I can't believe that people still don't believe on climate change and global warming
Still treating these events as "once in 100yrs"
If a "once in 100yr" event happens every year then something must be going wrong, right?
Still treating these events as "once in 100yrs"
If a "once in 100yr" event happens every year then something must be going wrong, right?
Forget the fact that there's been a huge spike in only the past few decades (coincidentally since the start of the industrial age), and that we don't see any change anywhere this fast in the history of the planet.
I'm still convinced that these are generally older people who want to enjoy their lives as it is and don't give a single fuck about the future of humanity and future generations.
I personally met somebody who, after whittling down his climate arguments, told me as much... :(
Yet here we are, with "once in a century" floods, fires, hurricanes and heat waves happening nearly every year in the past decade. Are you claiming these don't have "any impact on humanity"?
> We've been warming since the last ice age.
It has gone up and done over the centuries, but absolutely not at the rate that it has been (completely coincidentally) since the start of the industrial age. If you look at any graph of average temperature, there's a huge spike in the past few decades. When in history has there been a sudden spike like this in such a short period of time?
Just give it some time. The reasonable ones will follow.
Climate is never finished, we will never wake up one day and see "breaking news: climate change is done", it's a continuous process
But that's the thing. You have to realise many people can't reason about events that take a 100 years to unfold. It's like when you hear on the news "the sea levels will rise by the end of the century". For an average person it's as far in the future as the thermal death of the universe. People won't wear a mask in the middle of the pandemic, and somehow we expect everyone to forever change their habits for the better future past their lifetime.
Not saying global warming isn't a thing, just that you can't make that argument, and even if you could the argument could still be just as true if global warming was caused by a sun phase.
Anyway I don't really care to debate global warming, but I would love to see people debate how to solve this problem, given real world constraints of politics, economics and the rise of China.
That might be useful. I still haven't seen any that don't begin with a) if only we could or b) if only everybody would which are nonstarters.
As our civilization has become more powerful we are able to put sensors in many more places, some of those places were inaccessible to previous generations of sensor programs. Sensors now operate autonomously and the data is collected remotely. This would create a strong bias towards detecting lower temperatures. It would be possible to estimate and control for this bias in the number - but I haven't done that as it's a bit of work!
As a not expert (not ever involved in any climate analysis) if I were asked to create a meaningful statistic I would try to do an analysis that tries to see things as they are (rather than supporting an opinion) and would look at the mean and median temperatures recorded at sensor locations over time, and would also look at the evolution of temperature aggregates across representative populations of sensors deployed - which would include sensors in cities and deserts as well as those in Antarctica. For example I would take random samples of 10% of the sensor population that was available at a given time point. I have no idea how the climate scientists do this - but I am confident that they will have methods that are far more reliable than my silly homebrew idea - if you are interested in the topic it would be good to look into how they do it.
Some people act as if it was a semantic game they have to win. "Aha see it's not warming its - 60c in winter and 60c in summer we're perfectly fine"
The classic "it's not warming" "ok it is but it always has been"
I think it is fairly clear that we are seeing a .04 C rise per year since the 90's. We are also seeing a 1-3mm sea level rise per year which is a slow rate compared to 20,10 and five thousand years ago. This 1-3mm/year rate will have little to no impact on humanity.
If you want to explain this heat wave its probably more useful to look at the La Nina, El Nino cycles and what they are doing right now.
Of course 1mm rise in sea level doesn't matter but what about warmer ocean creating different currents, which in turns affects storms and hurricanes, marine life, ocean acidification, mass insects/animal migrations &c.
If climate change was just about 1mm of water and 1c more it wouldn't be an issue, the problem is that Earth is an infinitely complex system full of inter dependant parts we barely understand and we might very be breaking important sub systems without even realizing it.
> its probably more useful to look at the La Nina, El Nino cycles and what they are doing right now.
Indeed, and I guess you haven't done it, looks like climate change plays a (negative) role in that too: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-change-is-making-el-nin...
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2685/...
This policy isn't trivial by any means either and likely will restrict economic growth and prosperity for billions of people if it is seen through.
If your decades period is biased towards record high then the original evidence stands.
You can indeed cherry pick decades long periods of both cooling and warming which would show a biased in the last 100 years. In the 80s, scientists thought there was Global Cooling. There was also an Ice age that shows temperatures were indeed cooler.
At least understand what is being discussed before you make a response and downvote.
> Since January 1, 2009 (also compiled to the end of September, 2009), there had been 11,711 record highs and 7,449 record lows, with a ratio of just less than two to one.
We can also check whether that ratio is consistent with a random process that has an even probability of giving record lows and record highs:
> binom.test(c(7449,11711), p=0.5)
Exact binomial test
data: c(7449, 11711)
number of successes = 7449, number of trials = 19160, p-value < 2.2e-16
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.5
If 1.57 is "just less than 2", I am just less than 8 ft tall.
I am a staunch believer in the dangers of climate change, but it's easy to see why people are skeptical of arguments like this. The evidence is compelling enough that it doesn't need to be massaged into more.
> [...] since January 1, 2000, there had been 291,237 record high maximum daily temperatures set, and 142,420 record low minimum daily temperatures, or a ratio of roughly two to one.
It seems like "just" shouldn't be in that sentence though.
To other commenters: Of course, there wouldn’t be a straight line but rather the curve would flatten out the longer the random sampling would take place. This is due to the fact that it gets increasingly unlikely that a random „temperature“ would be higher than any drawn before.
As the paper explains the ratio between the number of maxima and the number of minima decays in a 1/n law if there is no underlying temperature trend and approach 1:1. What is observed is that the ratio between maximum and minimum temperatures indeed approached this limit until the 1970s but since then increased to almost 2:1 — at least for the US. Simulations suggest the number to increase up to 100:1 by the end of the 21st century. However, this would not so much be due to ever increasing extreme high temperatures but due to a decreasing number of extreme temperature lows.
(To clarify: I'm specifically asking about your use of a binomial distribution, not about the linked paper).
As for the bounds on the distribution, while it's true that there is an absolute minimum temperature, in practice I don't think a temperature anywhere near it has been reached by natural means on the surface of the Earth.
Ok, to understand this as evidence what you actually need to do is to repeat this process after you have got to ~0.99 many times, this will give you a way to understand the expectation of the evolution of this process, then you will see a curve with an initial rise that flattens as you approach 0.99 - you will have many trials at that level before you can have a expectation of getting to 0.991
So getting to a record level - if the bias of instrumentation is understood - is a surprising and significant thing; it's not something that we should expect. It's an event that can be interpreted as either a rare and surprising coincidence or an significant piece of evidence of a change. As a bayesian it makes me update my priors towards a stronger belief in climate change - but I had strong priors for that already.
Cliff Mass' Weather Blog has been covering the heat since it was first predicted by the models a over a week ago [1]. His view [2] is that this would be a 100-year (or more!) event regardless of global warming.
So the expert analysis is that this is not an indicator of climate change, but that warming is sure not helping.
[1] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-greatest-heat-wav...
[2] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...
And things are getting worse consistently
Rainy season was June to Sept.. now it rains 12months, literally.last year it rained in ALL months. It has never happened before.
There never were cyclones in Arabian sea, since 2yrs we had 1 cyclone per year.
And they had predicted these cyclones, yes. That's happening due to a warming ocean. And that's because of global warming.
There was polar vortex in US for 3 or 4yrs now, Texas was freezing just a few months ago
The fact that these events are predicted means climate is changing. Else how would we predict a freak accident? A freak accident that keeps happening over and over again
Edit: getting heavily downvoted so much that HN isn't allowing me to post comments!
Critical thinking is a skill, not something you automatically get by being intelligent.
Temperatures aren't a random number you get from throwing 10 dices and adding the numbers. This isn't a statistical issue
Let's compare two scenarios: (1) no warming and (2) warming.
With no warming, when a heat wave hits we get a few new highs. This is because (a) heat waves a rare events, so we may not have one in the record for that exact day and (b) due to microclimates in the area, the exact conditions will affect which sites are able to beat the record. And (c) there aren't that many records to compete with.
With warming, problems (a) (b) and (c) still apply. But you get a nice little bias up which should increase the number of sites obtaining new records. Yay except... the amount of warming so far means that it won't be a complete wipe out of new records, but rather just "more."
The question is how to distinguish the two cases. How do you tell if it's just the expected number of records being broken vs an increased number? The answer is stop doing that! Instead we should look at all daily temperatures -- rather than focusing on the count of record breaking highs -- because then we have a lot more data to work with.
In any case, the PNW heat wave does not match any reasonable expectation for the types of records we expect to be set by global warming because records would have been smashed regardless of warming.
None of this argument is an "anti-global warming" argument. Too many people conflate "science says this particular event was not a sign of warming" with "this person is a climate denier." If we're going to follow the science, that means less panic over individual events and more concern over the ongoing changes.