New Temperature Records for the UK
metoffice.gov.uk
metoffice.gov.uk
This was predictable, and was predicted: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/. The technical summary is 160 pages and should be required reading for anyone over the age of 13: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6.... The Paris Agreement, for all its problems, tries to keep increase below 1.5 C over pre-industrial. We are locked in for 20-30 more years of increases like this if we stop emitting net CO2 in 5 years, best case. This is the beginning of global warming, it will be getting worse. I plan on retiring from software soon to devote the rest of my life to technical and political work to keep Earth habitable for subsequent generations while retaining the knowledge and technological progress made possible from the carbon age. Too many people in software - just my experience, and definitely not limited to software - have no concept of the orders of magnitude of energy involved and unreasonable expectations of other engineering fields to solve this problem. I hope more people will join me.
I will follow you, my liege!!!
The same as retiring in any other field.
It's more complicated than I make it sound there but ultimately it's a matter of deciding it's important to you to do this and making it happen.
A median income with a median cost of living and a median lifestyle won’t do it, obviously. Otherwise everybody would be retiring early.
There’s a lot written about finding remote, high-paying jobs and then living like an ultra-frugal bachelor. That’s actually much harder to do than people like to admit and the lifestyle isn’t for everyone.
The more common approach is to get married, keep expenses reasonably low but don’t torture yourself, and one or both spouses should have a moderately high paying professional job. Consistently invest the difference between income and expenses for a few decades and you’ll get there.
Nobody is retiring at 30 and living like a king unless they’re extraordinarily lucky with a startup or some other gamble. However, it’s very reasonable to retire before the age of 50 or even 40 if you’re smart about it and willing to live a moderately priced lifestyle.
Also I'm really curious what people consider valuable environmental work - like, if you didn't have to work for money tomorrow, what kind of environmental work exactly would you take on?
make half a million dollars per year total comp, duh.
The IPCC report suggests first-world citizens reduce their energy footprint by 80% if we are to have even a remote chance of keeping things under control. Yet everybody is now making plans where to travel next when the pandemic becomes milder.
Meanwhile Germany closed half its nuclear reactors yesterday and people were cheering.
Are you sure you want to save this version of humanity?
This fatalistic, sneering attitude is the least effective way of discussing climate change with people who don’t yet understand the issue.
I think a lot of people don’t realize just how much of a turn-off these attitudes are to people who are on the fence or otherwise doubtful. It’s not helpful.
Personally, I simply don't think we have the capacity as a species to overcome the challenges of climate change right now. I'd like to be proven wrong and think we should be trying anyway, but veer towards solutions which actually provide another benefit and help with CO2 emissions as a secondary effect - the most obvious example being renewables as a means of securing energy supply sovereignty.
This approach probably won't see us beat even 3 degrees of warming but let's be honest - most people in the western world will adapt to a less convenient life, and we don't care about the pending deaths in Bangladesh and similarly poor countries nearly as much as we like to pretend.
That is fantastic and inspiring. I'm shifting my life around in order to focus on similar priorities.
For people who think it is extreme, this is my perspective: Previous generations built 99% of what we have - the political system (freedom, democracy, peace, better justice), the economy, the knowledge, arts and culture, the endless social goods (school, healthcare, FOSS, etc.), the technology. How are we building on that for the next? Environmental catastrophe? Political chaos and social distrust? Online manipulation, cryptocurrency scams, and lulz? So far, IMHO we are mostly liquidating, as vulture capitalists, that largess by our predecessors - by their hard work, their forward thinking to build a 'More Perfect Union', and their sacrifices:
Many sacrificed everything. Some saw nothing more of life than high school, boot camp, and a bullet. Too grim? Too dramatic? Too serious? That's reality; it's too late in the day, in our myriad crises, to hold back so that it's not too challenging or upsetting. I'm not saying everyone should do what I do (certainly not - they should figure out what is right for them, as individuals), but I think we all have very serious obligations. We have the free choice to do good or bad; the good news is, the results are up to us.
Friends on mine in the energy business think it could get really really bad if it's cold.
There are so many people in the UK who have to make difficult choices each winter about heating their house or spending elsewhere. It’s estimated to be 1 in 10 households (3m people)[0]. So we can take a small amount of comfort that in the short term that this is help for them, but we must as a society address both these problems (income inequality and climate change)
0: https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/one-in-10-uk...
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/weather/ontario/thunder...
The chances of me coming back to Canada are very, very low. Another country in Europe however, especially one of the Nordics or the Baltics, that might just happen.
Here we now have essentially 6 months of autumn that switches straight into an early summer.
No one seriously says this, unless they're pushing their own anti-science narrative.
I guess they're hoping some confused bees will come along...
And looking back at previous warm periods it looks like things mostly got better during warm ages and nose dived during the cold. https://imgr.search.brave.com/v3hRyzU6Mm1ShpkX2Z4SEYasQRtDD-...
[0] Global Greening
Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning). Ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilisation effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%)."
Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716 "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening” in dryland areas of the Mediterranean, the Sahel, the Middle East and Northern China, as well as greening trends in Mongolia and South America. More recently, a global synthesis from 1982-2007 showed an overall “greening-up” trend over the Sahel belt, Mediterranean basin, China-Mongolia region and the drylands of South America."
Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard 2014 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Global greening refers to global net increases in the area of green canopy, stocks of carbon, and the duration of the growing season. The growing seasons in general have prolonged while the stock of biomass carbon has increased and the rate of deforestation has decelerated. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data obtained through atmospheric CO2 observations, remote sensing, forest inventories and land use statistics."
Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models)
10 C ~= 50 F
20 C ~= 68 F
30 C ~= 86 F
Guess the summer is going to suck. Either too hot or too cold.
https://imgur.com/gallery/1Brt04C
I think there should be an extra winter in there after summer begins
Much dryer in the east, similar difference all the way up into Scotland
Homer: “The hottest summer of your life so far”
We're not all Catholic
Most people want to look after God’s creation. They just don’t want to get screwed over by politicians in the process, nor do they necessarily want to buy into the false prophet scientists who have been claiming the end is nigh regarding this subject for decades now (always pushing the new end further down the line, but this time it’s for real, they swear!)
I see your straw-man.
Also, Fossil Fuel subsidies? Did the progressives do that?
Meanwhile, what has actually happened: the scientists keep finding that their earlier predictions were too optimistic.
As an american atheist, an awful lot of American Christians don't seem to follow much of the teachings of the Bible.
I am pretty happy to be honest, considering the fuel crisis, this is a blessing to some. I am not convinced that life everywhere will suddenly be terrible just because it is a little warmer. We had warm periods before and things got better. The Late Bronze Warm Period, The Roman Warm period, and the Middle Age Warm Period.
https://imgr.search.brave.com/v3hRyzU6Mm1ShpkX2Z4SEYasQRtDD-...
Also see global greening https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...
Second, it’s not about life everywhere except for people who stop as soon as they finish the headlines. Some farmland will go from marginal to good, others from good to marginal. Unfortunately the latter is going to hurt more than the former will help, fortunately there are already solutions, unfortunately they are expensive. Probably more expensive than green subsidies, even if the tech never improves.
Thirdly, IIRC, we don’t yet know the conditions which would interfere with the thermohaline circulation, but we have observed the bit near the the U.K. — the Gulf Stream — moving north. Mess that up and the U.K. suddenly turns from a pleasant mild-ish climate all year round into something more like Newfoundland, which is at the same latitude.
Curious to see if there’s a prediction that Scotland becomes a lot nicer weather wise as it is at the northern end of the UK.
Quoting your own link: """The vegetation cooling effect is large from the energy dissipation perspective, but only about 10%-20% compared to the pace of global warming. The cooling effect from greening is less significant in tropical forests with high leaf areas."""
Regarding the previous warm periods, I was right, and I just now found the following reference to demonstrate this:
"""More recent research, including a 2019 analysis based on a much larger dataset of climate proxies, has found that the putative period [the Roman Warm Period], along with other warmer or colder pre-industrial periods such as the "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period," were regional phenomena, not globally-coherent episodes.[7] That analysis uses the temperature record of the last 2,000 years dataset compiled by the PAGES 2k Consortium 2017.[7]"""
[7] https://boris.unibe.ch/132301/7/333323_4_merged_1557735881.p...
"Abstract The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) is a well-recognized climate perturbation in many parts of the world, with a core period of 1000–1200 CE. Here we are mapping the MCA across the Antarctic region based on the analysis of published palaeotemperature proxy data from 60 sites. In addition to the conventionally used ice core data, we are integrating temperature proxy records from marine and terrestrial sediment cores as well as radiocarbon ages of glacier moraines and elephant seal colonies. A generally warm MCA compared to the subsequent Little Ice Age (LIA) was found for the Subantarctic Islands south of the Antarctic Convergence, the Antarctic Peninsula, Victoria Land and central West Antarctica. A somewhat less clear MCA warm signal was detected for the majority of East Antarctica. MCA cooling occurred in the Ross Ice Shelf region, and probably in the Weddell Sea and on Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. Spatial distribution of MCA cooling and warming follows modern dipole patterns, as reflected by areas of opposing temperature trends. Main drivers of the multi-centennial scale climate variability appear to be the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which are linked to solar activity changes by nonlinear dynamics." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00310...
Edit: Bonus climate reconstruction from 1268 studies of the MWP https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1akI_yGSUlO_qEvrmrI...
And what exactly is the point you think you're making with that? From the link:
> Stopping deforestation and ecologically sensible large-scale tree-planting could be one simple, but not sufficient, defense against climate change.
So "global greening" is an anthropogenic phenomenon to counter global climate change. It actually confirms that we humans have the means and the possibility to meaningfully impact the climate, and that some of those efforts are proven effective.
Is that what you were trying to say?