2016 was third consecutive year of record global warmth

> I'm dismayed that the very environment we all share somehow got politicized to death.

Largely in the US; the very existence of anthropogenic global warming is not a partisan issue in most of the world.

> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time

It did; there are people who deny it _to this day_, amazingly.

> or the link between smoking and cancer

It did; tobacco companies lobbied and continue to lobby mightily, and politicians were arguing that tobacco wasn't unsafe for a long time.

Back around 1980, I remember lots of tv news specials and saturday morning cartoon interruptions with reports about acid rain. Lots of scares about dying fish and melting statues and canada being pissed at the US for spewing stuff into their air.

I remember too how it was poo-poo'd by the political establishment of the time and lots of claims that its just the way it is and we're not going to be able to fix it, it would hurt jobs, it would hurt the economy.

But regulations were passed, and hard work was done, and we don't really hear much about acid rain (as much!) anymore.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/acid-rains-dirty-legacy...

Science and its-already-gone-too-far not-withstanding, I hope the US in particular will return to sanity and realize that we can make a difference in what is going on, and that doing so raises the quality of life not just for the US but for the entire world.

(I've also wondered: with the dismantling of environmental regulations and associated funding of the current administration, we're seeing individual states pick up the gauntlet and fund their own initiatives. Is this some sort of subtle "see, you don't need the feds to intervene when states have the power and ability" ploy? Then they can gut federal regulations and claim their smaller federal government mandate works? The fallacy being that climate doesn't follow state boundaries.)

> why don't we trust our scientists and climatologists?

1) I don't think local news media has helped last few decades. The constant reports of study that say "X" bad, followed by no no "X" is good (all the while both studies were describing tiny results) has led to distrust.

2) Govt funding of stupid studies creates image where researchers are scam artists who provide results by money

3) Lots of research is done by universities. Growing dissatisfaction with university system being projected onto researchers therein.

4) It was always sold wrong. It should have been sold as energy independence (freedom) not a burden (we need to change how we are doing things and limit ourselves).

> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time,

It did, and a large number of people on the Right took attitudes exactly like the Right takes on climate change today.

That faction was somewhat weaker within the Right at the time, and the Right somewhat weaker overall, so the political resistance to the science wasn't as successful in preventing federal policy action as it has been in the US on climate change, but the same overall shape of political dispute occurred.

> Is this, sort of, Gore's fault...

How in the holy hell would it be Gore's fault? He has tried to be a communicator on this issue for decades. He's "highly polarized" because the great smear machine felt it needed to destroy him for having the temerity to run for President.

> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time, or the link between smoking and cancer if it got politicized.

People have tried to politicize the smoking links. Mike Pence in 2001:

pence> Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20010415085348/http://mikepence.c...

There actually were some political attempts by DuPont to stop the Montreal Protocol's anti-CFC measures, but they weren't successful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

> Also in 1985, 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances. After the discovery of the ozone hole it only took 18 months to reach a binding agreement in Montreal. But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation."[21] And even in March 1988, Du Pont Chair Richard E. Heckert would write in a letter to the United States Senate, "we will not produce a product unless it can be made, used, handled and disposed of safely and consistent with appropriate safety, health and environmental quality criteria. At the moment, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions. There is no available measure of the contribution of CFCs to any observed ozone change..."

>why don't we trust our scientists and climatologists?

"We" do. It's a faction of conservatives in the US who either don't or find it politically useful not to. Unfortunately they're currently in charge. Obama had started to move the US towards working on the problem, but that's hit a wall now.

>(Is this, sort of, Gore's fault, combined with a highly-polarizing media? I have to wonder.)

This is madness. Gore didn't politicize the issue, the right did by gearing up their ideology media machine to skewer him as part of its anti-climate change crusade.

> We trust our doctors;

Very many people, even on HN, do not trust doctors. There's a bunch of anti-vax bollocks on HN, and any thread about doctoring includes people saying they can't wait until all doctors are replaced with AI because doctors don't know anything.

Everything's ridiculously polarised. :-/

I think some of it is that most of the proposed solutions involve social and economic pain. It is easier to deny this problem than accept higher taxes or a lower standard of living for most people. That's human self-interest at work.

A renewable that is cheaper than coal is really the only thing that is going to work.

If you'd like to get a good overview of the case for fossil fuels, check out The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein. [1]

Here is a video trailer for the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu6637cjk8A

Edit: This interview with Dave Rubin may also be helpful in understanding the other point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJmL9hRrpIQ

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels/dp/1591847443

I was thinking about the CFC thing the other day. We'd still have that hole there today if it we're for sane politicians willing to do the right thing. I fear we're doomed this time though.

Action on CFCs and ozone depletion was a lot easier with a lot less economic/industrial impact. Work on CO2 emissions is much more difficult and much more costly. It also is more of a direct challenge to the implicit value assumptions of a huge group of people (that humans have "dominion" over the Earth, and it is theirs to subject rather than theirs to responsibly steward). It's an instance of the "boomerang effect" writ large.

I always have to think about Louis CK's "Indians, White People and God's Earth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZkwuILn_s

It's both hilarious and sad at the same time

Regarding your second paragraph, a joke I saw recently is "We won't act until it's too late. Luckily, it's too late now!".

The last 2 summers have had heatwaves that killed Indians, Europe just had a big one the last few weeks. Meanwhile, German automakers were caught in a conspiracy about diesel. Their government actually argued to keep lax testing methods a few years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...)!

>> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time, or the link between smoking and cancer if it got politicized.

I can't tell if you are being cute because both of those things were very much politicized.

Part of the problem is that it is hard to convince people that 2 degrees farenheight difference would be all that bad. A lot of the talk is around keeping change "under 2 degrees" and a lot of the opposition is in the US.

Nobody in the US has an intuition for what a change of 2 degrees celcius feels like.

This is a tricky question. (Hell, it could well be a trick question.)

El Niño takes place 2-3 times per generation. A stronger than usual phenomenon is a single data point, and we all know how much validity one should give to an outlier. In order to quantify the strength of consecutive events, and especially to rule out freak outliers in both directions you will need a few distinct data points. Let's say 6-8 data points at a minimum.

So the timescales for measurements will be in the range of 40-50 years.

By the time you can reliably use El Niño as a yardstick to say that it's getting late to act, it will have been too late for quite some time.

Nope. You still have people in this thread posting about how "oh the left is just too mean so I became a client skeptic" "oh well the scientists get paid and they don't have 100% of the answers so I'm a client skeptic now"

Climate information is also written in the rings of trees, which in the case of giant sequoias goes back several thousand years. It's also there in the geological record in the form of layers in sedimentary rocks.

totally apolitical here, I thought the same. Archaeologists are often studying bronze age and later sites off mediterranean shores in 10 meters of water...which used to be shoreline, so the sea has risen in a few thousand years more than current doomsayers are discussing. because, you know, yay politics, whatever the science and data happen to be.

If you're going to say this idiotic line, at the very least take 5 minutes to read Wikipedia on the topic.

1. 100% of the problem that climatologists discuss is heat from the sun, trapped, by greenhouse gasses that we release. As you rightly point out, we can't control the sun, so we must control how much insulating gas we put in the atmosphere.

2. Even it China cuts is emissions, with the USA outputting more than 4 times per person, would that be enough? How exactly is it that China spends more on reducing emissions while USA spends zero? This is a collective action problem (much like CFC's were in the 1980s, or not peeing in the lake you depend on for drinking water), it requires grown-up behavior from all nations now so as to no despoil the inheritance we might leave to our children.

I guess the new line is that we can't trust the scientists, because they're all corrupt.

Which I guess is pretty similar to the old line. But at least back then the know-nothingism had the pretense of caring about the science with screams of "1998!" and "sunspots!"

can you provide a link instead of hearsay, please

It might not be because El Niño years are a little warmer. So, if the next couple of years aren’t warmer, we don’t have a hiatus.

We've updated the title from “2016 confirmed as planet's hottest year”. Submitters, the guidelines ask us not to editorialize titles like this.

"International report confirms 2016 was third consecutive year of record global warmth"

EDIT: Title was actually JUST changed.

Fossil combustion is directly heating the Earth by ~16 terawatts. Radiative forcing from human emitted CO2 (primarily fossil combustion) is ~1 watt/m^2:

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

Multiplied by the surface area of the planet, 510,000,000 km^2, that's 510 terawatts heating from CO2 in the atmosphere. As time goes by the relative importance of radiative forcing continues to increase, because fuel produces heat for just a short time as it burns but the combustion emissions amplify the effects of sunlight for years to come.

The earth is always radiating heat, balanced against new heat from the sun. Absent the heat-trapping effects of CO2, the generated heat would quickly dissipate to equilibrium.

That is actually part of the plan. Everyone believes in a manufactured environmental doomsday scenario, and can blame it on nameless "others" who "pollute" the Earth with their trace gases. Soon there will be a carbon indulgence available for everyone to pay in order to secure your salvation. Then you can continue your patterns of actual pollution with a clear consience: littering, not picking up after your dog, not conserving resources, starting flamewars online, using too much water, ignoring the real environment around you.

and people downvoting me just prove that the majority of those people overconsuming is not going to change soon