Monday Was the Hottest Day Ever as Global Temperatures Rise
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Someone somewhere said "the end is near", so let's ignore all the counter-arguments and counter-examples, human ingenuity and technological capability and weep instead.
>it sucks huge dick
>I'm really not all that interested in learning how much higher my body can withstand while being told that everything is fine
I'm guessing as a Texan, you have a car (or worse, a truck)? You're causing the situation you're complaining about.
Just look at anyone below age 25. It is utter lunacy for them to believe in the system as a force for good, or a necessary good either. "Your vote counts," and other bullshit media keeps repeating like a broken record.
It's going to get worse, but humanity takes a step forward for the better only after massive tragedies, not when megacorp says they're going net zero, or that party promises they'll fix it for real by adding a tax on meat products.
Humanity and Earth will eventually be fine, but right now we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak.
The bulk of people below 25 live in the Global South. A majority of them live in countries experiencing strong economic growth, albeit from a low base. This kind of doomerism is exclusive to rich countries and is little more than whingeing.
The large charity foundations billionaires give the money to are doing undeniably good work, but it is a massive circlejerk for rich people to imagine that thanks to their generosity they're now all singing Kumbaya.
How's the deforestation of the Amazon going? At least now the indigenous tribes can drink Coca-Cola now instead of plain water. Isn't globalisation just great?
I'm just saying it is commonplace in the Western world to pat ourselves in the back because we've donated $100 to Médecins Sans Frontières and believe we've made the world a better place. We certainly did, but it's just a drop in the ocean.
The economic growth that my country has experienced in past few decades is down to abandonment of retarded socialist policies and adoption of globalisation. The fact that you think Western charity has anything to with it suggests profound ignorance.
> How's the deforestation of the Amazon going?
The people of Brazil have every right to make use of the resources of their country. If they want land for their livestock or want to harvest timber, more power to them! Remind me: What happened to the forests in Europe or the bison in America?
> Isn't globalisation just great?
It absolutely is! More globalisation, more growth and less whinging from privileged Western doomers.
It's not the people of Brazil that are benefiting of the resources of the Amazon rainforest. Even worse is believing that the destruction of the rainforest is the catalyst for Brazil's growth.
Also:
> This kind of doomerism is exclusive to rich countries and is little more than whingeing.
When one can finally afford bread, they still are too busy to see how fucked up our global economic divide is. Give a starving man a crumb of bread while you have stashed food for years, and they'll weep with gratitude. It's all a matter of perspective.
Sometimes you need a vantage point to notice how unfair everything is.
Brazilian farmers would beg to disagree.
> Even worse is believing that the destruction of the rainforest is the catalyst for Brazil's growth.
You're attacking a strawman. I made no such claim. Although Brazil experienced significant growth during the China fueled commodity supercycle. That was possible thanks to... checks notes ... globalisation!
> When one can finally afford bread, they still are too busy to see how fucked up our global economic divide is.
Globalisation and free trade have lifted hundereds out of poverty and reduced economic inequality globally.
> Sometimes you need a vantage point to notice how unfair everything is.
Thankfully we have Whinging Saviors to tell us all about how everything is fucked despite things being significantly better than in the past:
What do you mean you can find a high paying job and afford to have a good standard of living? It is utter lunacy for you believe in the system! You're too poor to know!
But you're the one that has moved the focus to that. Would you mind if I whinge, like you keep on repeating ad nauseam, that here in our privileged world, things are not better than they were 20 years ago for most people except the ultra-rich? We do in fact have our own < 25 years old here as well, they are not only living on the equator as you seem to suggest.
So if I accept that in poorer countries things have turned for the best, as you keep droning on, please accept that I have a perspective that here in our supposed ivory towers life for many people is worse, poorer and with less social mobility. These two outcomes are not incompatible with each other.
Thank you and good day.
> We do in fact have our own < 25 years old here as well, they are not only living on the equator as you seem to suggest.
I specifically said the majority of people under 25 live in the Global South. That's simply an objective fact down to larger population and higher fertility. And the Global South has nothing to with the Equator.
Write a physical paper letter to your congresspeople letting them know that you’re a single issue voter on carbon tax with carbon dividend and border adjustment. Help bring it to the top of their mind, above the huge number of competing priorities, if you want to see something done.
No, always blame the voter. But please don't complain too loudly, say the protest laws. And so we keep the farçe alive for another 4 years.
--
The carbon tax would be a swell idea, but no politician will ever table it, because none of the major players that put money in their pocket want it.
How did the voters react to the gas tax increases in France? Was that the result of the evil billionaires and lobbyists? Or was it regular people afraid of the potential disruption to their lives?
I don't know where you live, of course. But you seem to be in despair. If I may suggest that you reflect further or talk with someone, your view of society is clearly not true.
There continue to be significant benefits to participating in ordered society. And this, for the vast majority of humanity.
Distance from spin axis (equator Vs poles) plays more of a dynamic than "South" vs "North" (air quoted as that's merely a convention as to which hemisphere is the 'top' hemisphere).
Two major points are that:
* N vs S looks a bit different on a globe or non Mercator projection (chosen by European traders to maximise the parts of the world of interest to them).
* current positions are just that - they've steadily moved since formation of the planet.
The linked animation shows a relatively short sequence of movement, over the last few million years, that is likely the most we'll be able to reconstruct thanks to the arrow of time.
"Top" and "bottom", however, can be air-quoted. There's nothing that says north equals "top"; north and south are arbitrary, and are just terms chosen to designate the two poles. The only reason people think north=top is because most maps are oriented that way.
Unless you mean spin direction about axis, and even so a spinning top can also flip.
Can you cite the definition please?
My understanding, from 40 years of geodesy and cartography, was that it was a fairly recent (post 16th Century) convention and many many significant older maps orientate in quite different ways.
eg:
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/maps-cartograph...
It doesn't matter which way you point a piece of paper: the North Pole is always going to be the North Pole, and the South Pole is always going to be in Antarctica (until the continent drifts, though the pole will still be there). The names of these poles may have been originally chosen centuries ago because popular maps pointed that way, but now those names are fixed by definition.
Here's a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole
Finally, you're just plain wrong, and you're reading Wikipedia wrongly. According to the page for "North",
>The word north is related to the Old High German nord, both descending from the Proto-Indo-European unit ner-, meaning "left; below" as north is to left when facing the rising sun. Similarly, the other cardinal directions are also related to the sun's position.
So the definition is derived from the Sun's position, not some stupid paper map.
You're probably reading this part:
>By convention, the top or upward-facing side of a map is north.
That just says that maps are normally oriented with North pointing up. It doesn't say that "north" is defined* that way.
> You're probably reading this part
Probably? I literally quoted it.
You claim I misinterpreted that phrase but you don't give a better option. All definitions of north are by convention or relative to space (so if it flips then "northern arrangement" of continents you see from the moon will be southern)
You quoted it, but you don't understand it.
That quote is ambiguous and could be interpreted as "north is where the up on the map is". And actually there seems to be no better definition (that eg. would stand the flip of axis). What are we arguing about again?
Wikipedia having one poorly-written line about it doesn't change tens of thousands of years of human history and knowledge about where north is. Wikipedia isn't even an authoritative reference on anything.
You're looking at a snapshot of a process that goes on for billions of years... there's no particular reason why any snapshot would look like any sort of way.
Then zoom out to the globe view. Then tweak the position to get North America to just disappear over the horizon, along with most of South America.
With sufficient tweaking you can get it down to the half of the Earth you are looking at just being ocean, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Tasmania, about 2/3 of Antartica, and parts of Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, and Philippines, plus a handful of islands.
a. Northern Hemisphere: The half that lies north of the Equator. This hemisphere contains approximately 68% of Earth's landmass and is home to about 90% of the global population. It includes North America, Europe, Asia, and most of Africa.
b. Southern Hemisphere: The half that lies south of the Equator. It contains only 32% of Earth's landmass and is home to about 10% of the global population. It includes South America, Australia, Antarctica, and the southern parts of Africa.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591402
126 points, 11 hours ago, 103 comments
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.“
What if mankind just lives in peace and balance with nature? No plastic. Carbon balance. Nothing added annually that wouldn’t be taken back and fixed anew by nature. Greenhouse gases back at 350 ppm. What if?
It's total hubris of us to split the world into natural and artificial. The stuff in the ground that we dig up came from nature, we came from nature, so everything we produce is the result of nature. Not excusing our actions or inability to change, but also not ascribing it completely to malice or saying stuff like we should be in balance with nature which is meaningless.
I wonder what percentage of the mesozoic co2 is sequestered in oil and gas and what the total quantity is based on that calculation.
Extremely cold day? One day is not a pattern.
This is why fewer and fewer people actually believe in global warming.
Also, even if we correct the terminology in your post, climate change denial is what is dying out. Denial was all the rage until ten years ago.
There are also, of course, local patterns that can cause extremely cold days. Averages and quantity also matters, of course. How many extremely cold days for each extremely hot day?
If an extremely cold day is climate change, and an extremely hot day is climate change, what is the point of the ratio?
Climate change is both an increase in global temperature (increased average), and an increase in extreme conditions (increased variance)
The number of extremely cold days increases, but the number of extremely hot days increases more, and both are relevant.
I think in terms of negative consequences, though, the effects of anthropogenic climate change are already here in the present. Although it is scientifically debated to what extent one can attribute single weather extremes to co2 emissions, it's not really disputed that today's climate, which is already severely impacting humans negatively, is due to past human emissions.
Basically: it's already happening right now, and to identify the mechanisms responsible for the present climate does not require belief that goes beyond other scientific insights that are otherwise widely accepted.
Most of these claims I've seen are either wrong or fail to take into account several obvious factors.
For instance, claims of rising property damage amounts or lives lost fail to account for the amount of property that has accumulated in these locations or the population explosions in these places.
If it's a), examples are that the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the past 13 years; also increasing are the volatility of rainfall, the likelihood, duration, and intensity of heat waves, the arctic temperature, the temperature in the tundra, the acidity in the oceans, etc..
If it's b) you can look at area of bush and forest fires, duration of droughts, areas of flooding, desertification etc. which are all increasing, and which cause tangible damage.
Of course you have a good point; it's nontrivial to "distribute" the damage of, say, the flood in Pakistan last year, into: climate change, bad urban planning, high population density, bad political response etc. But the bottom line is: the climate is changing quicker than we are adapting to it. The fact that many factors come together, and that it's complicated, doesn't mean that this isn't a factor.
I think one of the main misconceptions is that the discussion is too centred on average global temperature, or average rainfall. It's the increasing frequency of wild fluctuations (droughts, floods, heat waves) that creates the challenges.
If you like I can dig out references etc., I just wasn't sure what kind of specific examples you were looking for.
BTW it's not really trust in the scientific community. There are lots of scientists calling foul on this kind of story. What happens is, we get told they're the wrong kind of scientists, or "fringe" or whatever. It's social signalling all the way down and the message is Follow The Science.
Could you please list some of them along with their field of expertise?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559554
Note the response - yes they may be nuclear physicists or hydrologists but they can't possibly comment on climate, they're the wrong sort of scientists. Also they even say they have a good understanding of science and then define science as "what 99% of experts believe" which is just hilariously medieval.
These are just examples. I can't be bothered trying to draw up huge lists. Other people have done that, it doesn't matter, the crisis true believers just use a circular definition of expert in which if you disagree the world is doomed you can't be an expert, therefore, are not worth listening to.
But thanks for illustrating my point so perfectly. All the people who think they're most rational on this topic are actually the least rational. Relying purely on mental shortcuts and social cues works right up until someone figures out how they can game you for profit, which is what's happening here (cry crisis = funding, grants, status, fame).
Extremely cold days are part of climate change, more extremes