Eastern Antarctica sees record temperatures 70 degrees above normal | Hacker News Reader

Eastern Antarctica sees record temperatures 70 degrees above normal

washingtonpost.com

219 pointselsewhen84 comments

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The site is fine. Cloudflare's DNS is blocked by it, use another provider. For more context: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-does-not-re...

This is the craziest/coolest denial of service I’ve seen in a while. Intentionally poisoning your own DNS record is next level.

The reason for it may be less appealing. According to Cloudflare[1]:

> The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

They are intentionally blocking you.

Something's wrong between your computer and the site. It's fine here.

that is 39 Celsius above minimum average, or 27 Celsius on the conservative side:

Instead of temperatures being minus-50 or minus-60 degrees (minus-45 or minus-51 Celsius), they’ve been closer to zero or 10 degrees (minus-18 Celsius or minus-12 Celsius)

Without knowing the variance, that really says nothing.

Here's what it says according to various researchers, per the article:

“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system"

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,”

"Concordia -18.0 °C unthinkable value in mid-March "

And then for something less extreme:

“[W]e can’t tell whether this is going to be a new trend or is just an oddity that occurs occasionally on a most fascinating continent,”

Personally, I think it's important to pay attention when experts in the field say things like unprecedented and unthinkable on the record. Especially given scientists have a tendency to be more conservative. I think it's a pretty shallow dismissal to say that it really says nothing when experts are saying the opposite.

"five standard deviations above normal." -- from the article

Calculated conditioned on calendar day or just treating it as one time series?

70 degrees fahrenheit to be clear! Still a lot, wish they included that in the headline.

> This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system

While this is more about weather than climate it shows how much is still left to be understood.

I found it a bit clickbaity. The title is correct to the letter but not really to the spirit, because down at the bottom there is:

> Temperatures are known to vary wildly over Antarctica, and massive swings are common. Contrasting with this warm spell over eastern Antarctica, the South Pole observed just observed its coldest April to September period on record last year, with an average temperature of minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius).

But to be sure "The heat dome was exceptionally intense, five standard deviations above normal" is nuts.

We should rename Antarctica to something like "Crazy continent".

When you start calling five sigma events "click-baity" you may find others asking legitimate questions about your ability to assess what is significant.

Encountering a headline that tries to get people to read the article is a roughly zero-sigma event. That's the purpose of a headline, and has been for about 150 years. Retailers also sell things for more than they paid for them and supply chains are hard. If you can understand what a five sigma event is, you can understand these things as well.

I must agree on the "click-baity" title.

If it wasn't for the article being posted on HN, I would never have clicked on the title, as it includes something like "Scientists are flabbergasted".

Uhh last I checked 5 standard deviations was the definition of a statistically significant difference.

To me it sounds like a realization that climate changes will have drastic and possibly chaotic effects.

Do you know the temperature probability distribution in Antartica? Not all distributions are normal and not all even have a standard deviation.

The probability that an observation is beyond 5 standard deviations is < 1/25 = 4%, according to Chebyshev's inequality, provided the variance of the distribution is finite (which, as you say, is not guaranteed, eg. for Cauchy distributed random variables).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev's_inequality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution

An observation bound below by 5 standard deviations is at best a one in a million on a standard normal distribution.

Yes, for a normal, which is known to have extremely thin tails (decaying with a squared exponential!). Chebyshev's bound holds for any possible distribution (with finite variance).

Not squared exponential (that's just an exponential), but exponential of a square, even. Anyway.

If the observed variable is “the mean temperature in a given day”, 4% can be expected to occur relatively frequently.

Anyway until we know the probability distribution, and my intuition says that it’s definitely not Normal for wide periods of time, we can’t say if it’s significant or not.

Five standard deviations is not four percent, it is in the 1 in 3 Million range.

Yes, for a normal, which is known to have extremely thin tails (decaying with a squared exponential!). Chebyshev's bound holds for any possible distribution (with finite variance).

You’re the only one introducing the normal distribution here.

When discussing standard deviations, what meaning is there for non-normal distribution?

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/108578/what-does-s...

4% would imply that we should expect about two weeks of such weather every year, in total.

Which would make this article somewhat clickbait — nothing more than “wowza, July 15th is another hot one in California!”

Since it’s currently summer, in the Southern Hemisphere.

That's a bound not an expectation.

Standard deviation is defined by the distribution under question.

I think you're hearing "massive swings" and jumping to the conclusion that 5 std dev is somehow normal-ish behavior for the region. It's not. At all. By definition.

Temperature is bounded to a positive values and it is sufficiently reasonable to at least try to look at temperature distribution as a log-normal distribution, where logarithms of temperature are distributed normally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution

From this vantage point, bigger positive swings are more likely than bigger negative ones - because positive swings are in the range exp(logmean)..infinity and negative ones are in range 0..exp(logmean).

Take a look at second picture in Wiipedia article. The value with CDF(x)=0.75 is about four times bigger for sigma=1 curve than value for CDF(x)=0.25.

And I guess that distribution of temperature in Antarctica is more close to a log-normal distribution than distribution of temperature in, say, Houston or Cancun.

That’s absolutely right.

But as the article itself says, we don’t know if this is the start of some trend or if this is a never previously observed fluke.

Climate change is about regression to a mean that is itself higher than the previous mean. But with or without human contribution, weather events are still going to regress to a mean.

> But as the article itself says, we don’t know if this is the start of some trend or if this is a never previously observed fluke.

...That's not how statistics works.

A 2 sigma deviation can be a never previously observed fluke. A 5 sigma variation ... that means that the model is wrong. Observing a 5 sigma variation means that you need to stop, and consider why your model is incorrect.

> Climate change is about regression to a mean that is itself higher than the previous mean.

That's what we've been assuming, but this result upends that assumption.

We talk about a new mean that's 5F higher than the old mean. But an event that's 70F higher than the current mean is also 65F above the the 'new' mean. And that throws out the possibility what we're talking about is a new mean that's higher than the old mean with the same standard deviation.

The brave new world we're walking into doesn't just have a higher average temperature, it also has a significantly higher standard deviation.

And this is potentially catastrophic. If Antarctica is, on average, 5F warmer, but is not prone to significant deviations, then Antarctica stays frozen. This is our old model; maybe the new extremes are a little bit more extreme, but Antarctica is still so cold and the rare high temperature events are mild enough that it's still gonna be super cold, and all the ice that's held up in the Antarctic ice sheets stay there. But if we have wild swings like this one, then our old models are quite simply wrong. We now need to start to consider models where Antarctica melts, and now we need to consider a 190 foot increase in sea level over the next century.

AFAIK that means that a majority of Earth's population will be displaced. NYC, London, Tokyo, Florida, Rio, all gone.

I agree that if you don't like getting 5 sigma events against your model's forecast, sure, change your model.

But I'm curious whether the model in question is even looking at 5-day events, or more at monthly/annual/decadal averages. This may not be 5 sigma at all at those timescales.

And, it sure looks like it's not headed to a new mean 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/antarctica/vostok-statio...

Please don't get me wrong. Human-generated greenhouse gas emission increase and carbonization of the planet's atmosphere are big problems, that will contribute to overall global temperature average rises. It's just that this is not that.

This is more like when the CPU spikes momentarily by +50% on your production observability monitors. Panicky teams might react to it. Mature teams might see it as transient cloud (heh) behavior and know not to even bother alerting. Immature teams will tune it out as alert fatigue.

We don't want to give the whole planet alert fatigue about extreme weather events. We want to focus on reducing the long run change to global average temperature.

We at least have day-to-day written history for thousands of years, in human population zones. We have oral beyond that.

We barely have 30 or 40 for a place like antartica.

We can detect gross climate, and not any real weather in fossils.

For example, no fossil record would capture a chinook, a common occurance in Alberta.

https://cwf.ca/research/publications/five-facts-about-chinoo...

In 1962, Pincher Creek saw record temperature rise of 41 °C from -19 to 22 °C in just an hour.

One hour!

And of course, we have only been monitoring chinooks with detail for maybe a 150 years.

It is however fairly predicable that folks will comment on unusual (to them) weather behaviour[0]. First thought - "I guess Leo has never experienced a chinook". Go to school when it's -25°C; go home for lunch at +5°C [1].

[0] https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/celebrity/that-awkwa...

[1] circa mid 60s

The climate is the weather, on average. It's not wrong to call this climate change.

The earth is billions of years old. A single week of hot temperatures is not indicative of lasting, permanent change or even a change in a trend in terms of climate

We are studying the climate for half a century and we have information about it that goes back to millions of years. We can't wait hundreds of years to draw a conclusion, because the climate is changing so rapidly. We have to prepare now, and our imperfect models are helpful, even though time and time again they turn out to be too optimistic.

This atmospheric river and heat dome phenomenon is part of the rapid changes that are taking place. You can see these significant changes with your own eyes, but they are more obvious at the northernmost areas such as Siberia.

5 sigma.

So what will be the consequences of this? Article makes it clear this is not normal, but doesn't really say much else.

Accelerated calving, meltwater flows, unsafe ice conditions for researchers would be some of the immediate consequences, in addition to the obvious long-term atmospheric and oceanic implications resulting from ice volume loss.

It's still below freezing. It's just supposed to be way colder than that.

Under the hood Antarctica is way hotter way closer to the surface than you might expect. There are volcanoes, too.

We probably want the weather to stay much colder than the negative one degree Celsius technically required for it to not melt straight away. Could make a critical difference or at least soften the impact.

> Under the hood Antarctica is way hotter way closer to the surface than you might expect. There are volcanoes, too.

Thanks, I had no idea.

I found this related article interesting: http://www.plateclimatology.com/geological-hotspot-melting-p...

Isn't it more like < -2 Celcius ambient temperature, since it's sea water?

And it is winter in Antarctica, a mild winter can make the impact of summer worse.

It is summer and ending in a few days.

If it is just some kind of random anomaly, like a rogue wave, not much beyond an odd layer in the glacial ice pack.

The problem is that this is most definitely not an anomaly, but a point in a trend of massive climate change. There are many predictions of the consequences, and as far as I can tell, the actual data are running ahead of the most serious predictions. Seems like just another data point.

Also to consider is the multiplier effects of higher temperatures at high latitudes, which is already starting to release gigatons of methane stored in the permafrost, and methane has about 22X the warming effect of carbon dioxide. Not the kind of feedback loop we want to allow to run away.

One of the major concerns, alluded to in the article, is the destabilization of the Thwaites. If that thing goes, we're done.

The equivalent sea level rise numbers here are larger than I was expecting, but if temperatures are regularly above melting (are they? IDK from the article), one should expect something like this: https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/what-...

I'd argue that such event is the consequences.

And melting all that ice would have drastic effects on the oceans. Current changes, sea level rises, etc. we probably can only estimate at the lower range of consequences.

Nobody really knows, and it's too late to do anything real about it. Fun times.

It is too late to do something about what happens _today_, it is not too late to do something about what is now likely to happen in a decade, and two, and three.

Your comment sounds like on of the stages of the "four stage strategy" from Yes Minister:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak

originally about why the UK doesn't help foreign nations in an inconvenient crisis.

> [...] a decade, and two, and three.

My understanding is that very little of what we do now would have any effect on what happens in a decade. Maybe in three.

Amazing, I would totally have assumed that clip was referring to climate change without any other context.

Most of the great scenes from Yes Minister, and latterly Yes Prime Minister, still not only stand up today, but are also surprisingly still relevant 40 years after they were first broadcast.

It truly was a genius show.

Climate change is not boolean. It is not a question of damage or not damage.

It is a question of how much damage.

Okay, but the frightening part is that this is only true to a point.

And that point is where positive feedback loops dominate at which point it is very much boolean, habitable by humans or not.

But we do not know where that threshold is.

And we may have already passed it.

We just pretend there isn't a real threshold because scientists can't tell us exactly where it is yet so we might as well just keep doing what we've been doing for another 20 years... like we've been using as an excuse for the last 40.

I don't think there is any sort of scientific consensus that i) there is a point where its too warm for earth to be habitable for humans or ii) there is a massive feedback loop threshold.

There is certainly a point past which the Earth cannot support the same order of magnitude of humans, at similar technology levels.

It's hard to argue that there are no bad feedback loops once temperature gets higher. We know of several huge methane stores that are temperature dependent, we know how ice and clouds work as temperature rises, etc. We're gambling 90-100% of humanity on the critical points not being reachable.

I have this mental image of the scene from Erik The Viking where the island is sinking into the sea, but everyone on the island is denying anything is happening.

It's heartbreaking. We had everything and we pissed it away.

And continue to worry about scientific consensus as if the mechanisms for piles of known positive feedback mechanisms aren't numerous and straightforward. The comment a few up is textbook 90s fossil fuel company except having ceded ground on the trivial, trivial reality that climate change exists at all.

Because there's certainly *not* scientific consensus that there are negative (technical sense) feedback loops that continue to stabilize the climate (well enough) far away from the steady state climate and a lot of good reason to think that they will fail to keep up.

I was told that I could use my SUV up until the problems start, and then I could just start taking the bus to solve it.

That is wrong on many levels. Such nihilist position does not help the millions of people leading concrete actions on different scales.

You are wrong, it's not too late to change how we behave regarding climate and such way of thinking is unlikely to induce the required actions.

It's too late for what's happening now, that's for sure. Stopping the "surprises" that are going to happen in a few decades are still likely physically possible. We'll see if humanity is up to it.

Things will continue to get worse until we do. I guess until some hypothetical dystopian society finishes burning all he coal. Or someone whose entire family has died due to heat/drought engineers a nuclear/biological disaster to end the pieces of civilization that use a lot of energy. Or you know we de-carbonize and build an electrical (for energy) and biological (for medicines and food) society.

It's not a nihilist position.

It's: "we already fucked up, can we _please_ stop making these awful gambles before we're inevitably all dead?"

The Elder Things will awaken and humanity will have to choose a side between the Elders and the Shoggoths.

Nothing long term, it will most likely swing back the other way in a decade or two just like it has done for all of recorded history, oscillating back and forth like a global thermal tide.

For that to be true, it either should have swung back already, or at least it needs to do so very VERY soon.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

“Eastern Antarctica”. East of what? I have no idea where that is.

draw an imaginary line from right around London, UK to the South Pole... imagine standing on that line, looking towards London from the sunny shores of the world's oldest forests under that ice, East is on your right side.. optional singing of national songs or worship according to your conscience

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctica

Yes, the side facing Asia, rather than the side facing America. AKA the round side, not the peninsula side.

At least it didn’t say “northern”…then I’d have been even more confused

Without paywall on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20220319112653/https://www.washi...

That's 10° F (-12 C) instead of -60° F (-51 C), to be clear.

For 3 days

Hah, that article is a mess of temperature standards as well as mixing up delta Fahrenheit to delta Celsius vs Fahrenheit to Celsius equivalents (delta 18 F is delta 10 C, whereas the temperature 18 F is -7.78 C).

It seems they got it all right, better than some other reports where they mix up the 2. Imagine seeing "It's 18 degrees warmer in Fahrenheit, (that's -7.78 degrees warmer in Celcius)."

The funny thing is that converting changes in temperature is even easier than converting actual temperature. There's no offset to apply, which has the nice side effect that the signs are never different.

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