January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service
phys.org
phys.org
This is outlier journalism. The actual data is more informative (from December): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mn...
On average the globe is warming. In a splotch of northeastern europe very much so. In other places, it's actually colder.
It is pretty damn strange.
The immediate reaction (as an ego defense mechanism) is to dismiss what you will read as unproductive fear mongering. However, it is a far worse fate to be surprised by the reality of the situation (both environmental and social) when these processes hit their limit and begin affecting the neoliberal institutions that govern our world. The best way to protect yourself and your family is to stay informed, no matter how dire the truth may be.
The time for gradual change was decades ago; the only thing that will save us now (and when I say save, I mean allow modern civilization to continue) is radical action.
Most people want to remain at the same level of comfort and luxury, and that's not possible if we want to effectively combat climate change. We'd need to fly less, drive less and consume less and that's the opposite of what's happening in the world.
In my country (Australia) we had a federal election last year. The climate issues were very clearly laid out, and most citizens here accept the science, and have some understanding of the severity of the issue. Yet they voted very decisively against any further action to reduce emissions.
Most of the electorate here simply will not countenance changes from business as usual. Of the world's more significant population centres, Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions, the US is weighed down with a sclerotic political system and a huge proportion of the population with dogmatically anti-scientific attitudes, China is backpedalling due to economic worries, and India has enough troubles of its own.
We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.
I think EU is the only significant region to have actually decreased CO2 emissions over the past few decades: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
That's not to say they couldn't have done more, but it's kinda sad that everyone else is drawing a flat line or going up. EU alone is not going to save the planet, even if they somehow stopped emissions altogether.
Yeah, unfortunately you are more right than you know. Like, right all the way to the bottom of the human soul. Climate change is both too fast and too slow for us to deal with effectively. In the past, humankind was never united in a global economy powered by fossil fuels and fed by financial markets driven by AI. It could never grow at a very large exponent. Now, fueled by massive population growth and even more massive economic growth, we've entered into a very steep exponent indeed. Running on theories generated by thousands of economic PhDs and underwritten by national monetary policies, the machine is finally eating the world. Literally. Capital is flowing everywhere for economic development, from vast palm oil plantations across southeast Asia, to Lithium mines in South America, to cattle farms in Brazil, to vacation homes in every picturesque spot on the planet, we're chopping it all down. And that's just the sheer physical digestion of nature. We're pumping out our waste products at record rates, and thirsty for more, we equate energy consumption with quality of life.
And worst of all, we will not stop nor even let our foot off the gas. We're locked in the patterns of international struggle for dominance even as we are locked in interpersonal struggles for sexual competition. He who makes the most money, touts the biggest consumer markets, the greatest exports or GDP or most powerful weapons...that person is crowned king of a smouldering planet.
We cannot right this ship. We are just apes, ffs. We can't evolve past our basal instincts and our antibiotics and satellites are no witness to the betterment of the human soul. We reached the apex of better angels of our nature and greed and corruption and the brutal mathematics of a game theoretic dilemma where every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating.
We're gonna smash this motherfucker against the wall as hard as she will go. And the greatest irony of it all is there written in the bibles that evangelicals clutch to their chests as they gnash their teeth for more prosperity as god promised. And that was the simple wise truth, that cuts to the core of all that is today's sin: the love of money is the root of all evil.
> every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating.
Is it human nature, or is it the design of money? [1][2]
[1] The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer
[2] http://ceptr.org
Any creature that manages to escape, for a period, limits on its reproduction is going to overrun its environment. That's just elementary ecology. It should only be surprising to the religiously-minded who never truly believed humans to be part of the physical world. This includes many atheists raised on a superstitious belief in inevitable 'progress'.
If you think about it, the notion that the assemblage of cognitive, conative and affective faculties that evolution installed on a primate for the purposes of hunting and small group coordination were somehow magically going to be up to the job of managing a whole planet was always pretty fanciful.
I am. I've been around and around this thing for decades, a misanthrope since my teenage years. A lot of us who delved deep into tech and scifi absorbed myths about the future of humans as a space-faring, enlightened and truly advanced race. After the internet and the great advancements in computing, it seemed maybe we were reaching into truths of the universe and would join God in his great datacenter in the sky, cranking pure mathematical harmony and joy in our ever-expanding understanding of scientific knowledge. But we weren't climbing into heaven, or building a space elevator up there. We weren't even making ivory towers or steel skyscrapers. It's still been our base primate instincts at work. Greed. All of that striving after science and mathematics and technology has never been any different than digging up the hills for gold or slashing down the forests to plant our wheat. We're dwarves; we're diggers, miners, destroyers, conquerors, killers, pyschopaths. And that guilt triggers in me because I see the delicate things, the beautiful things, that we have destroyed to get here. And the future just looks like one big highway littered with McDonald's with powerlines strewn across, dusty and dilapidated. We fucked Earth. You bet I am angry.
Still, on reflection, I'm pretty sure our current trajectory was inevitable the moment humans developed agriculture. We're the wildly pullulating caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were going to be just what we are. Just another species. Just another dead end in evolution's exploration of ecological state space.
> We're the wildly pullulating caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were going to be just what we are.
It's really mind-blowing to think of us as a planetary-scale caterpillar. Thanks for the analogy!
Cheers.
(Note: this is intended as a very harsh condemnation.)
edit: downvotes for finishing the song lyric. Cheers, HN.
We all know something very, very bad is going on with the climate.
And we'll likely all die reasonably content knowing it's not our problem. We're among the last generations that can expect to ride the current peak in human success before the hard bounds kick in and things either become much more difficult or more likely just completely collapse.
We all love to rest easy on the fallacious idea that (as Carlin put it) "the earth will be fine, it's us who are fucked."
It sounds nice, but the reality is far worse. Beyond a certain temperature bound, the entire biosphere collapses... completely.
"Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!"
And what do they feed on? Organic particulate matter that filters down to them from the rest of the biosphere that depends on relatively tight temperature bounds.
Natural selection can only keep up with a certain degree of change in the mean of temperature before it just collapses.
If we generate the conditions for the collapse of human civilization, it's more likely than not that we also take all life on Earth with us.
And statistically... that means the end of life, period. That our planet happened to have the particular temperature bounds for long enough for life to emerge is vanishingly unlikely.
The biosphere has already got a match in our insane devouring of habitat and industrial-scale poisoning program known as modern agriculture. Not to mention the ocean acidification, garbage patch, and overfishing. People look at me a little nutty, but I seriously think in 100 years the oceans will have nothing alive in them larger than your finger. There will be no tigers, no elephants, no bison, no deer, few or no birds.
The necessary reactions to make a photosynthetic carbohydrate production chemical pathway energetically feasible actually only exist within extremely narrow temperature bounds.
You honestly don't understand how naive you are. You're disguising hope by what sounds vaguely scientific.
Not to mention: exactly where do you think those temperate zones will exist?
I don't hang around hackernews to get insulted. It's not what we do around here.
Being told by someone that they think you're wrong isn't an insult.
If you buy the reassuring yet nonsensical idea that "the humans are fucked, the planet will be fine", you can be adequately classified as cherry-picking a minimally discomfiting worldview, against all evidence. That's not an insult.
It's chemosynthesis fueled by a continuous stream of organic silt from above and volcanic vents, not magical planetary heat.
That's exactly the kind of thinking that caused this mess (i.e climate catastrophe) in the first place.
Had people prioritized their grandchildren and great-grandchildren instead of short-term profits then the effects of climate change would have been mitigated long ago. For example, companies like Exxon knew of what lay ahead. They chose to condemn future generations using precisely the same logic as you.
You're (I think) likely objectively completely right.
That doesn't mean that a total collapse in our food supply is around the corner, but it does suggest a collapse in the availability of certain micronutrients to a large proportion of the population.
What that means is that the outcomes of certain nutritional deficiencies will likely become commonplace diseases societies will now how to cope with. That will of course also affect politics.
[Edit: Just realized you wrote the comment I was replying to - so OK I see what you're saying]
Time literally means nothing to the universe. So the idea we can kill all life in the universe, or are somehow responsible for the creation we live in is oddly religious to me.
Yet you place no real import in the demise of humanity so I'm not sure how to parse it.
This simply isn't true. I don't know where you absorbed such a dumb and naive idea, but the current theory pretty much completely rules out your completely unsuppported take.
Gravity is to our best knowledge not symmetric in time, and neither is heat. (Every other fundamental force in QCD is though.) The likelihood of the emergence of life decreases as overall entropy increases.
Moreover, the emergence of life at any point in the universe is already vanishingly unlikely.
If we kill life on Earth, the likelihood of life emerging again is strictly less than that of life on Earth existing as it does. And beyond a certain temperature bound, it's simply impossible. The viability of informational molecules like RNA (even silicon based variants) vanishes above around 60-70C.
Lol. The fermi paradox is not my idea, neither is the great filter as one the possible explanations. But the presumption in both is that we are not alone as intelligent life, not to mention simple life.
You mention the goldilocks theory, which indeed states that life probably has an incredibly thin temperature band in which it survives. But that just means life is unlikely on most planets, which means almost nothing in infinite space and time.
The fact life started once, makes it likely it has done so before us and will keep doing so. When I say time doesn't matter, I mean it could take billions of eons, and in the context of the universe that doesn't matter.
If anything the most likely situation is finite but comtinuosly expanding.
> The fact life started once, makes it likely it has done so before us and will keep doing so. When I say time doesn't matter, I mean it could take billions of eons, and in the context of the universe that doesn't matter.
This is still entirely wrong, on the basis of basic thermodynamic principles that are relatively well empirically supported.
Even if life has emerged before us, the probability of it happening again only decrease over time.
And also: low probability in finite domain doesn't magically imply high probability in an infinite domain. That's not how math works.
The drake equation and fermi account for that, using something like "The universe has 10 million, million, million suns".
Most of these ideas are probabilistic based on sizes that are just immense beyond comprehension. But I still find them more grounded than the pre-Copernican hubris that we are somehow central to all this.
> And also: low probability in finite domain doesn't magically imply high probability in an infinite domain. That's not how math works
How do you figure that?
To analogize: the vanishingly unlikely probability of landing a dart precisely in the center of the bullseye on a finitely sized dartboard implies nothing more than the same for an infinitely large dartboard.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely (in particular the mathematical concept of "almost never")
You're confused here, did you read the mathematical definition of your own article?
It has nothing to do with what you think, it starts with the presumption of P(E) = 1 or P(E) = 0 for almost never.
That's not what we are talking about with small probabilities.
> And what do they feed on?
You are underestimating the diversity of metabolism in bacteria/archaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea#Metabolism
As a weird example, there is an isolate cave in Romania, with a weird source of energy http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-l... . (If that's all life that all life that will survive, it looks like a nightmary scenario. But killing completely all the biosphere is very hard.)
Also, Cyanobacteria will probably be fine. They almost killed accidently everyone else in the past, but there are not hard feeling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
And even if they do, why do you assume they (species adapted to environments entirely distinct from 99.99% of Earth) will somehow exist long enough to speciate into a robust planet's worth of species?
The species that exist today have largely survived because collectively they exist in homestasis and regulate their environment. If every tree suddenly disappeared the human race would be gone within hours. Similarly if every warm blooded animal suddenly disappeared plants would start dying in droves within a few days.
You write below that you work in mathematical biochemistry. What research are your conclusions based on; which authors, measurements etc.?
> All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true extent of the outcomes.
Do you feel scared of this collapse you are predicting? Are you distraught by humanity's destruction of our home, because you would you like to see Earth and humanity's beauty continue?
I guess the overarching theme/question for me is: if all this is true, where, and in what, do you find meaning?
Edit: to be clear, I am asking for your personal experiences and strategies. I am not looking for any advice.
It's not like TESLA has some magic pixie dust that can save the world tomorrow. Environmental impact from current ICE cars is fairly small compared to the pollution caused by mass manufacturing with no recycling, heavy industry, coal burning, shipping, etc. People buying more Teslas are a drop in the ocean when it comes to saving the environment, like putting a band aid on a slit artery.
People buy TSLA because it makes them money and buy Teslas because they're nice cars. If they really wanted to save the environment, they would ride a bike.
There is no Planet B. The energy expenditure required to 1) terraform Mars and make its environment habitable to humans, and 2) get enough people there... is several orders of magnitude harder than fixing our problems here on Earth.
Even if that plan was viable: we simply don't have the time to do so before we kill ourselves off.
That's a triumph of hope over experience if ever I heard one. We need an urgent intervention right now. The chances of it happening? Pretty damn close to nil, I'd say.
I agree the problem is bigger, but non-industrial transport is about 15% of CO2 emissions in the US. It's nontrivial. There is also the grid storage business.
Anyway, I don't care to make this about Tesla/TSLA but the stock movement has made me wonder if there was material news I was unaware of. That could be a breakthrough in efficiency or that is good for Tesla, or it could be much worse than expected climate forecasts that might direct very large spending their way (among other things).
That's only true in countries that did absolutely nothing. The reality is that when you stop burning coal then unchanged emission sources like cars grow in relative terms and become more important.
Investors have been too stuck on the environmentally friendly thing to see that they make great cars and that's not even the only thing they do.
if you have that sort of deviation its hard to make meaningful statements about the longer term changes, it seems to me
And not just under expectation but in general.
The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960. There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax
Edit: I am getting quite a few downvotes even though I linked to scientific data. Please let me know what the downvote is for, otherwise it’s disappointing a scientific community doesn’t want to engage in poking holes in the data.
It's for not knowing what the word "globally" means. That is a pretty big hole in your own data.
Look at the equivalent data where it exists for South America, Europe, Africa or Asia. The majority have records set in the last 30 years.
Of course, none of the Northern hemisphere countries set their all-time record temperature in January so all-time records in the US are pretty irrelevant to the article.
The record was broken in 20 of the 50 countries in Europe in the last 10 years alone. Only 12 still have records standing from more than 30 years ago.
About half of records in Africa were broken in the last 20 years.
The majority of records in Asia and South America were broken in the last 20 years.
Anyway, this article is about temperatures in January, which means that all-time high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are irrelevant. Would it be meaningless if California hit 130°F in January just because it was once slightly hotter in July?
> There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states
If they were talking about maximum recorded temperatures, your argument would've made sense.
However, they're talking about average temperatures, for which a 30 year range is certainly not meaningless.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmin
Around 10 were broken in the last 3 decades which is more than the around 7 broken for the max temperatures. If more min records are broken, then I would expect the average to be going down not up.
You would expect so but the data about temperature anomalies suggests the opposite:
Annual 2019 Average Temperature Anomalies in USA: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201913/supplemental/...
Global Temperature Anomaly Mapping at a glance: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
Global Climate Summary in 2019 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-201912
The disruption of the polar vortex drops temperature significantly across Northern Europe but it can be caused by the warming of the atmosphere so even though it can cause record lows it is a short lasted event and on average the temperature is still going up.
That is also a side-effect of climate change, more powerful bursts of extreme weather.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Europe
30 records in the last 15 years vs 18 in the previous 100+
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Possibly some of the downvotes are simply for not following the guidelines.