June’s record-smashing temperatures – in data
nature.com
nature.com
Climate forcing has such momentum that it takes two decades for the full impact of emissions to be felt and many more for cascading impacts. The fires we're seeing? The droughts? The floods? That's from emissions from the early 2000s, before China and India embarked on rapid industrialization and growth of energy use, especially coal.
This isn't the apocalypse either. It's just something of a scale we've never faced in human records, like what the Mayans faced at the end of their civilization but global.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-earth-0601...
Basically political and economic dysfunction combined with drought and soil degradation over a couple centuries.
But it was the resulting warfare from all that that really fucked then up.
But post-classical Mayan civilization was still healthy and large in scale. Just not the same kind of thing.
It would be a mistake to say their civilization ended then. It simply changed.
The Spanish killed it though. Killed it so systematically it became myth for centuries
Climatologists make predictions in terms of probabilities. “If emissions go up X amount then we will see Y increase in likelihood of impact Z”. They can’t predict a specific future. Our climate is a single instantiation of many possible climates, and climate prediction is a matter of characterizing the possibilities.
The vast majority of predictions from actual climatologists has/is occurring. From increasing mean temperatures, to increasing hurricane intensity and frequency, to marine life impacts (eg Maine lobsters are migrating so far north they won’t be Maine lobsters soon), to decreasing sea ice, to innumerable ecological impacts. ALL of that was predicted. Accurate temperature predictions go back 150 years.
They can’t predict “sea ice will diminish to exactly this amount by year 2023,” they make probabilistic statements about how mean sea ice will decline per decade. They can’t say “in year 2040 all the lobsters will be gone,” they say the mean lobster population will migrate north to cooler water.
I assume you heard a few reporters make specific claims about a hurricane hitting your town or something, but they missed the point. Maybe you watched too many fictional movies. That line of reasoning is utter propaganda that you’re spreading. It’s antiscientific, unsubstantiated lies.
And the oceans are warming as well.
The climate models Exxon ran in the 1980s predicting widespread warming were frighteningly accurate.
The only way you can rationally argue with the numbers is to provide measurements which indicate the opposite. But you can’t, so you question the motives of those who chose wisdom over polemics.
Here's an example of some record lows from this winter.
Many of the heat waves, hurricanes and first fires we’ve seen weren’t predicted to occur until 2030s.
People in North America and Europe of course enjoy the best climate and see the effects the slowest from climate change.
One way to accurately judge climate change is to count the number and frequency of extreme events. How many 100 year weather events have you seen? How many 500 or 1000 year weather events have you seen? How many once in human history, like the drought in China have you lived through?
We have an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine where one of the largest grain exporters is blockaded. This year's record-hot summer in Argentina halved crop yields. If you were to combine just one or two more events like these in a year you have a substantial price increase in staple foods, which is known to trigger massive geopolitical events with impacts that last years.
Systems are resilient until enough of the foundation is chipped away, then they collapse suddenly. We are really toying with our destinies in a way few people are truly aware of.
I sometimes drive my automobile for non-essential reasons too despite that being one of my largest risk factors, much larger than covid.
I'm a rock climber and I've gotten into enough tricky situations on the cliffs. So long as you can take action the fear is manageable. It's when there is seemingly no viable action to take that the bad fear sets in.
Thing is, the risks I take personally as a climber aren't as big as the risk were taking collectively as a civilization by not acting on climate change, even though the risks I take go well beyond what most people would accept if they understand what they were in for.
I mean it's okay that you were, you don't have to do the macho act to save face or anything. It's a very common response even irrational fear (and is unfortunately exploited). I was not saying that's the "wrong" way to feel or live, just that it saddens me to think of people feeling like that.
I know, because I had some understanding of the risks. All without being terrified! In fact there may even have been some correlation there.
> But most of us weren’t 70+ and couldn’t really empathize with those that were.
Speak for yourself.
- you understood 1.5% 70+ who get the disease will probably die
- you empathized with them
- you weren't terrified of 10s of millions of people, possibly your loved ones, dying
But still, if you had some empathy for those who are older or much younger (not even born yet), their would be a lot of guilt in this thinking, the shame would be deserved.
You might want to consider whether to have children though, they change the way you think about the future.
This is what being an internet tough guy has sunk to in the age of twitter.
Living in fear, anger, a strange frothing hatred for people who are different. If anybody would appreciate why someone would not want to live their life that way, I'd think it would be you.
*edit: fixed spelling
It’s apathy.
Air/ocean pollution and environmental damage !== climate change.
Climate change is specifically about greenhouse emissions trapping the suns heat causing long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.
> It’s apathy
I am following the prescribed "action plan" for the average citizen. What would you have me do? Not everyone can be a political activist.
My point was that even in a hypothetical scenario where climate change is false (no rise in global temperatures or change in weather patterns), the damage we are doing to the earth is still enough to destroy it.
Rational and level headed efforts to tackle problems like climate change would be welcome. A great first step would be to vote out all politicians who use it for political games by riling up panic and then actually doing very little about it.
If you look specifically at Northern and Southern hemisphere temperatures it seems that the SH and more specifically Antarctica are where the spike is occurring.
Whenever I read articles about temperatures, the heat wave is always happening in some foreign country that I didn't visit.
The thing is climate change is an almost perfect example of the boiling frog parable. It occurs over several decades, just enough to cause skepticism or feelings of "it's not changing so quickly".
See NASA's graph: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
This rate however is probably almost without precedents geologically, save for extreme events like giant eruptions or something. It's hard for life to adapt this quickly, on top of the many other habitat pressures we've introduced. Also, there will be significant consequences for humans (which could be catastrophic and hard to predict if we don't limit warming to say 2C).
What frustrates me is that there's still significant resistance to not destroying our own home...
It's also important to realize that this isn't all "natural" skepticism and there's plenty of money being thrown around to spread FUD about the causes, severity, and consequences of climate change.
Otoh, I cannot think of a single billion dollar company that got where it is by being climate friendly.
Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018.
My main quibble is that as I've been around geophysical energy and mineral exploration since the 1980s I'd argue that Koch and Co. started funding anti-climate change think tanks and policy groups a lot earlier than 1997.
They've been prepackaging all manner of FUD talking points and passing them out to media groups for almost 50 years.
They torpedoed any chance of decent widespread public transport in the US, simply to keep the demand for individual freedom loving liberty driven gas guzzling high and profits flowing.
It's remarkable how easily led by the nose central north americans have been.
Gonna have to disagree with you there champ.
I have trouble visualizing what form the catastrophe would take. The worst I can imagine is global famine, is that what we are talking about here? Or rather local famine, acting as catalysts to civil unrest, wars etc?
Basically, I think the climate debate gets fuzzy here. Granted, just like you say, it gets hard to predict, but given that, what makes certain temperatures a threshold for disaster?
This instability will drive a migration of people inland, essentially as ecological refugees.
The way I see climate change activism is that elites want to fix the climate at the expense of the lower classes of society... In a time when wealth inequality is at an all time high and without the consent of the lower classes. This is incorrect.
First, we have to fix inequality problem so that the pain of the transition will fall more or less evenly on everyone's shoulders... Then once this is the case, everyone should have more time to think about climate problems and we can expect broad support.
Of course, 'we' will all be long dead by then. I feel totally fine and morally justified in leaving this problem to a future generation. Most people in my generation have way too many concrete personal problems concerning their own survival in a week's time to worry about abstract problems such as the survival of the human race in a few hundred years.
...Not to mention that in a few generations' time, if we focus on maximizing access to opportunities, through the resulting innovation, we will probably end up with extremely efficient renewable energy which will be able to fight climate change far more effectively with no sacrifices necessary.
It seems literally like a no-brainer to me to just let the free market do what it does best in terms of innovation. Shut down government money printers and dismantle policies that are harmful to the free market and which centralize opportunities and create tech monopolies to control the masses. That's not the way. It needs to be done honestly.
What's the point of even allowing the human race to survive if it turns the global economy into a squid game and only the most dishonest, manipulative people will remain?
To illustrate, the Earth's temperature has already risen by approximately 1 degree since the inception of industrialization, yet our lives have arguably improved significantly during this period. Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree? This seems improbable, and yet it is a viewpoint advocated by certain climate change alarmists who propose concepts like degrowth.
I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest that. I don’t believe you’ve heard serious people suggest it either.
I've seen people claim that slowing down or stopping economic (or even reversing, but I admit this position is rarer) progress was an acceptable tradeoff to counter global warming. Almost all solutions proposed by climate alarmists follow this pattern, albeit to varying degrees.
The analogy was that 100 years from now, people would see our current era as we see the industrial age. That is, unless we stop progressing.
Formulated differently, if degrowth had been followed in the industrial age, we would still be living in the industrial age (but the Earth would be a degree cooler).
For example, I am a conspiracy theorist, and the number of nasty things that have been said about "me" by literally delusional Normies over the years gets a little annoying after a while. It would be a real shame if these chickens were to come home to roost at a particularly inconvenient time.
Anyways, I wish you and your Rational crew best of luck with your climate problems!
Like I said: you’ve made it an emotional core of your identity.
Please read up on some science.
It's being suggested quite clearly in some of the most unexpected places. One of the most curious things about the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, is that a great deal of the funding for some of its largest exhibits comes from one of the Koch brothers. Specifically there is the floor sized exhibit on human evolution which repeatedly emphasizes a subtext of adaptation, adaptation, adaptation as the driving force behind development of modern humans. The proponents don't care if this adaptation can also take the form of a misery-soaked return to pre-industrial society in 500 years, they won't be around to deal with it.
But they know that it's an asymmetrically structured argument that is difficult to counter using the language of progressive politics, in which adaptation is also emphasized but of course in different contexts.
Eh. I see what you are saying but have we felt the full effect? Do any of us have a perception of what was lost that would let us even make such a determination?
There has literally NEVER been a problem anywhere near as large as climate change, including World War 2. If being concerned about literally the largest problem to have ever existed is 'alarmism', then your position is simply that it's impossible for anything bad to ever happen.
By my logic, people who call emergency services when the room temperature rises 1 degree are "alarmists". The building is not on fire. We are not headed towards extinction, not even close. How do you explain that the world has gotten significantly better over the last century despite warming over one degree?
My position is that this "extinction" fear you speak of makes absolutely no sense. And any attempt to prevent warming through economically harmful policies will likely have a greater negative impact on humanity.
It's really not a big deal - humans will adapt to deal with the changes, or they'll go extinct and something else will evolve.
The best adaptation to burning your house is the rational thought "Perhaps I should not burn my house". :)
It dreads me to think we so much lost contact with living well that many don't care anymore. I think the first step in the journey would be to stop the destructive culture of desperate consumerism, greed, consumption, overwork and ill-being. Maybe that's something we should be prioritizing alongside climate change, as a species. Living well in our homes, and as a community.
Moreover, energy consumption isn't so significant as emissions per Watt. Our capacity for solar energy could sustain even energy growth without significant emissions. We already have the technology to make the transition.
To reiterate, whatever we do, sitting back and watching the world burn (in an almost literal sense) is not a reasonable option!
Stable supplies of food (and fertilizer and machinery to grow and process it), clean water, refrigeration, transport, (somewhat ironically) HVAC, lighting, and some amount of outputs of manufacturing are desired by all.
Again, it's not clear what your proposal is. Ignoring the problem is a bad idea. Doing the best we can to rapidly (of course, not so rapidly we couldn't handle it) transition to renewable energy is what we should be doing. Doing it now is the best time to be doing it. And are doing it! Just some countries are lagging behind somewhat, including the US and China. A big part of the problem is not recognizing the scale and importance of what we're facing. With reason and compassion in our hearts, we shall find the best solution for all :)
Prior that I had never been evacuated or cut off from anything because of weather events, so I guess that’s why scientists are keen to distinguish between anecdotal evidence and statistical, empirical or experimental evidence.
Did Australia not drastically cut back and stop the amount of back burning that Australia used to traditionally do in order to prevent larger bushfires? You only have to ask anyone who has lived for a while in an at risk area to discover first hand that these activities had been curtailed and stopped for quite a few years.
No, that didn't happen.
“Hazard reduction work has increased because of increased funding to the RFS and to national parks. There has been more carried out in recent years than in previous decades.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/is-th...
> You only have to ask anyone who has lived for a while in an at risk area to discover first hand that these activities had been curtailed and stopped for quite a few years.
Farmers get all their information from Sky News and Facebook. I've lived in at risk areas for over 15 years, and I can't tell you first hand that the activities have been curtailed and stopped. Very few people would be able to tell you that first hand. A lot of people will tell you bullshit conspiracy theories they've read on Facebook though.
https://www.dfes.wa.gov.au/hazard-information/bushfire/plann...
I've been around fuel reduction burns for 60 years.
As a local practice it dates back tens of thousands of years.
That closed space is the thin layer of land + ocean + lower atmosphere, it's spinning and it's quite large in comparison to single human.
Now think of a closed room with energy being pumped into that room, to (among other things) a fridge on the floor with door open.
The energy increase makes the heat exchange coils on the back of the fridge hotter and the space inside the fridge colder.
Overall the average energy within the room in increasing.
This is a poor but in some ways accurate picture of the earth .. or at least one climatic cell - the earth has a number of these in the North and South hemispheres and they interact and spill energy from one to the other.
Energy can express itself in many ways by cascade transfers - to wind and storms, to melting ice (at zero degrees) to create water (also at zero degrees).
In Australia that energy has driven the decadal scale La Niña and El Niño oscillation that, so far, has worked out fairly well for Australia ... (a very catastrophic fire season a few years back aside).
Elsewhere on the globe, not so much for others.
But wait, there's more, especially in the longer term if steps aren't taken.
In the near term, you can expect Australia to see a hot, dry El Niño:
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-australia-hot-dry-el-niohere.h...
It is very dry and all the signs are point towards a big El nino + the Indian Ocean Di-pole being in full swing. Going to be a rough one in the south at least.
But yes, to make it average to a slightly higher temperature, but have some places have much hotter temperatures, some places have to cool off.
Anybody who listens and trusts media will most likely think we are living in a drastic climate change. Because media sells fear making people consume more media.
Ever wondered why you constantly see bad news on media and not good news?
People living in constant panic since five years. And panic is never a good advisor when thinking about complex issues. Think about this.
Anyone who understands graphs should be concerned. It isn’t a case of “the media are scaring us” rather than “we have a serious problem with weather that isn’t going to get better on its own.”
Yeah, why discuss complex topics when there are comics instead.
The problem is not weather - but Ideocracy getting reality much more faster than anyone predicted.
Fun fact - by replying in that way you exactly prooved my point. Thank you.
P.S.: "looking at graphs" is exactly media. But you don't think about relevance and probability. At least from the past three years you should have learned that scientific models are not religious truth but are an opinion of the modellers.
(Data from ECMWF)
Just leave these quips out of your comments to not water down your otherwise reasonable argument.
1. Avg case is we cross 2.7 degree Celsius hotter by 2100. Worst possibly 5 degree Celsius hotter according to ICPC.
Let’s assume this is a given truth, so what are the negative effects of being 5 degree hotter. If you’re in America, 5 degrees hotter will make USA more like … Spain or Argentina?. So the worst case on average is cooler than current day India. Why all this apocalyptic messaging? (This is before even contesting the models, Science etc)
Edit 1: A lot of people talking about ice age, burning age, rivers stop flowing etc. please think more clearly, Is India uninhabitable? (Has it lost its rivers etc). People talking about places becoming uninhabitable, again please think clearly, Qatar is one of the hottest places in the world, 5 degrees hotter does it make Qatar closer to Sahara desert or is there quite a way to go (almost 15 degrees more to go?) . Most places in the world will remain cooler than present day Qatar after the warming! (Assuming the worst case warming)
Edit 2: I’m more sympathetic to the arguments about crops and animals dying but this is not apocalyptic to humans. Bad for nature sure, we should try to protect them but humans will be fine, we will manage to grow the crops and animals we need, worst case in different locations than now and I’m not even sure of that (technology?).
Resulting droughts, floods, and famine are typically seen as bad things. These factors will contribute towards conflicts and wars.
There will also be mass emigration from areas that become unliveable, on the order of hundreds of millions to billions, primarily towards "first world" nations. No matter how that plays out, it's bad.
A disintegrating world order does not bode well for the global economic system on which current Western quality of life is built.
Plus, some people care about nature beyond factory farms and concrete urban sprawl. That nature is most definitively getting fucked as life just can't adapt so rapidly.
A short way to get the point across is that when the earth's average temperature was 4°C lower than it was in 1990, that was an ice age. "Boston is buried under almost a mile of ice".
Imagine such a dramatic climate change in the other direction, 5°C hotter than 1990.