining them include:"[0]
Obviously not as good as current models, but it's a bit of historical rewriting to say that geocentrism wasn't a good model for the time, which is one part of why there was push back for heliocentrism. With the tools of the time, the heliocentric model had similar predictive power. Geocentrism at the time wasn't just about god, it actually had predictive power.
"He also argued that his system was more elegant than the traditional geocentric system. However, the predictive power of his model was not substantially better than its competition."[1]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model
[1] - http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/tharriso/ast105/Ast105week04.html
Had Jupiter's moons been visible to them, their motion would have confounded their model entirely.
Also, "The change from circular orbits to elliptical planetary paths dramatically improved the accuracy of celestial observations and predictions." Your own link says the predictive power was "dramatically improved."
The problem we are facing is that in the last 100 years the temperature have constantly been rising, and the rise seems to even speed up. The consequences of this is at minimum a major shift of the ecological systems. If we are unlucky, even the collapse of some.
In any case we are facing severe consequences for human civilization as we know it. Even if we "just" lose cities like New York it would be bad, but whole countries like Bangladesh with over 100 Million of population are facing flooding.
I know, I know - I'm the life of the party.
I tried to explain, "I can't speak for all environmentalists, but I want to protect the environment so that it's habitable and enjoyable FOR HUMANS."
I apparently blew his mind - he'd never considered that as a reason to be an environmentalist.
There are predictions that global warming will cause droughts, floods, water and food shortages, mass migrations of dangerous species, ocean acidification, and sea level changes that threaten millions of people.
So, documenting the fact that every year the Earth is getting warmer should remind us all that we should come up with SOME ways to act to protect ourselves and our fellow man from those problems.
SOME people advocate fighting global warming directly. Whether or not they believe it's caused by mankind in the first place.
But you "really don't see the point" in discussing... ANYTHING... about global warming?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...
Before it was the warmest March on record it was the warmest February:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/february-smashe...
Oh, and it was the warmest January:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/02/17/january_...
Oh and 2015 was the warmest year on record:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-2015-became-the-hott...
Chart of temps from 1880:
http://www.skepticalscience.com//pics/2c-2016-02.png
CO2 is at 408ppm and climbing as it nears it's seasonal peak.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
This is a level not seen in the past 15 million years
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/04/11/hothouse-gas-spikes-t...
Here's a chart that looks at some other greenhouse gases, such as methane.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/debunking_the_97...
[0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/0240... [1] http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
United Nations IPCC http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
Exxon Mobile http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-po...
American Meteorological Society https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/about-ams/ams-statemen...
NOAA http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
EPA https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/
National Center for Atmospheric Research http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html
Royal Society of the United Kingdom https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-evid...
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society http://www.cmos.ca/site/ps_pos_statements?a=7
Science Council of Japan, Russian Academy of Science, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Chinese Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Indian National Science Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Royal Society (UK) (PDF File) http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
Maybe the consensus number is only 95%, or 93%, but it's pretty clear that there is broad scientific agreement. Even that 'debunking' only claims that the papers do not explicitly take a position, while virtually every major scientific body who have taken a position say that human-caused climate change is a major issue. There is pretty undeniable evidence now that the world is getting warmer (example: http://www.crystalcruises.com/OfferDetail.aspx?OG=220). So the shift in thinking should be away from "is there anyone who doesn't think this is happening" to "who has the best ideas for how to limit this".
But I will say this: we will have a crisis on our hands in places like Bangladesh. Investing in ways to remedy this will benefit us all.
They'll be dead.
In the history of Earth there were periods where climate were much hotter, with more greenhouse gases, yet life did not stop.
Yes maybe we will suffer (maybe not so much), but don't over-dramatize the issue because drama does not last.
So what?
- the normal heating/cooling periods take place over thousands of years, which leaves ample opportunity for species to adapt to the changing climate. The human-added heat works much faster, and could trigger a massive extinction event unless the same humans work to prevent it.
- irrespective of whether the heat was added by humans, the previous "hot" periods did not happen during human habitation of this planet. The change we're facing is unprecented in our history and we must work to prepare for it.
Either way, action is required.