March Temperatures in Alaska: 20 Degrees Hotter Than Usual
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Southeast Alaska is a temperate rainforest. When I moved here in 2002, I spent my first years relishing the short periods of clear skies we had. I'd plan longer hikes for those days, and squeeze in a few of those hikes each year when the weather cleared. I liked going hard outdoors when it was clear, and then enjoying some inside time when it was gray and gloomy. It was a perfect place for a programmer, because you play hard for a while when it's nice and then spend longer periods working indoors while it rains. I like the rain too, but it was nice to plan some bigger hikes for dry spells.
Now I make myself do indoor work when it's nice out, because we have regular month-long dry spells. It's not just me; many people talk about how they've adjusted their lifestyle away from a focus on rain. We all still talk as if the rain keeps us inside, but it's less of an impact every year. Around the state it's the same story, local changes have a wide range of direct impacts on the everyday lives of residents here. Three miners in Nome got stranded on an ice floe because the ice broke up in March for the first time in at least 120 years. [0]
If you're curious to hear about Alaska weather on a regular basis, Brian Brettschneider is an Alaskan climatologist who regularly provides informative commentary on long-term patterns and recent changes. [1]
[0] - http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued-drif...
Tons of locals talk about how they used to drive onto the River in Whitehorse for the annual Rendezvous festival in February - park cars on there, put up tents, have a huge party ON the river for a week.
It hasn't frozen over solid even once in 10+ years.
How many times during a 365 day period does the temperature read 20 degrees above (or below) the average? How many times does this happen per day, per weekly average, per month?
As someone who grew up in New England it doesn't seem like it would be that rare. There were weeks in July where it was over 95 when the historical average was probably 75 and weeks in February when the average was 10 even if the historical average was 32. What is the standard deviation for temperature in certain areas and how rare is it to see 20 degrees variation if you are looking at multiple windows of time that vary in length?
Sure, global warming did not cause it to be 20 degrees higher than usual? If anything it would be +3 degrees global warming +17 degrees random variation? Why run with 20 in the title if there is no way that global warming would be responsible for the random variation.
It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table.
Same thing with debates about whether earth is flat or earth is 6000 years old. The fact that these debates take place gives undue credibility to the non-scientific opposition and elevates to the same stage as the scientific views.
This is a pretty odd take. Believing anything is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.
Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That’s besides the point.
Except nothing.
> hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally
Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.
I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.
I think what people who get rankled by this have in mind is a certain, pluralistic connotation of "believe." Often when someone says, "I believe in Christianity," it's implied that atheists or people of other faiths are not unreasonable to believe differently. (Something similar could be said about political or ethical beliefs. It's difficult to spell out the sense in which you can view someone who disagrees with you as reasonable, but I think you know what I mean.) So people who think "belief" is not applicable to global warming or evolution are trying to deny that we should be pluralistic about these matters.
I still think this is a somewhat obtuse equivocation on the word "belief," but I think I understand the intuition beneath it.
The article makes no mention of how local people, businesses, etc. are affected by the temperature change. The intended article takeaway is clearly about climate change and how this fits into the current state of climate change. Yet, the chance that one specific area is +/- a certain average over a flexible and short amount of time has nothing to do global warming.
It paints an inaccurate picture for those who don't read academic papers on their own. It reminds me of articles that talk about how a stock is down 5% when it is up 100% in a few years and make it sound like the company is imploding. By not framing it with a general sense of regular variation the article itself is confusing.
People double global warming, so it makes sense to declare belief or disbelief in global warming to put one's self on a certain side of the global warming issue, since it's actually an issue of contention.
It doubly makes sense if you want to alleviate the knee-jerk responses that will dismiss what you're about to say since people seem to respond emotionally rather than logically to such a contentious issue.
Prefacing the side you're on in this case is like going up to a guard dog at your friend's house and saying "It's ok buddy, I'm on your side. Don't worry." in a soft non-threatening voice.
If you're gonna downvote, would love to see you point to a specific climate model, and the math behind it...that has the predictive capabilities that the Gravitational constant does about how the universe works.
I don't know exactly when we went past the balance point. But we could probably be 10 billions humans without a negative impact on the planet. The problem comes from the way most first-world and emergent countries people live, the lack of a sustainable system
It's not unreasonable in the least to say, "Perhaps the climate is changing, but I am highly skeptical of the models that specifically implicate AGW in certain weather patterns, or insinuate that certain weather patterns are the direct result of climate change" In fact I think it's much more plausible that a few decades of "dry weather" would be categorized as weather phenomena and not climate phenomena, since such decades-long changes in weather patterns are frequently a part of the historical record.
it is well past time to make a conscious decision of which side of the 'debate' you choose to lend your voice to. regardless of what caveats you may put up front.
Forgive me, but doesn't your response boil down to "this criticism is accurate" and then, accuracy be damned, railing against it? If the answer is "it's really fucking rare", then that's exactly what the OP is asking for. If the answer isn't that, well...
It's the one thing virtually all economists agree on as the most efficient way to catalyze large-scale change (although we'll still need regulation and sequestration as well).
Politically, the most realistic way to get this done without a huge public backlash is via a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. There's a bill before congress right now [0]. Canada implemented a variation on this at a federal level recently.
One of the most active groups supporting this kind of legislation is Citizens' Climate Lobby – if you care about this issue, please consider joining.
[0] Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116...
Besides – how do you suggest we get China and India to cut emissions without doing the same, if not more, at home? Perhaps Border Adjustments [1] can alleviate some of your fears; they would protect domestic industry. All of this has already been worked out to stupendous levels of detail by legal scholars and Nobel-prize winning economists [2] – your armchair criticism just shows that you're decades behind the policy wonks. Leave it to them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin...
[1] https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science...
It is safe to assume at this point climate change is like an asteroid on a trajectory of near term collision with Earth. I'd rather be wrong and alive then right and extinct on this one. But thats me.
We are spending so much energy and resources analysing a black-hole (which is fantastic for Science, but our ship is sinking), entertainment sports... Every individual can and should change. Personally I did, I'm living with a really low environmental fingerprint compared to the average here in Western Europe, I eat mostly region-scale local vegetables, fruits, rice.., ride a bike, and buy the strict necessary
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate [2] https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human-survival.html