Average Global Temperatures since 1850
kyso.io
kyso.io
The next 50 years are going to be interesting... let's hope we leave the world in a manageable state for future generations.
It's the same thing with the planet, I'm afraid. We just don't understand how important a stable climate is for the stability of our civilization and thus we don't really have the will to maintain it. Once the crisis has developed into something that's completely unsustainable for the ones with influence and power a reaction will come.
I've had multiple talks with managers about the need to invest time and resources in our tech infrastructure after long periods of user and feature growth, only to be turned down because it's not as important as more features. Once a nasty situation rolls around time and resources to make sure this never happens again magically pops up.
That sounds like preventing a catastrophe.
But natural selection doesn't work for us. We don't have a large sample of earths where it doesn't matter when humans die out on some of them.
I'm not questioning the data per se, as you can tell from looking at 2000 up to today that the median is rising.
I'm just a bit surprised by the accuracy in the late 19th century. I expected less.
No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that.
This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that allows you to do things like this (derive a higher level of accuracy than the data would otherwise allow) if you know for a fact that the associated errors pretty much all cancel out. But you have to know this, from prior sampling or whatever; you can't just assume it. But that's what these folks are doing - waving their hands and just assuming that the errors mostly cancel out.
To add insult to injury, for other portions of the data they state that they have the right to make routine, automated adjustments because of systematic errors in the data. But you can't have it both ways - assuming that the errors mostly cancel out on the one hand, while on the other hand claiming you have the right to make adjustments because, you know, those errors don't actually cancel each other out after all.
> I'm not questioning the data per se
You should be! Most of the "data" here is either of remarkably low quality, or just pretty much made up.
Some claim the world is not getting warmer.
Some agree it might be but we don't know for sure.
Some agree it is getting warmer, and say it might be due to human activity, but we don't know for sure.
Some agree it is getting warmer, but claim it is due to some other cause than human activity.
Some claim it is getting warmer, but increased co2 will bring huge benefits.
Some agree it is getting warmer and agree that increased co2 brings harm, but that efforts to reduce emissions would bring great economic harm.
Plus probably several other positions I have not mentions. Also, some people try to combine several positions.
You know, you all would be more persuasive if you could first reach agreement among yourselves. Or at least if the advocates of each position would be as critical of the other positions as they are of the mainstream position.
You're reducing multiple known sources of error to a single one for some reason, which doesn't help here. Here's an example: my car shows 4% higher speed than the real one due to difference in expected tire diameter. Additionally it has some small dynamic error of speed measurement. In this case I can "have it both ways". I can correct for the known difference and use multiple measurements to get a higher precision speed reading.
The same thing applies to old temperature measurements if you provide good explanation of the systematic error.
And to my point, no, you can't claim that the errors in various temperature readings mostly cancel each other out, without having any solid proof of that. Nor can you then turn around and claim that since there are enough errors out there that obviously don't cancel out, that this then gives you the right to set loose a computer program to blindly "correct" those errors, said program having been constructed using whatever models and biases you were operating under at the time. (Those "corrections" may not be anywhere close to accurate, in other words.) But that's exactly the kind of thing they've been doing.
But the problem is many other measurements confirm the surface temperature results. Air temps agree with ocean temps, various proxies agree with those (ice extent and mass for example, are declining as would be expected with a warming trend)
Now, does 1800s temperature data have large errors? Yes, and those are reflected in surface temperature reconstructions by large error bars.
You are not the first person to be convinced that climate data is bad, some very smart people have felt that, and got funded by the koch brothers to do it right, and they did an excellent job, but got the same answers NASA, NOAA, and other groups did:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20...
Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to be warmer.
You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter is indisputable.
Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016 https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/...
1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with everything in between.
As well, the fraudulent activity would be going on with satellite based reconstruction, deep sea temperature measurements, ice extent and mass measurements, all being done by other groups in various ways.
If you really feel that this is what is going on, it is possible to do your own reconstruction from raw data. The raw data, unadjusted, is freely available. If you pick a time frame to look at, where you have a few hundred stations randomly distributed around the globe, that are not changing during that time period, then you don't have to do any adjustments to the data at all. I've done this before, pulling raw data into MySql and analyzing it. You get limited to smaller chunks of time, but I got the same trends all of the professional groups got in that time period. This was something I did years ago, to try to cut through all of the rhetoric that one can read on the internet.
Having read scientific journals myself on and off for several decades now, one of the things I've noticed is that once a paper gets published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, then that opens the floodgates for other related papers to get published using related data and related methods. And that's true even if the original paper used highly questionable data and highly questionable methods, as so many do these days.
The reality of scientific publishing today is that scientists need something - anything - of theirs to get published in order to build and maintain their professional reputations. And journals need something - anything - to publish; usually something provocative, too, otherwise nobody would bother paying the high fees that they charge. So a lot of what they publish is just their version of clickbait.
Funny you should mention Japan: Back when I did my deep dive, one of the cities in Japan (Tokyo, I think it was) was being held up as a worst case example for warming. And if you looked at the raw temperature data, the warming there was kind of scary enough as it was, but in the adjusted data it was just horrific. And I thought to myself that one of two things was going on here: Either the level of warming that was being claimed to have occurred there didn't actually occur, or that it puts lie to the notion that humans and flora and fauna can't readily adapt to such warming. After all, it's not like Tokyo is an apocalyptic dead zone or anything, now is it?
As to the raw data itself, the last time I checked the raw HadCRUT3 data that I used in my deep dive was no longer available (I kept running into broken links and such), and this data had only been provided under duress in the first place. I didn't really strain any muscles trying to look for it again, though. Nor did I originally have much luck trying to find similar data for HadCRUT4 (again I didn't look too hard), but I have seen passing references to it being out there somewhere.
And by "raw" I mean the data as it originally came in from the various temperature stations, without being manipulated in any way except maybe to get it all in a common format for easy processing. But apparently what I call "raw" and what some other folks call "raw" can be quite different things.
And unlike your situation, when I looked at the HadCRUT3 data (at least the version that existed at the time; I know they made some changes to it afterwards) what I found there was appalling. So either massive fraud was going on at the time, or (more likely) they had just allowed their computer algorithms to run amok on it without really quality checking the final results.
As to stations "not changing during that time period", I forget the details but you should be aware that some folks (not me) have gone so far as to track down a few such stations (those which were well-documented and well-maintained, but with no documented moves or changes), only to find that the algorithms had made adjustments to them anyway! As for the local station that I used, the adjustments were such that it made it look like this station had shifted from condition A to condition B (that it had moved or whatever), then shifted back to condition A, then back to condition B, and so on, and that it shifted by exactly the same amount every time, too. Then rinse and repeat, every few years, which is hardly a realistic scenario.
BTW, all of those changes were warming changes, too. There was never a cooling change that I saw, at least not for my local station nor the handful of other stations that I also checked. The most that I saw was those periodic shifts back from the "adjusted" (warmer) data to the "raw" (cooler) data.
I did that deep dive about ten years ago, BTW, and the local data set I used went back to about 1870 or so - a solid 130+ years of data. I know a lot has changed in those ten years, but I don't know that much has really changed for the better concerning the data or the algorithms being used to process it.
As I believe I've already commented about in this thread, a few years back I did something of a "deep dive" on temperature data, paying particular attention to the temperature records in my own area. What I found there at the time was appalling, and even if I go check Berkeley right now what they show there appears to have little or no basis in reality.
Search my comment history for where I go on at some length about Berkeley (BEST) and the problems I see there. I suggest that you follow the links and go check out some things for yourself.
(Forgot to add) When I reviewed local temperature records myself, dating back to 1870 or so, I did indeed see a real but modest warming trend. But it was nothing like the warming which showed up after you got finished "adjusting" the data, which the climate folks routinely do.
As to deep ocean temps and such, lately those folks have been claiming to measure temperature changes on the order of 1/1000th of a degree per year, if not less. Now I don't know about you, but that just strikes me as BS on the face of it - more "statistical noise" than anything else. There are also claims made about ice melt and such, but if you do the math (the amount of ice claimed to have melted vs. the amount of ice still sitting there), you see that it falls within the same type of range - not even rounding error, just "noise".
Granted their are two relevant kinds of systemic error. If temperatures where more likely to be 0.1 than 0.9 then rounding would introduce bias. But, as our temperature system is arbitrary that seems unlikely.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/
it doesn't take a very large number of sensing stations to get a reasonable global mean, surprisingly. You get pretty much the same result as the serious efforts if you just pick ~300 random weather stations.
It is like a human body if its temperature changes a few Celsius degree from its normal temperature, it is the fever. If the person has a fever and it increases a few degrees, it might mean the death of the person. We are killing The Planet, it is a Climate Crisis.
The United Nations have the IPCC working on the issue and their reports influence national policy in many countries. There are the Kyoto and Paris agreements that are based on the details from the IPCC reports. Is the world doing enough? No, I don't think countries are doing enough, but to say humanity seems to do nothing is patently ridiculous.
Whatever humanity is doing, it's got little to do with preventing the climate catastrophe. Remember that the total amount of GHG emissions in the atmosphere is what counts. We're not even getting the second derivative to go in the right direction.
If I get sick, I cant just solve my problem with some ibuprofen.
Solving climate change requires a major overhaul in culture, lifestyle, expectation, technology and politics.
We did it before, mostly in War situations, I do not understand why this is different.
We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem.
1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally.
2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear activist would have to admit that the risks from nuclear power are localised and that the raw volume of pollution rounds to 0 compared to what we do now.
It would take a couple of breakthroughs in battery technology to solve the transport problem and the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
I think once an issue like that becomes a left/right black/white thing all logic just goes straight out the window. You can't even say the word nuclear without hearing a cacophony of statements about the price of nuclear vs renewables, as if those claims don't need any actual numbers to go along with them.
You don't need to have storage for all your solar; you turn other sources off when you have excess supply. Or you can switch them off simply by covering them. Batteries are not the only form of storage. Hydro exists and is in use already. You are allowed to import electricity. There are other renewables besides solar and wind. etc etc etc...
Other sources can be hard/impossible to stop.
Batteries are the only form of storage that's scalable. Hydro exist, but you can't expect to just add another hydroelectric dam, whenever your solar overwhelms your current capacity. Hell even storing gravitational energy probably requires frankly massive amounts of development.
You are allowed to import/export electricity, but the assumption is others will have similar power sources, no? When there is the excess sun in one area, it's either going to be excess in nearby areas (because day happens nearby at the same time). Sure, you want to export to countries without sun, but the loses are probably going to be huge (loses mean infrastructure is stressed additionally).
What other renewable resources?
- Hydro? Destructive for the environment kills migrating fish, ruins ecosystems and not available everywhere.
- Geothermal? Only available at a few places can possibly lead to earthquakes.
- Bioenergy? Causes horrible air pollution.
Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.
> You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.
You kinda don't. Here in Scotland, we've gone from around 15% renewables in 2007 to 70% in 2017. We closed our last coal station in 2016. Guess how many battery storage facilities we have? None. There are plans to build one in the near future. And yet we have a perfectly fine and consistent electricity supply. When reality disagrees with your theory, it's your theory that's wrong.
The other obvious renewable in California would be tidal.
Oh, and you can get rid of all your hydro when you no longer have any need for water. I swear sometimes people forget what dams are actually used for.
Or, your premises are different. From what I see Scotland derives like 90% of its power from Wind, which is possible its unique property. Another thing to take into consideration is that California has a larger population than Scotland.
But overall I get what you are saying. I still suspect going 100% renewable won't be feasible for most countries.
2. Even if nuclear were not controversial, it cannot be deployed quick enough. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304100413.h... I recall seeing a calculation that it would require us to turn on a new nuclear power plant every day for the next several decades. That's obviously not going to happen, when countries are currently decommissioning nuclear plants.
> the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
Frankly, this is a ridiculous and dangerous assumption. Globally, we have a limited carbon budget remaining in order to prevent catastrophic warming. That means we must be decreasing emissions on the order of at least 10% per year until we're at zero emissions, and then continue taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Such a scale requires massive transformation across all sectors of society.
These are more lies and half-truths, for the most part. Wind and solar as always quoted on a "nameplate" basis - how much power they can theoretically produce under ideal conditions. But most don't produce anywhere near that, on average, and I suspect that many can't even make their "nameplate" promises either. Add in the fact that they will have to have more traditional power plants as backup for when they fail to produce, and actual costs are easily a multiple of what is currently being quoted, perhaps a relatively high multiple at that.
IMO the most viable path forward is to find some overlap between our desire to obtain and consume more, and the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Maybe if we find a way to make carbon capture super lucrative or something?
So yeah, technically it may be easy, but politically (which is what really matters here) this is almost impossible.
That seems pretty near to nothing to me. Let's say "nothing substantive" then.
National responses range from "critically insufficient" all the way to merely "insufficient".
You are tragically misinformed if you think some responsible people somewhere are taking action.
So it should be no surprise, then, that right now temps may be a bit on the warm side, comparatively speaking. This situation might be quite inconvenient for us, though.
Bigger cities are following too including New York and Sydney today.
We live in a finite world consuming like it is infinite
Every action counts, but it will be hard and it must be super reinforced by law
The Australian electoral system is first past the post too and is similarly as chaotic as the UK.
In practice this probably means you feel more like your vote matters, but eventually goes to one of the major parties.
I know that a lot of people feel helpless because it's the big corporations that are emitting, but companies only emit CO2 if consumers pay them to do so.
Buying everything consciously, whether its food, appliances, housing, or a ticket to some performance, will make the world better.
We're in the process of moving home and putting everything into boxes makes one realize how much crap one has bought unnecessarily.
We're on a relatively special case in that we've only recently moved (18 months ago) so we actually have stuff that has never been used in our current house. A lot of this stuff has been donated to charity and some tossed but still my gf wants to take some stuff that hasn't been used in at least 18 months to the new house.
I am excluding Tools and camping gear from the list. The former for obvious reasons, the latter due to having recently had a baby we've not been camping for a bit, YMMV
There is no way out of this that doesn't involve a "lot of people doing" something. Our lifestyles are just not sustainable.
Essentially, you're never going to drive car use down (and, thereby, fossil fuel use), if there are no viable alternatives than using a car and the poorest areas can't afford to "catch-up" to the electic vehicle trend[s].
Yes, the effect might be miniscule, compared to the output of CO^2 by businesses, but every little bit helps - when deforestation continues in the Amazon (e.g.: "the world's lungs") and we're not planting enough trees (anywhere) to counter-act that.
Globally it looks like we're not doing that bad. There are areas doing worse (Africa, Latin America), but the trend seems ok even for them.
>However, deforestation is the second-leading cause of climate change after burning fossil fuels and accounts for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — more than the world’s entire transport sector.
How can we be doing "not that bad" and it be the second-leading cause? These do not equate.
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190627040941/http://www.fao.or...
For example - it's insane how the Miami real estate prices ignore what's going on (they even have a cheerful name - "sunny day floods"): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA Just sell it already! There's nothing good waiting for Miami, the city will die. Rent if you really want to stay till it blows up.
As far as stocks go many companies do not publish data on how climate change will impact them. But they probably will, soon, and ETFs will follow suit: https://www.economist.com/business/2019/02/21/business-and-t...
Of course for the worst case scenario (hundreds of millions of refugees from dried up / flooded places) no assets management strategy will help, as this will be a world-war impact event.
This was all covered in detail in the press at the time the problem first started occurring, and of course it made everyone involved look really bad. But then someone came up with "climate change" as the cause instead, so now the guilty parties had something to hide behind. The press had a field day with it, too, using it as "proof" of dangerously rising sea levels.
The attempted solution here (which is why I said "was?") was to install drainage pumps much like the type you find in New Orleans, because apparently going back and adding the proper back-flow prevention devices was going to be too involved and too expensive. But, of course, just as soon as those pumps were activated people started complaining about how they were polluting the ocean. In fact, they probably aren't putting anything into the ocean that wasn't already going there eventually anyway; they just made the situation more obvious.
There are now frequent periods where you have to boil your water before you can use it, and it floods in a hard rain which didn't really happen 10 years ago.
I guess what I am saying is I don't believe you, and most of New Orleans going into the ocean as well.
New Orleans and Miami will just slowly deteriorate over time and people will stop investing in these places because it isn't worth the flood risks. Eventually New Orleans will really just be a tourist destination. The French Quarter and probably some of uptown around St. Charles will survive unless things get really bad.
New Orleans has been losing its natural protection of the wet lands and barrier islands for decades, exacerbated by the oil companies digging trenches in the wetlands to speed up their demise.
Louisiana has been losing land for a long time, and it is concealed in maps by the local government.
In the last 80 years louisiana has lost 1900 square miles of land to the ocean.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/boot-no-more-a-wetter-map-...
The problem isn't only mismanagement. That is just one of many problems that are causing failing infrastructure throughout the city.
What the poster above said about Miami is probably somewhat true, in that mismanagement is one of the issues of why Miami is flooding as well. But it isn't the only problem and it isn't even the main issue these cities are facing.
It will only become more expensive to maintain these flood protections in the future, and create more opportunities for greater corruption as well.
And why not? You could, you know, lift a finger and go check out for yourself the relevant local news reports about the current and past situation, but you have to go back a few years now to see how it all actually got started.
And pretty much all of coastal Louisiana is naturally subsiding (sinking) anyway. (The same is true for Texas, BTW, including much of its interior.) Flood control projects built on the Mississippi River over the past century have made the problem far more readily apparent today than it would otherwise be.
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
Really, it's stupid, but if the politicians can ignore you, they will. You have to make it so they can't ignore you.
https://fixathon.io/ <-- looking for sponsorship if any tech companies are feeling generous (https://bit.ly/fixathon-sponsor)
The key thing is to work with your neighbors, friends, and community to build on the movements that are already working to make politicians and countries change. This must be a collective effort.
Science is the only thing that everyone can agree with. I feel that it is our job to be accurate and not just do lazy one dimensional research. We might solve the wrong problem and just damage the environment on the process.
"ok ok it's actually happening, but it's something more complicated, you're still wrong"
There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now. For example, during the Viking expansion, and during the Roman expansion. Then things cooled off - for example the Viking and Roman contraction.
If you go to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, you can see the remains of the only known Viking settlement in the new world. The buildings were made with logs from trees that do not exist there today because it is cooler now and does not support the tree growth required.
This is not to say that direct data from 2 centuries back is necessarily reliable but it's a step in the right direction
As far as cherry-picking goes to suit a case, this also sounds like a pristine example. Even worse then what you are countering, since it is only one single year.
There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now.
Well, yes, but what does that prove?
The buildings were made with logs from trees that do not exist there today because it is cooler now
You make this sound as evidence of something, but what? That the people shipped trees there from somewhere else? That those trees grew there but now are extinct due to some disease or bug?
Don't get me wrong, I'm open to whatever evidence provided, but if you're going to go against something at least come up with quality arguments. None of what you wrote supports a solid case against the anomalies presented.
For the record, we do know of at least one instance of positive climate change in the past caused by humans. Genghis Khan famously went on a huge murderous rampage (some estimate that he directly and indirectly caused the death of ~10% of the world population), causing massive forest regrowth in previously populated areas, which in turn scrubbed CO2 out of the atmosphere.
https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match-defores...
_comes and cherry picks a single year to "prove" something_
> There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now.
Yes, but you are talking about geologic time scale and extremely gradual changes compared to what we see now, which is just dozens of years.
I recommend to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM
[0] I'm not even saying 'caused' because at that point it doesn't change anything
This is your typical half-truth (lie of omission). Even if the HadCRUT4 folks themselves don't make these kinds of adjustments, the folks who provide the data sets which HadCRUT4 is based on most certainly do.
About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorrect statements about local heat levels made by the folks at NOAA or wherever, and then repeated (but very quickly retracted) by our own local weather folk, I went to the trouble of doing a bit of a deep dive on the HadCrut3 data sets. And what I found there was appalling. Other folks did more comprehensive deep dives and found far more problems with it than I had.
I could only do what I did at the time because some authority (I forget who) had finally forced the entire data set to be released to the public, over the strenuous objections of the folks who administer that data. Much of that data has since been hidden again, though, from what I can tell.
That was the older HadCRUT3 data set. The newest one is HadCRUT4, but I haven't done any kind of deep dive on that. (Without digging further into the matter I don't even know if there is enough data publicly available to do the kind of analysis on it that I did on the earlier set.) But other people have, and have noted serious problems with it, and have even written entire books about that. The short version, though, is that there is an awful lot of "data" out there which they're using that is mostly just made up, and what is genuine has been adjusted so much that it can no longer really be considered "data" at all.
At this point, the issue is also way too political.
I would love to see a group of researchers, ideally originally from a different discipline (studying complex systems, so finance perhaps?), with pro-economic-activity, pro-capitalist leaning beliefs (this will give them a higher hurdle for being convinced by data), apriori skeptical of the level of certainty that ACC is real, self-funded, looking at the models and come up with some probabilities of various outcomes for the future.
According to the researchers here, during the past decades the problem has been being played down by science. Predictions of effects and outcomes and especially the chosen language in publications was rather conservative. This changed during the last couple of years.
You mean the datasets here? https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/ with the data used to generate it available here? https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station-data/
What do you think has been hidden?
"Legal reasons" was the cover they used to not make this data available to begin with, but some authority or another finally forced their hand here. It wouldn't surprise me to find that they still don't want it out there, and so it may only be available on an on-again, off-again basis, maybe only after somebody complains about not being able to get it. Nor would I be surprised to find that the data itself mysteriously changes over time, as many have claimed. I believe that they have even admitted to such - that they routinely "correct" various data sets, meaning that what you see today may be different from what you see tomorrow.
In any case, I didn't expend a lot of effort the second time around, and the first time around I was mostly interested in what the "official", final data sets were claiming about temperatures (at least at first), because that was what was being put out to the public. And after finding issues with local temps, I ultimately went out and got local data from local sources, completely bypassing the official sources. And one of the first things I discovered was that there was an awful lot of data - both old and new - that was ultimately marked as "missing" in the official records but was sitting there plain as day in the local records. I never did quite figure out what was going on there either, but I have my suspicions.
The whole process just left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and so I don't generally trust anything other than the original station data from the original sources. The HadCRUT4 stuff may be a bit better; I haven't really looked into it but others have and they say it can't really be trusted either.