Visualizing the Warmest August in 136 Years | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing the Warmest August in 136 Years

earthobservatory.nasa.gov

68 pointshochmartinez74 comments

Fortunately, the world has agreed to do something about this global warming business...

By entering a vague international agreement with no clear targets, or enforcement power.

If I were a fossil fuel lobbyist, I couldn't have drafted a better agreement then the Paris Accord. There's a collective target, there's every reason for the participants to defect, there's no proscribed steps that signatories must take, and there is no mechanism for censure of defectors.

I recently attended a conference organized with Jean Jouzel (vice-president of the IPCC) who said the Paris Accord was a success as in it allowed us to get out of the Kyoto Protocol mindset which had binding targets for only 37 countries nothing whatsoever for the rest of the world.

Another conference led by an economist studying climate change/economy interactions stated that we still lack two things to start doing something effective against climate change:

- Compulsory and audited accounting and reporting of greenhouse gases emissions for all countries. What are you doing anyway if you don't known who emitted what and when to start with?

- Some sort of internationally agreed on economic incentives to push the economy in the right direction. An example would be to have fossil fuel producers collect a tax (which would be reinvested / shared in some way)

Short of this we have no binding target and the 2°C limit remains wishful thinking for the time being...

While I agree with you regarding all the points you made, let's try not to get too cynical with age if we can. I was a kid when Earth Summit happened and we humans managed to stop and slightly reduce the Ozone Hole within a generation time. And it all started pretty much the same, with politics and all: something had to be done, if it was an ultimate silver bullet or not it does not matter because it is all about political momentum, IMHO.

> we humans managed to stop and slightly reduce the Ozone Hole

By "we humans" I assume you mean Dow Chemical or whoever the primary inventor of CFC replacements was at the time. Yes, it was a good thing, but there was a relatively easy and uncontroversial fix. What we are talking about here involves people with huge vested interests in fossil fuels - people dependent on them for living and commerce, entire nations solely dependent on them just to function - there are much larger systematic problems at play that must be overcome to reverse the current trend. I'm still mildly optimistic that we can improve the situation, but if the ozone was like steering a rowboat, this is like trying to do a 180 in an aircraft carrier.

CFCs had relatively cheap, equivalent replacements, and did not make up the cornerstone of many national economies.

The damage they caused was disproportionate, compared to the economic benefit of using them over alternatives.

The nature of the ozone hole also didn't let people hide behind nonsense like "The climate changes naturally" and "Well, there are natural sources of carbon" and "The climate was different in the past."

It didn't? I distinctly remember the same sort of FUD progression with regards to the ozone hole.

  1. It wasn't actually happening/a problem. 
     (It's hippy nonsense. [insert sarcastic comment about saving butterflies])
  2. It was happening, but it was natural, not caused by human activity 
     (The ozone hole grows and shrinks naturally throughout the year! And its been bigger and smaller in the past!)
  3. It was happening, caused by human activity, but there wasn't anything we could do about it 
     (We can't force the other countries to change, and if they won't change it'll keep growing anyway!)

There's really no difference in the playbook between it and global warming. It's just the financial incentives to delay are much stronger with carbon.

Even the "equivalent replacements" for CFCs were widely regarded as overpriced and far worse at the time. (I still hear people bemoan the loss of freon AC to this day.) It's not so different from solar/wind vs fossil fuels.

Much more recently, the Republican candidate running for the US Presidency still expressed skepticism that him using hair spray on his hair in his home had anything to with the ozone hole: http://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/trump-on-hairspray-and-ozon... .

Fair enough - I suppose the magnitude of financial incentives is the major distinction.

> The nature of the ozone hole also didn't let people hide behind nonsense like "The climate changes naturally" and "Well, there are natural sources of carbon" and "The climate was different in the past."

I'm sure they would have found a way if the incentives were as strong.

You don't even need strong incentives. The ozone hole was a target for the same types of people who now fight against the idea of climate change. For example, in one of his books, Rush Limbaugh dismissed the idea that humans could ever be responsible for any significant amount of ozone damage, because volcanos produce thousands of times more ozone-depleting chemicals.

They celebrated with a nice dinner afterwards though: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Cassidy-...

Who, in your opinion, should wield the enforcement power in such cases? And what would be the mechanisms of said enforcement?

Commercial treaties are signed all the time to make a few bucks, the same contracts could predict economical penalties for breaking these agreements. Money talks both ways, but it takes a lot of courage and political will to enforce such penalties.

Economic. The simplest way to enforce carbon reduction is to tax goods that come from high-carbon polluting nations/industries. This is, of course, politically unpalatable.

Recently I've been talking frequently with folks about my concerns re: climate change. The general feedback is along the lines of: "don't worry, the earth knows how to regulate itself, it will figure itself out, we'll be fine". :(

>"don't worry, the earth knows how to regulate itself, it will figure itself out

Yep that part is true

>we'll be fine

That part is not

I think this is the best short summary of the situation. Short of a nuclear war we won't kill all life on earth. But what we do next will determine how difficult the next decades will get. Cutting back on CO2 emissions is not about saving "the planet" it is about saving our immediate future.

First part isn't true, either. There's no reason why the Earth couldn't end up like Venus or Mars, and it could well do so in a few hundred million years. Habitability is a confluence of luck, there's no constraint that it has to last. It's just unlikely that we could cause harm on that scale, yet. Climate change won't wipe out humanity either, it will just inflict a tremendous amount of pain.

Earth is a massive (a bit under 6x10^24 kg) ball of iron and some other elements in comparatively minute quantities. The thin layer of the "biosphere" is utterly insignificant to Earth. It's massively significant to humans.

Exactly! I'm afraid that whatever equilibrium (or quasi-equilibrium) or death spiral that nature comes up with, humanity won't be part of it.

obligatory George Carlin bit. . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

Don't forget the "You're just being an alarmist, the earth has been heating and cooling for centuries!"

Did you see the XKCD infographic on that from just the other day? http://xkcd.com/1732/

A friend of mine told me that we shouldn't worry. A few years ago, he denied global warming but now his view has changed. His reasoning is the following. More pollution => more growth => more knowledge => humanity will find a way to solve this like it always had.

Apparently, many people think along those lines :(

The problem is that "it will figure itself out" does not imply "we'll be fine".

Yeah, homo-sapiens will undoubtedly survive but the economy sure as hell won't. And given the inevitable loss of every major city coastal city, the unutterable disruption of agriculture and water supplies with the attendant massive die off, I agree the word 'fine' may be a tad inaccurate.

Sea level is rising so slowly (currently 3.4 += 0.4 mm/yr) that we can absorb the increase for quite a while simply by abandoning coastal property and rezoning as each parcel of land becomes endangered by sea level rise. We're talking less than 7 1/2 inches over 50 years.

I suspect something similar will hold true for agriculture. Farmers will plant different crops 50 years from now than they do today.

You are assuming the rise will remain constant. It has only been rising slowly because the temperature change hasn't reached a tipping point that would trigger massive melting of polar ice.

The rate of increase has been going up, too. When I first started watching all this, which was 10 years ago or so, the rate was at 3.2 +- 0.4 mm/yr rather than 3.4. I haven't seen an estimate of that acceleration anywhere that gets it just from the data and not from assumptions about models or tipping points. I haven't really looked that hard, though.

I'm skeptical of tipping points. Right now, I'm taking a "just what I see in the data" approach because of how politicized everything is.

I don't know what the future holds, but I'm not convinced, yet, that it's going to be a complete catastrophe.

Note that we only need to worry about the south pole and Greenland. Floating ice, like all floating objects, already displaces water equal to its mass, so if it melts it will not affect sea levels.

"Simply abandoning costal property" and "rezoning" on a global scale is already going to be a far worse impact on what we consider today as modern life, than any realistic actions against CO2 would have been. We are talking about moving hundreds of millions of people. Sure that is entirely possible, but tell that to people who seem to be scared of helping a million Syrian war refugees.

Fortunately, with recent progress in renewal energies, achieving a massive reduction in CO2 emissions does not require hardship, just a larger investment program (which will pay even off long time for most countries, due to no more money drained from the economy for oil). This investment would be comparable to the building of the US highway network in the 50ies and 60ies. Long term it was a huge boost to the American economy.

> achieving a massive reduction in CO2 emissions does not require hardship

Houston is America's 4th largest city. Turning it into Detroit would absolutely be a hardship. We should still do it, but we shouldn't pretend that it won't cause suicide and violent crime.

You're also assuming that plants and animals can migrate/adapt at a fast enough rate. Trees seem especially at risk.

We'll move the corn potatoes and Roundup, but nature will have to manage the rest. If a few keystone species go who knows what havoc will be wrought.

are you arguing against the gospel of the up every year forever s&p500?

Well, if "by fine", they mean mass migrations away from the equatorial band, fragile areas near deserts, and increased conflict as immigration controls block that migration.

We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

I think this is the most effective way to get people's attention at this point in history. The current waves of migration from Syria, North Africa, and from Central/South America are just a tiny foretaste of what's to come if climate change goes the way we fear.

I think you are right.

However many people will mindlessly argue that "secure borders" will magically prevent the mass migration of 100+ million people.

Well, if states were to embrace a lot more violence than they do now "security" probably could do that (not an endorsement).

> We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

That is not even remotely politically tenable though, and lots of stupid things will be attempted long before it gets to that point. Mt. Tambora deposited 50 megatons of SO2 into the upper atmosphere in 1815, and in so doing dropped the global climate by .5℃ for over a year. Such an action is well within our technological and industrial capacity. It's a terrible idea but it will definitely be attempted long before global warming depopulates 2/3rds of our inhabited range.

I don't know about that specifically, but is there a reason why geoengineering in general is a bad idea?

We lack even a basic understanding of many aspects of the global climate. Imagine trying to engineer a computer with a nineteenth-century knowledge of electromagnetism. The only thing we know for certain is what worked in the past.

So you're saying Yellowstone is an option... ;)

I think the bigger risk will be associated with extreme weather, all over the globe, not just in the middle. We're already seeing that ramp up big time.

I fear that long before the oceans rise substantively, crop killing heat, crop killing cold, crop killing floods, crop killing drought and crop killing storms will strike so widely, frequently and randomly that it will be difficult to reliably produce food anywhere.

I haven't seen much science on this specific topic yet. I'm just intuitively extrapolating how quickly these food-destroying '500 year' storms are ramping up. We've had something like 6 '500 year' storms in the US so far in 2016.

We are humans. We adapt the world. If the waters rise we will build dikes. If flooding will become frequent we will build dams and use that to generate electricity and regulate the water cycle. The only people who won't do well are those who insist on being victims and refuse to see the opertunity in the challenge (and there is always an oppertunity).

Yeah, damn those Bangladeshis always insisting on being victims just because they don't have initiative. Wait, did I say initiative? I meant money. The people who don't have money will die by the millions.

Don't tell anyone that in San Francisco. We recorded the coldest August in 74 years: http://www.sfgate.com/weather/article/Fogust-Coldest-August-...

Same here in Northern Nevada. It snowed in Tahoe already.

It's interesting to see that, starting in roughly 1990, the temperature seems to break away from its previous range. It looks so dire. Temperature increases seem to be accelerating.

Because of the exponential growth of humanity along with cars and CO2 emissions. We're a direct cause of the temperature rises, and exponentially more of us means accelerating growth.

See also this xkcd comic for a great visualization of this: xkcd.com/1727/

Here's what CO2 emissions look like over the last 50 years or so:

http://johannes-friedrich.com/emissions/e-reg.htm

There's a pretty big increase since 1990, mostly driven by growth in Asia (which in turn is mostly due to the huge economic growth in China and India, I imagine).

I think you mean #1732.

I noticed that too. My question is, why then?

There's a feedback loop to increasing greenhouse gases and increasing temperature.

For example trees being burned (at a faster rate than they would die naturally and regrow) resulting in less trees to bind CO2.

The opposite is also true: Algae in oceans grow when temperatures rise, binding CO2.

I think the fact that we don't look at our solar system as a whole instead of trying to isolate data to "prove we are doing this" is indicative of politics corrupting science. We need to get back to pure science and forget about trying to force this country or that country to do something, namely force it's citizens to pay a tax that fixes nothing. http://www.space.news/2015-10-06-entire-solar-system-is-heat...

"Many scientists suspect that the solar system has migrated to a region of the galaxy with high energy."

Can't tell if satire or hippies.

It could be science.

The solar system is moving at 230 km/s after all. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_year

It's not the movement that triggers that, but rather the "with high energy" part. It makes no sense in context, and the hippies I know love to use "energy" in nonsensical ways.

Some ideas for positive action:

"What can a technologist do about climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615

I like how the Y-Axis shows a 2 degree "difference from annual mean" when the trend is very clearly a 1 degree difference for every month.

Thanks for point that out. It even says right before the graph the month also was 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean August temperature from 1951-1980.

Why would they do that?

Silly question here: why are January and December below the average and July-August above? Aren't the two hemispheres equal in size?

Answering my own question, just in case anyone was wondering the same thing. One possible explanation is that the Southern Hemisphere has a lot more ocean area, and oceans have higher thermal inertia, and therefore the average temperature will oscillate less than in the Northern Hemisphere. When combining the two averages that are sinusoids in opposite phase, the one with larger amplitude will dominate, so the overall effect is that the global average looks more similar to the average of the Northern Hemisphere. In other words warmer in July-August and colder in December-January.

This blog post is taken from the original NASA source without a link back: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/earthmatters/2016/09/...

See also Reddit discussion of the visualization by the author: https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/52k3gr/earth_j...

Thank you, we updated the link from http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/5216.html.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

May this planet somehow be saved for us and our posterity if Trump becomes president.

Please, the problem is much bigger than one political figure.

You sure about that? Obama has done much work than most individuals to bring about the first international collective agreement to prevent climate change. Domestically he has gone above and beyond and risking political backlash to avoid partisanship in senate and bring about climate change prevention policy. This can very well be undone by a president who doesn't believe humans can change the planet. A man who will not acknowledge the comprehensive science surrounding greenhouse gases.

There is more danger than you realize.

How could he be risking political backlash if one man alone was uniquely threatening?

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