It’s about 50°F warmer than normal near the North Pole again
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/global-temperature-t...
These are averages over the whole year. The graph to consider specifically for Arctic is this one:
There is zero question if there is anything we can do to change it.
The question on the social level is if we will, as a species, regulate the behavior of individuals and institutions.
On the individual level the question is if you and I will choose to take responsibility and choose our behavior as individuals and stop saying, if a billion other people don't change it doesn't matter what I do so I won't change. We can all take responsibility for our personal actions. If people in previous generations had, we wouldn't face these issues. They didn't so we do, but maybe we can for future generations.
The project was related to measuring greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation industry. Everyone is excited about the massive savings (potentially the largest single saving in the State) but the numbers are pathetic when you put them into an equivalency calculator (https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...).
My takeaway from the project has been that without dramatic and systematic change at a societal level nothing else really matters. At best we can mitigate and try to slow the impacts of climate change. The Sustainability Manager at my work has told me that the industry/literature/academics are also shifting towards talk of mitigation and resiliency now instead of prevention.
I hope I'm wrong but global GHG emissions are massive compared to the solutions we currently have.
The climate can't be "wrong" it has no agency. The impact of human CO2 production on climate can be "unprecedented" or "destabilizing" or "ill advised" but the word 'wrong' implies that there is a 'right' climate. We know that the climate changes on the planet, we emerged as the more annoying form of hominid during an ice age after all. "Something" caused that ice age, and "something" caused it to end, and that something could not possibly have been us. So who is responsible becomes less important in my mind as responding while we can with effective ways to live and prosper under different climates.
What about important questions, like effective ways for others to prosper while some are crushed by the massive industry of human-felled / human-crushing trees? Whether we could or should stop felling trees onto people is a question beyond science or human judgement on which to opine.
This sort of "climate trolley problem" is the final stage of pseudo-rational climate change denial, before it was "it isn't happening", now we're in a postmodernist semantic argument in the face of human destruction of our biosphere. How intellectual.
It's a bit of a reach through and I pretty much agree with your point.
The hard fact is this: about a thousand politicians have the collective ability to make a large percentage of the planet no longer viable for humans for hundreds of years.
You likely know it to be true with regards to nuclear arsenal. Why would it be so hard to accept that the same goes for gas emissions?
Humans can burn or cut down phenomenally large forests — they have, and still do, at an increasingly faster rate, thanks to more and more sophisticated technology. Humans can, and do, drill into methane pockets underground, releasing large amounts of gas. And, of course, oil.
The second law of thermodynamics is a fact of life. There is no fully sustainable energy consumption scheme. Those we rely most on currently come from accidental geological events; primarily, the lack of bacterial enzymes able to consume lignin prior to the end of the Carboniferous.
Just like diagnosing a disease is necessary to get the meds needed to survive, understanding the mechanisms of our planet's viability is necessary for our sake.
We emerged during an interglacial. Which happens regularly during Ice Ages.
However we are now seeing conditions that could end the Ice Ages. And the "something" causing that is us.
We're supposed to have another few warm days next week.
Likewise, a single day of warmth doesn't prove global warming. An entire winter of warm days does.
>"Extreme temperature spikes such as this one have occurred multiple times in the past two winters, whereas they only previously occurred once or twice per decade in historical records"
It sounds like this is becoming a trend, which is what is worrisome.
The guy is a stand up fella, real family man, pillar of the church.
Do you open the door, hug him and invite him in?
He did it, he did! HE DID IT!
Now, moving the discussion back to AGW..
If they can't predict this, climate science must be wrong.
Of course global warming is real. But modeling the effects is very hard. I think deniers conflate the models with the trend.
Edit: I know I've written things in the past that arguably deserved being downvoted, but this time it is uncalled for!
It's hard to dress correctly.
I recall one summer, maybe 5 years ago, ten days straight above 35 with day time temps in the 40s. Trees were dying from heat stress after a ten year draught.
Ah, this is it, from 2009:
Adelaide, South Australia Edit Average daily maximum 27 January – 7 February: 40.5 °C (104.9 °F) – (11.1 °C (20.0 °F) above average)[9] 13 Consecutive days over 33 °C (91 °F) 6 Consecutive days over 40 °C (104 °F) 4 Consecutive days over 43 °C (109 °F)
That's right, 13! consecutive days above 33!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2009_southeastern_Aust...
(Lots of high 30's, but no 40+)
The downsides being ticks becoming common, warmer temperatures enabling more diseases spreading in both human and animal populations, a few native animals dying (they can't breed without certain things such as ice, and their natural defense mechanisms do not work), and Gulf stream probably slowing and causing a new ice age. Ah yes, there's always that. But then again, not going to happen on my lifetime so who cares... :)
This entire paragraph is why people deny global warming.
They admit we don't know if this is unusual. In fact we know it's a normal occurance, just it's 'probably' happening more often yet.... jump to Global Warming.
This is not science, this is politics and it's why people go hard the other way.
Most people have no clue about anything going on around them except for what pays the bills (and even then). I was listening to some random radio host telling how "stupid" doctors and healthcare administrators are, that we should be concentrating our efforts on "prevention" rather than fitting a brand new hip onto a 96 year old person. He then went on to cite cancer patients in particular: we should not cure cancer, we should prevent it. His recommendation? "Preventative" MRI and SCANs for everybody over 30, because these would help "detect cancer" earlier.
I don't have to explain to you how clueless that man is/was. But there you have it. The general population is clueless about everything and people speak out of their asses all the time. So in a sense, you were right, but it's the other way around: the problem is politics and human nature, not science.
There's a reasonable argument that we're fairly clueless about how most natural systems actually work. I heard recently that plate tectonics wasn't even a theory until the 70s! It's a tricky situation because the political aspect of global warming is both the only way to solve it and the thing getting in the way of it being solved.
I think people intuitively understand that science doesn't have this figured out. Which isn't to say the science is wrong! But papering over those gaps in knowledge by immediately ascribing all data to global warming does more to hurt the cause than help. It's easy to be a skeptic when there are so many low quality articles like this being produced.
First Scientists are (I think) moral. So they find some evidence for AGW and then think "oh gosh if this is true my kids are going to have a problem" and then try to raise the profile of the topic to (essentially) help their kids out. On issues like "dog tooth growth" there is no driving moral imperative and so no tree shaking.
The other factor is money, scientists are human. Scientists need grants, appealing to politicians gets grants, stirring up news media gets grants. There has been a lot of grant getting in this space - the top 5% of folks working in the field have got grants in the most professional, highly targetted and useful way possible. The 5% worst applications funded, not so much.
However, this process is all about getting the science done - it seems to me as an outsider that the science has moved from not done but in the news to mostly done but roped around with personal positions, sacred cows and so on (like all science). I think that practitioners in the field think this too as they still want to work in it. In contrast I was will one of the leading Quantum Physicists a few weeks ago, I understood very little of what was said but smiled when he announced "I'm not working in Quantum Computing now as the theory is all done"! Compare...
The problem isn't the professional, ethical and well supported by science messages being put out by most AGW people now; it's the wild (probably correct, but wild) assertions that came out 15 years ago. These were slammed and unpicked by skeptics, leaving a residue of mistrust.
Unfortunately without one (assertion, flap) you don't get the other. This is where Feynman was wrong - PR does sometimes trump (geddit?) nature.
No one seems to be thinking about how Science should accommodate and learn from this. Which, given the Scientific method, is odd.
It isn't "low quality."
This article reports about the current weather conditions, it was not intended to "prove" anything about the cause of climate change. You expect from the news article something that nobody can give you (understanding of the causes) unless you have the capability and the wish to acquire it.
When the weather conditions reach all-time high, it's news. Especially if it matches the much longer trend.
See my other post here for the links to the graphs with the context.
There's a reasonable argument that we're fairly clueless
about how most natural systems actually work.
The fact that the arctic or any region is experiencing warmer than usual weather lately doesn't mean that climate change is happening or that the weather is a result of climate change.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-sk...
The causality is unidirectional; there is no entailment in the sense that a period like this could occur without global warming or without global warming effects being responsible for this particular episode.
However, the prior probability of this event is influenced by the warming of the system overall. The expectation that an event like this will occur in a given season is higher if you have a warmed planet than not.
That doesn't mean that it will happen, or that if it happens it's because of global warming. If there is global warming this event is more likely and should be expected more often.
No. There's no way that some warm or cold period can only be caused by global warming (or that it can disprove it). Since thevformer are extremes at the specific point in time, the later is the trend (averages, compared year-to-year).
But some period can be so extreme that it's a big news if it breaks the records compared to all previous measurements. This is the case this time. If it breaks the records in the direction of the trend, it can point to trend getting even stronger. You won't know if the trend actually got stronger until you make new averages, but it is worrying enough.
To compare with something you know: you drive every day 1 hour between two places. You know that your speed at some specific point in time never gets under some value, for example, you never had to stop. If you stop somewhere and wait 1 minute, it doesn't mean you won't have chance to speed up and still get on time. The average can still be the same. You'll know when you're there. But if you day to day have to wait, first day 1 minute, the next 2 minutes, after some number of days you can know that you can't think "maybe I'll still be on time" when you break the wait "record" of all previous days. Now, the climate is one level above: it's not even how fast is one car but how fast are all cars everywhere, if we speak about the whole Earth climate. That's why the denier claiming "but I feel I drove this small route here faster" (i.e. "it seems warm in my town now," not even comparing the actual historical measuremens) is not disproving "it's warmer every year on the whole planet."
The averages are here:
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/global-temperature-t...
It happened 100 years ago, it happened one thousand years ago.
It ponders perhaps it's happening more often, but brings no evidence to the table on this possibility while reporting on this natural occurrence.
If you think this is science, to use examples that have always happened to convince people of change, your conception of what science is is very very flawed.
And my point is, climate deniers can see this. They see through this fake pulp for the masses (I mean seriously the article even admits it's a normal occurrence) and use this to reinforce their opposite cult views.
An outlying temperature is just one data point, and on its own it doesn't really open the door to reliably talk about global warming.
What type of cancers are you talking about? What subtype? What population are we talking about? What subpopulation? What is the difference between an early diagnostic and prevention? Are CTs and MRIs the right tool for the job? Who is most at risk? How often do you screen your target population? How do you make sure they actually come and do the exams? How do you measure success? Are you ready to deal with the outcomes of the diagnosis?
These are just basic questions really. Some people devote their entire life to these hard topics. The radio host sounded like an "expert" with "great ideas" to an equally clueless audience when really he just has no idea.
- Early detection, for the sake of argument assuming that the proposed screening program would in fact be effective or could be adjusted to be effective, does not always improve survival rates. There is a diminishing rate of return from pushing the detection earlier and earlier.
- Any screening needs to deal with false positives. Telling someone they may have cancer leads to suffering, and may in some cases trigger more serious effects. E.g. consider someone suicidal who is told they may have cancer, and decides to end it. Or "just" decides to engage in more high risk behaviours, increasing risk of harm. And for something that is rare, even a very small rate of false positives during large scale screening might cause disproportionate suffering, and might end up causing significant harm.
- False positives require further investigation, and if not ruled out with reasonably low impact methods like biopsies may result in over-treatment. This is particularly serious for cancer, where many of the treatment alternatives have a substantial risk of causing death.
- The screening also needs to deal with false negatives. Someone who is told they don't display any symptoms of cancer may pay less attention to signs later on, and may end up discovering their cancer later than they otherwise would, increasing risk of death.
All of these affect overall outcomes, and you need to tally up the effects of all of them before you can say if a screening program will be overall positive or overall negative.
One outcome of actually analysing this, for example, has been a push towards ending large scale mammography screening, because newer surveys that takes the above effect into account shows that while it does in fact reduce mortality somewhat for those who actually have breast cancers that would kill, it causes sufficient overdiagnosis to kill many otherwise healthy patients. Here is one article that covers this problem [1].
The problem is that people often assume the worst case outcome of a screening program is that it won't be effective, but the worst case outcome is that you kill more people than you save.
Essentially, CT scans increase the risk of cancer.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-ct-scans...
The remaining parts are: (1) Do humans induces a rise of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? and (2) is the rising level of CO2 in the atmosphere provoking a rise in temperature on global scale?
It's my understanding that (1) is a simple yes: just do an accounting of the number of carbon atoms, and you realize that getting atoms of carbons out of the rocks to the surface of the planet at industrial scale means that there must be more carbons either in natural carbon storage (forests, oceans) or in the atmosphere. Since forests are not growing and the absorption of CO2 by the oceans does not seem to be very efficient, it means humans are increasing level of CO2 above themselves. Carbon doesn't magically disappear. It has to be somewhere.
(2) is the one that get difficult. There are a lot of arguments for (a lot of data points to rise both in CO2 and temperatures, a lot of models show the same thing) but all of this is modeling and correlation when what we are doing in extrapolation: is the relationship between CO2 and temperature going to stay the same as it is, or does some counter-effect going to kick in and make things smoother, or on the contrary, some effect on the atmosphere will accelerate global warming? Until we have a perfect model of the atmosphere or until we have actually got there and realize we have screwed up things or not, we can not say we have a scientific proof, and we can't be sure at which speed it's gonna happen.
But the amount of circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming and there is so much at stake that in my opinion it is not reasonable to act like it's not happening or like you need hard mathematical proof to consider it a reality.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...
Until now it was my understanding that greenhouses are warm because they are shielded from the outside by glass walls so only the sun can shine in but warmth can't go out. Are you now saying that greenhouses are so warm because of their CO2 levels?
No, what the OP says is that CO2 acts like a greenhouse
"Specific circumstances caused this, but probably Global warming is making things worse."
SO this isn't evidence of Global Warming and even mentioning it is just going to piss people off. I even accept that the statement is completely true. I'm convinced such spikes really are probably becoming more frequent and intense due to Global Warming.
However we're not talking about how I would read and understand this but how it would be perceived by a skeptic. On that score aaron695 is spot on.