The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land

Imagine a normal symmetric binomial distribution, along a X-axis of events and severity. Now imagine that the binomial distribution isn't normal and symmetric anymore, it is skewed toward the X-axis of more severe events (i.e. a negative skew). In this model, we still have the same number of events, but their distribution along the severity axis is skewed towards more severe events, and as such they have a higher probability of happening.

Ppm growth by year is sub-exponential even if above linear (looks like quadratic is a better first order approximation): https://datahub.io/core/co2-ppm

Actual temperature rise is actually a logarithmic function of co2 ppm, literally the opposite of exponential: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration...

Lots of people suffering and dying due to famine is the normal state of affairs. China has suffered more than 100,000,000 deaths due to famine since the year 1800 [0]. That is a lot of deaths.

I'd put it that pre-industrial conditions are probably a greater risk factor for famine than post-industrial global warming. Indeed, I suggest running out of fossil fuels is a higher risk factor than global warming. With enough cheap energy we could switch to something like hydroponics and air conditioning for all in the next 100 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

I like your optimism!

Exactly this. Climate change means no bananas and no coffee in the future. You like bananas and coffee so you want to help combat climate change. It is cynical, but Western people care more about their bananas and coffee than a few hundred million Bangladeshis and Indians becoming climate refugees.

Some scientists, who aren't wedded to the anthropogenic theory, have looked at all the solar numbers and concluded we're due for a couple decades of weak solar cycles (global cooling) before the warming resumes.

I don't know who to believe, I just wanted to point out that there might be a reason behind this alleged "warmest winter ever" other than "it's the CO2". I'm not particularly interested in debating with someone with convictions of hot-earth environmental catastrophe being more reasonable than cold-earth environmental catastrophe, so feel free to have the last word.

I worked remote for a very long time, at first it was lonely then I realized I needed to reach out to people locally who were interesting to chat with. I was able to grow friendships over lunches and coffees that ordinary office life would not have allowed.

Covid19 makes that impossible right now, but WFH doesn't mean lonely. It's just that your default is to get all your socialization from coworkers. Socializing with people in your community based on common interests is much more rewarding than by common employer

The good news is: everyone has learned a lot and if they want to do it again it might be easier.

I have a feeling, though, that after this, many people will be less willing to travel for meetings. Video conferences may be poor compared to walking to a conference room in the same building, but they may also compare favourably to travelling by airplane to a similar conference room in a similar faceless building in a different city. And many, many people are getting VC practice now.

You need to give this stuff time and probably re-establish a lot of your companies culture to fit remote work, or yeah, you will probably have a pretty crap experience.

Edit: Add link to a good and very recent podcast on this topic by Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg: https://samharris.org/podcasts/194-new-future-work/

Not everyone should work from home. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people need the in face connections. Working from home has lots of downsides that have been covered on here and everywhere many, many hundreds/thousands of times.

But a lot of people don't need to go into an office, at least not every working hour of every day. A lot of positions don't. A lot of people thrive fully working from home, some working part time from home and other times in the office, or a cafe, or whatever.

But how these discussions always go is the no-work-from-home crowd effectively saying that no one should work from home because they personally don't enjoy it.

I can say my work schedule has gotten a lot busier without even taking on new projects or clients, my clients just seem to have a lot more time to work than they did before.

So, my question to them, "So, when do you work?"

Video Calls / Meetings should be the last resort. Working remotely (WFH) is not bringing the office work at home, it is an entirely different experience and should be approached thus.

Besides the many other advice floating around, some cores ones that works are;

- Communicate, communicate, over-communicate, mostly via email or other long-form writing).

- If you do the above (writing), it helps in the key element of working remotely - asynchronous. The day you can work asynchronous with your team, is the day you won in working remotely. If you write, then you can also share it anytime, to anyone.

People’s homes aren’t organized around work now, but prior to the industrial era, they were, and people complained about working in factories and offices.

I don't think that really needs to be said.

> It also only works if you don't have kids, a partner or have a big enough home

I've been mostly working from home for several years now (maybe ~10), and I'm just as productive at home as in the office - definitely moreso during periods when there have been particularly loud and obnoxious employees working in the office.

I totally agree that you need to be able to isolate yourself from others in the home - you need a home office, where you can close the door and be in "work mode".

As long as you have a home office, it's actually a bonus if you have young kids and/or a spouse in the house, as you get to have lunch with them every day.

Not having to commute is a huge bonus, especially if you live far from the office. You save money, time, and even carbon emissions. You get extra time in bed, if you want it.

Even your employer potentially benefits, by not having to pay for office space (or at least reduced office space if they have hot desks).

But not everyone has space for even a small home office, and even then not everyone has the self-discipline to be in "work mode" while at home. And of course, some people are just really sociable, and enjoy that aspect of an office environment.

So it's definitely not for everyone, but it would be wonderful if more people were given the choice.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

In California, it is something like 40% of emissions.

These percentages are going to increase quickly, as renewable generation is now cheaper than other types of electricity generation in most markets, and prices are plummeting like a rock.

The same can't be said for electric car prices, nor EV adoption rates.

I think land use changes that permit transit are by far the most important infrastructure changes to reduce emissions. However even in California efforts to change this over the past three years (SB827, SB50) have met a brick wall of resistance, despite widespread acceptance climate action and desire for better transit.

Transportation GHG emission rates are going to be far far harder to change than power generation emissions.

Over all I think we make progress, even if it's needs to be backwards at times.

For example, the whole "fat is bad, carbs are good" meme was never backed up by solid science, it itself was a bad meme.

> Pretty clear that most of medicine is based on fraud and regulatory capture

I can't speak for you, but if I have a heart attack or cancer, I'll still go to the hospital, so it isn't as bad as you're stating.

> Even within climate science, the models aren't as clear cut as we tell the public.

Ok, death penalty for non-triple blind is crazy. But if we're thinking of tough ideas:

* Imprisonment for corporate lobbying.

* Corporate dissolution for political donations or influence

* Corporate dissolution for attempts to "influence science"

* Corporate dissolution for PR campaigns that lied

* No corporate-funded "scientific" studies should be published

* The reproducibility crisis is a bad incentives problem in science and publishing. We need to change the incentives. The system needs to change to reward something like "points" where points come from publishing failure to reproduce as opposed to just the notoriety of "first to find some interesting result"

Climate models are broadly quadratic: CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere determines the rate of heat accumulation in the Earth's atmosphere, so we integrate CO2 emissions twice to get warming estimates. This is massively oversimplified, but suggestive.

But progress is exponential. The long-term benefit of buying an electric car isn't that you emit less carbon dioxide. It's that market trends move towards emitting less carbon dioxide. More investment goes to battery development, less to oil extraction. (Some futurists argue that exponential progress can't last forever, but we only need a few decades.) For example, one of the major challenges in battery development is the reliance on cobalt. But currently, cobalt is too cheap to motivate serious development of alternatives like V2(PO4)3 or sulfur cathodes. Iron phosphate, a cheaper choice for grid batteries (where energy density is less critical), is likewise undercapitalized due to low demand from grid operators. Even with widespread nuclear power, grid storage is necessary to manage varying loads.

This is why I'm dubious of the ascetic approaches like just avoiding meat or airplanes. We need new technology -- the kind that allows us to live well without carbon emissions. Heat pumps are a major (IMHO the biggest) open problem -- commercially available air-source models run only at intake temperatures above -20 C, and ground-source heat pumps might not work well when they're used at a high areal density. (Electric joule-heaters meanwhile consume so much electricity that we'd need to double electricity production in northern areas!) It's much easier to give up beef/dairy or airplanes than heating, but heating residences alone (in the US) generates more carbon emissions than both put together (home heating: ~440 Mt; airplanes: ~150 Mt; cattle: 190 M; industrial heating: ~500 Mt).

I am a physicist, not an economist. I am not qualified to say what climate policy should be w.r.t. economic impacts. But if messaging were my job, I'd spend a lot more time discussing new technology R&D spending than villainizing the fuel industry. China's status as a leader in green tech is conspicuous, while we are busy watching teenagers yell at legislators.

https://www.csis.org/east-green-chinas-global-leadership-ren...

As a result you will see mass migrations as earlier fertile regions become arid, and people compete for scarce resources, exposure to diseases that populations in a region do not have immunity for, and because the changes are due to warming (I.e. an increase in energy in the ecosystem) the greater energy means extreme weather events will become even more extreme, and milder ones will become extreme.

What did the data set look like then (spatial diversity, measurement variance, etc...)

How do you compare that data set to one collected this year?