Temperature Anomalies by Country 1880-2017
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg
The data set is here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcnm/v3.php
IIRC, it took about a hundred lines of Perl to generate that animation of temperature station locations in the definitive global historical temperature data set.
When you are watching the animation, note when specific regions of the world make an appearance in the data set and the relative importance of measurements from specific countries.
I do not draw policy conclusions from these observations. However, I am frequently annoyed by official and unofficial visualizations which completely gloss over the sample selection and observational continuity problems in the historical record.
Also when reigons decrease in data. After the end of the cold war russia looses 3/4ths of their datapoints, and then half a year later china looses about the same.
And, what happened to Australia?
I'm curious where this opinion comes from? my understanding is the sampling takes a lot into account including the heat island effects. Your blanket claim does not come with any proof, so I'm curious where it comes from.
> I'm curious where this opinion comes from? ... my understanding is the sampling takes a lot into account
There is no sampling. We have an incomplete census of measured temperatures. Where humans decided to measure and record temperatures and which records survived were not determined by a sampling scheme.
Even if the record were complete, it would be subject to selection biases.
Just looking at the locations of temperature measurements in the definitive historical data set should drive this point home. Two, three, four hundred years ago, humans did not say "let's figure out a representative sampling scheme for accurately measuring global climate change." The current record is a function of where humans chose to live, work, produce, and travel.
The near-term interests of those individuals are not aligned with the long-term interests of the rest of humankind.
Showing the connection between global warming and unlimited political donations post-Citizens-United is part of that.
Conspiracy theory.
But if you accept global warming, what other explanation can you present for the continued inaction of our government?
1. Not believe in things they can’t see
2. Especially when it is convenient not to.
The reasoning goes “if global warming were true, we’d have to change a lot of things. I don’t want to change things. It can’t be true”.
There’s also a tendency to believe that slow moving things can’t possibly cause big changes. The reasoning goes: “The earth has always seemed basically similar, so why would it change”
This reasonong doesn’t happen at a conscious level, it’s more of an impulse that guides what beliefs people let in, and don’t. What rationalizations they use, etc.
If it were a conspiracy of elites, you’d see mass support for things like carbon taxes. Instead, they’re unpopular.
Now, you could argue that some rich elites have used propaganda campaigns to convince people global warming is false. I think this is correct, but I also think these propaganda campaigns were aided by what people want to believe.
As for governments: they can’t undertake politically unpopular actions. They’ll get voted out.
1. Global warming is real. (Duh.)
2. Political contributions from the fabulously wealthy are buying government inaction.
Now, it may be that, like many on HN, you value inequality and adamantly support the "free speech" rights of the fabulously wealthy few to dominate the U.S. political system through unlimited political contributions. But global warming becomes harder and harder to deny with each passing year. Maybe it will take the loss of the entire Florida peninsula, but eventually all but the most hardcore will have to face reality.
Even if you're not reachable, eventually enough others will be reachable.
You seem to be viewing this as only propaganda driven.
I don't think you're being disingenuous, but your argument is essentially "concern trolling": you agree with the substance but express concern that others may not. It is folly to be paralyzed in the face of such an argument: that's abandoning a won position to your interlocutor.
I'm saying that even though climate change is disastrous collectively, it's currently generally in an individual's interest to burn carbon. And so a fair chunk of people will have great difficulty even understanding that this burning is terribly bad for the planet and for us collectively.
Even absent propaganda we would have this problem. Now, if society were all united in sending a message I'm sure more people would be in favour of emissions reduction. But you're treating the issue as only caused by propaganda.
Any preventable scenario requires people ignoring it to happen. Which I guess in itself isn't very helpful. It is just that people tend to assume that dysfunction isn't normal when it is usually the opposite. That anything functional often requires long deliberate and concerted efforts. There are for instance still plenty of people dying in traffic.
It's just that we really don't pay attention to the earth not being destroyed by a meteor today.
In most of the rest of the world it might be even worse. Especially if you also consider the size of countries like India and China. Most countries have only had peace for less than a century. New technologies end up abusing, if not killing, hundreds of thousands of people. The global economy seem to experience one large crash every decade. A lot of things are getting better, but I certainly wouldn't say the are getting more functional. I would even say that a lot of development is more unsustainable today than ever.
When a million people don't die in traffic every year I will get more hopeful about humanities ability to handle existential threats. Until then let's hope for a something smaller event first (I don't really know the distribution of something like a meteor).
Yes, people sometimes had irrational fears. Yes, probabilities are unfortunately difficult to intuitively grasp.
But it's not safety that doomed nuclear power, quite obviously: countries such as Russia and (to a lesser degree) China care little about environmental concerns. Nuclear power is simply too expensive.
It's also surprising that the incredible improvements wind, and especially solar power have seen over the last decade or so are largely not the result of far-sighted technologists, but of the universally-despised political class: subsidising solar power production in Germany, as one example, must be among the most efficient government programs in history.
The thing with nuclear power (or solar now) is that just having a viable alternative isn't enough. Because so much of the costs of oil is discovery and infrastructure, its price per barrel can go incredibly low when a competitor arises - much of the oil that's in ground has bought by someone already and they want to sell it for something.
With a situation like this, the only way to stop carbon emissions is regulation. The only way to stop carbon emissions is regulation (in case anyone missed that). Even if nuke were a significant power sources from the 1980s, we would be facing a climate problem if hydrocarbons were not regulated.
However, after investigating the history more closely, it appears that nuclear construction projects were boondoggles even before Three Mile Island. Economics, not activism, is what killed nuclear in the US.
Nuclear has always been marketed under a lie, that its cheap, and perhaps too cheap to meter. In reality, well engineered projects are insanely complex, requiring huge material and labor costs during construction. And then there's maintenance.
People always talk about regulations driving up costs for nuclear, but they never talk about inappropriate regulations that drive up costs, meaning that the high costs are necessary.
And when you think about the design of the things, there's no reason to think it should be cheap: the nuclear is merely a heat source, which still requires the massive amount of machinery needed for steam turbines. The only part of the thing that's potentially cheaper is fuel, but to handle that fuel you've got to have massively engineering and equipment efforts.
This history of nuclear is always glossed over by its boosters. It's really expensive, and if we didn't have better options now, we should build it anyway. And we should have built a lot during the 80s like France did.
But today, grid storage is far cheaper than nuclear, and it makes no sense at all to ever build a new nuclear plant. Let's keep existing ones running until they're replaced with other carbon free sources, but for new investment, current nuclear tech is dead. New SMR, maybe maybe some day if it's cheap, but we shall see in a few decades, it's not available today like storage, wind, water, and solar are.
... and fuel-cycle then decommission -related costs.
About those last ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17844976
My current understanding is that the economics did not work out because: power company borrows x billion in capital to build a nuclear power plant, interest rates in the 80's are in the double digits, activists tie up the startup of the power plant for 5-10 years doubling the cost due to interest, power company finally drops starting the plant altogether and the public eats the loss.
Of course there are all sorts of complications to what really happened, like power consumption rates going up like crazy while AC is adopted and power companies thinking that the trend would continue forever, which didn't happen.
Have something you want to believe and you can find a narrative to fit it. This is a really hard trap to avoid and I'm sure I fall in it often.
While regulation certainly didn't make anything easier, and can probably be blamed for some percentage of the failures, there's a loooot more to the story. As you point out, incorrect demand predictions, and long term planning set during a time of plenty can require cancellations too.
I wish I had a more authoritative book from a disinterested historian, but the best I've found as a summary is the classic 1985 Forbes article[1], which I found through Wikipedia's list [2] of cancelled projects, the list that initially made me think, "huh, TMI can't be blamed for that one, or that one..."
[1] reprint on a blog, with some weird commentary about Gore on top which can be ignored: http://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-r...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_re...
Love to hear of any sources you might have too!
As a result, there are some who are arguing about the use of it for climate engineering [3].
I would be against climate engineering, but in the case of aerosol, given the history of volcano eruptions of the past and that we are facing an irreversible trend, this is something we need to seriously consider before it's too late.
[1] (scroll to the Aerosol graph) https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...
[2] https://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/cli_aerosols....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Here they've chosen to take the average over 1951-1980 and use that as the reference.
I'm wondering though, would it be possible to correlate these anomalies with some other metrics? Say for example human produced CO2?
[1] - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Global_te...
It also has the advantage of showing the blip of very high US temperatures in the 1930s. People also complain about bias if those extremes are left out.
And while I suspect this is well intentioned, I also think it's more likely to backfire than to help produce positive change. Poisoning the well [1] is very much a thing. When information is presented in a way that can be shown to be very misleading, it tends to make one question the integrity of all other data even when it is presented in as forthright a fashion as possible.
From the upper right, it seems like it’s I guess the average per year per country, placed in bins for -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ... except how were the bins constructed? In reference to global temperature in some specific year? Country-average in some specific year? Very hard to read or know the significance of it.
I hate visualizations like this for exactly this reason. The video hits me in the gut and makes me want to believe the final two decades of data are alarming, but it’s not clear at all what statistical claim is being measured, and how unlikely that specific claim would be under some counterfactual distribution.
I’m not denying (or confirming!) the implication of the data. Just pointing out that this is sort of like “ooh shiny” shallow attention grabbing, which IMO does more harm than good.
Statistical visualizations should not feel like they have an agenda in the idiosyncratic choice of axes, scale, colorbar, etc. It’s just not clear to me here that it’s not got one.
If the circles’ sizes and colors were based on country-specific average anomaly divided by country-specific standard deviation of anomaly, based on a post-industrial reference year, say in the 50s-80s, then the colorization and size changes would possibly be useful.
Basically bucketing Wald statistics instead of temperature anomaly, and ensuring it’s all always country-specific.
If a presentation of the data that conforms to standard techniques for an unbiased representation would not result in “hitting you in the gut” then that has to be accepted, and worked with, not sacrificing intellectual integrity to elide the data and change things for an agenda.
What's going to be your opinion of the value of my fund? Of me? Did I do anything wrong, or can I just claim I was only trying to "appeal to the audience's emotion"? Myopic thinking and Machiavellian logic are a great combination to undermine the very ends you aim to achieve.
In the case we're talking about, the emotional impact intended is simply that the information is alarming. You can drily say "the house is on fire", or with flushed face and wide eyes exclaim "the house is on fire!" The latter involves emotional information in addition to the relevant facts. If the house is not on fire, both statements have the same problem: they are false. If the house is on fire, the second is more likely to prompt action. The absence of emotional cues in the first statement will itself be taken as an emotional cue by an ordinary audience. "The house can't be on fire in the way I would normally interpret 'the house is on fire' because that would cause panic, and the speaker isn't panicking. Ho, hum. Are there any sports on?" In fact, the dryness of the presentation is frequently presented as evidence that climate change is a fraud. Denialists say "if you really believed this is true, you'd be doing X, and you aren't, so ha!" The beauty of this gambit is that the goal posts are so mobile. If you do X, they pull secret expected behavior Y out of their pocket and repeat the argument. These measures of sincere affect are like sharks teeth. There is always another if you pull out the one you see. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So, setting aside these particular denialists as insincere, one's best bet is to try to indicate your affect in your presentation, because this is a heuristic ordinary people use to gauge the honesty of their interlocutors: does the implied urgency of their argument match their tone.
If you genuinely think you're right, you don't suddenly turn to something very much bordering on falsehoods to make a point. In any discussion the strength of an argument is generally going to be measured based on the strength of its weakest point. And arguments, such as this article presents, are incredibly weak as they appear to be deeply misleading when one is presented with big picture data. And suddenly everything you've ever said becomes tainted, even if the other 99% of it was completely and wholly accurate.
[1] - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Global_te...
Instead, like on so many topics in the social media era, people 'pick sides' and radicalize on these issues. And media like this is published to help further the radicalization. All the while in this process people on both 'sides' ends up voluntarily retarding their own logic and reasoning by working backwards from a predetermined conclusion instead of working from the breadth of data towards whichever conclusion (or lack thereof) that they find the most logical position.
My point precisely.
> Personally, I think that people are very skilled at identifying when they are being spoken to unhonestly or dismissively.
How? By consulting their gut? Why do certain people lie so frequently if lying doesn't work?
Besides, we aren't talking about lying here, only presenting true data such that it has a particular emotional appeal. The goal is not to produce any false belief or any action contrary to the audience's interest. It is only to get the audience to register the information with the organ they use to process such information effectively: their gut.
But really the point I was trying to make by saying it's just another sentiment: perhaps the number of people put off by incomplete statistics is more than the people swayed by the dramatic results
On the other hand, when someone sees the firefighter and says "What a propaganda. These pictures never bother to present a concrete evidence that two planes hit WTC," then we kind of know rational discourse is over, which is what's happening with climate denialism.
Let me state first that I do believe climate change is real and urgently needs to be given increased attention to find a solution.
But, secondly, your comment falls completely flat, and in my personal view, you are espousing something that is truly far, far more dangerous than even climate denial.
You’re attempting to say that a rational analysis of entire patterns of propaganda is equivalent to no longer participating in the rational debate. You’re trying to say that anyone who does not agree there is intrinsic credibility to the data-eliding emotional appeals must themselves no longer have credibility in the discussion.
This essentially lobotomizes our best and only chance to solve problems like climate change long-term, which is to use science as a constraint on political gamesmanship.
When you say, “... then we know rational discourse is over” you’re just falling right into politicians’ hands, who want to continue politicizing the issue while not actually doing anything about it that doesn’t happen to also serve their short-term profit interests, and figuring that if younger generations have to inherit a wasteland and figure out how to live in it, that’s not their problem, and they’ll happily consume now, while the getting is good.
Your type of meta-comment is the most frustrating to me in this whole debate, because you seem self-aware enough to know better.