Last week was the hottest ever recorded – here’s why we keep smashing records | Hacker News Reader

Last week was the hottest ever recorded – here’s why we keep smashing records

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79 pointsweb1159 comments

I couldn't find the reference that shows where "U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction" released this record measurement.

I found another article[0] that says the measurement is from Climate Reanalyzer[1] that uses the data from CFS/CFSR systems.

The Climate Reanalyzer website also says "The increase in mean global temperature since the start of July, estimated from the Climate Forecast System, should not be taken as an "official" observational record."

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/world-swelters-unoffici...

[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/

Spoiler: El Niño and climate change.

Don't feed the clickbait titles.

New headline suggestion: El Niño and climate change caused last week to be the hottest week ever recorded.

I mean, I knew that without clicking the link. To the article or to the comment section.

I'd like to say politics could be avoided on this but not knowing anything about the science, historical stats, etc I've always had a simple nagging question on this issue that hopefully someone can help me understand. Elementary school science classes teach basic cause and effect.

My question is: How is it possible the planet can be billions of years old, then all of a sudden we discover fossil fuels in the past few hundreds years and start extracting and burning them at incredible rates, releasing them into the atmosphere.

Isn't it safe to assume there would be a basic cause-effect relationship here with /some/ kind of consequence? It just strikes me as a "no free lunch" scenario - I don't fundamentally understand how you could all of a sudden start burning all of this stuff and argue against there being negative effects for the overall atmosphere, ecosystem, etc.

Can someone help me understand how/why this wouldn't be the case?

No one can because it's clearly not true.

The only people arguing it isn't true are the various think tanks, foundations, coalitions, online PR bots, and the rest funded by the fossil fuel industry - working to persuade those who don't understand the issue, but are sure their opinion is very important.

Atmospheric CO2 science has been researched since the 19th century.

In the 70s Exxon/Mobil had its own climate scientists making shockingly accurate predictions of what would happen.

The IPCC climate change models - produced from 1990 onwards - have usually been conservative.

That is the objective reality. Everything else is spin, FUD, and noise.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

those think tanks really did a number. the climate denialists, have made moving goal of going from denial to climate change is not man made.

The amount of americans who can't stand that fact that they were wrong on the matter is incredible.

Everyone is so sensational about climate change but never looks at Earth's history.

Were at the tail end of an ice age.

For most of Earth's history, there were no polar ice caps.

For 400 out of 500 million years the earth was warmer than it is now.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt...

The earth is 4.5 billion years old so I don't understand what you mean with "400 out of 500 million years".

Also for a lot of that time earth was a hellishly hot place with little life.

The past 500 million years have been rich with life.

That's disingenuous misdirection. The current change is a threat to humanity of our own making.

> threat to humanity of our own making.

How? Do you have concrete examples or just fear based conjecture?

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

This book goes into good detail in human population growth, growth in energy use, and growth in use of coal, oil and other energy sources.

Highly recommended. Lots of stats, charts and math.

It’s not about climate change, the book is about understanding human growth and energy (across its various forms) and their implications.

> On July 3, the planet sweltered as the average global temperature reached 17.01° Celsius (62.62° Fahrenheit), the highest ever recorded, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. That surpassed the previous record of 16.92° C (62.46° F) from August 2016.

I am extremely curious about the error bars on these numbers. Are we really measuring the temperature in enough places around the globe with 0.01 degree resolution to make this a meaningful statement?

The raw data includes satellite measurements, which cover the entire globe. It's calibrated against ground-based weather stations.

The raw data is available at:

https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/

Putting all that together into a single temperature requires a model. The error analysis of the model is on their web site. There's certainly more than enough data to justify four significant figures.

(The weird part: the authors of the report are both prominent climate change deniers. One says that the problems are real but not man-made; the other says that the problems are real and man-made but not actually a problem. They are the guys who run the satellite and integrate the data.)

https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/2023/June/GTR_202306JUN_1....

No. Error bars on satellite measurements are OK (not sure what they are exactly but not too bad), but for anything before the 1970s the error bars are wide. 0.5 degrees at best but more realistically 1-5 degrees depending on weather station. That's government's own CI estimates btw.

And that's before you get to the way they rewrite the past in the temperature databases. It leads to problems like this:

Jeff Berardelli, WFLA-TV (Tampa Bay) Chief Meteorologist and Climate Specialist: “In case you missed it. The temperature soared as high as 100 degrees in the Northwest Territories on Saturday, the hottest temperature ever measured north of 65 degrees latitude in the Western Hemisphere”. Tough keeping up with all this climate chaos.”

https://twitter.com/WeatherProf/status/1678635894021005312

100 degrees, hottest ever measured in north of 65 degrees latitude. A factual statement?

No, because it's not true. It reached 100F at Fort Yukon (66.6 degrees latitude) in 1915, according to government logbooks since erased from their websites:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170209162324/https://www.ncdc....

This happens because climatologists engage in data fraud. They not only constantly change how they combine individual readings into global aggregates, but also rewrite the temperature history of every single weather station too. It leads to constant 1984-esque dystopian events, like trusted news sources claiming a new record has been broken when you can find records of that "record" having been previously already been reached or exceeded in newspaper archives and old documents.

Lots of discussion last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36595486

this is a UC Berkeley-based project with similar records

https://berkeleyearth.org/data/

blog post https://berkeleyearth.org/june-2023-temperature-update/

The 1930's are triggered.

Pretty sure all of these "ever recorded" records for global temps are only since 1979.

Pretty sure you're dead wrong.

Unfortunately their statement is too vague to be wrong, obviously there are numerous different ways to define global temperature, and different ways to measure it at the time, and different ways to infer it after the fact. amongst all that, probably one of them does only go back to the 70's. Does it make incomparable to any of the methods that go back centuries or millennia? Probably not.

The recent headlines are all based on NCEP, a model which isn't exactly super reliable.

https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1676391692461547522

In fact, if you read past the headlines in the articles, they also include the same caveat:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/0...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/climate/climate-change-re...

The NYT article buries the fact by making it seem like they were only presenting data that far back, but it is literally in the first sentence of the WP article... directly contradicting the very same article's headline.

(also, just wanted to let you know this comes off as a bit unnecessarily rude -- you might want to phrase it more gently / give some reasons why you believe so next time)

> Our planet’s seas have been warming for decades. The most recent decade has been the sea surface’s hottest since at least the 1800s.

Over the last 500M years, the world has been hotter than it is today for ~400M of those years: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

And for the majority of that time, it has been MUCH hotter.

Yeah and for the majority of time of the planet humans didn’t exist

> And for the majority of that time, it has been MUCH hotter.

Good thing humans only evolved after the climate became more hospitable.

Exactly. People keep saying that we need to stop climate change to save the planet. The planet does not care and will be just fine. We need to stop climate change to save ourselves.

My god, I hate this line. Obviously people aren't referring to the ball of molten rock getting a case of the sniffles and achoo-ing all over the solar system. People are referring to - you know - ALL THE LIFE ON THAT PLANET. Wow, amazing, an amoeba will survive us fucking the planet up! Since life and the planet will survive, go nuts! Blow up your nukes, why should the rock care? That's all that matters, we will not literally destroy the planet!

Well that's kinda the reason _for_ the line. Climate change kills people. "Save the planet" is too vague, it's disempowering.

No. "Save the ecosystem on our planet on which we rely on" is too long, and only incredibly pedantic people would come in and say "well, akshually, the planet will not care either way". People who say this are not people worth talking to.

And akshually, climate change doesn't kill people. Higher temperatures and catastrophes kill people.

In the meanwhile, Pangea formed and split, and trees came into existence.

And we are still building fires in the wood burning stove to keep warm in Northern California. Mid-July.

So we'll just all become #VanLife nomads and everything will be fine.

There is a hotel in Death Valley. People stay there when it's 125. If your home town gets 3 degrees hotter, I think you'll figure it out.

looking forward to all of the crops and livestock i need to stay alive figuring it out!

Your area might no longer be ideal. The area that was a little too cool will become ideal. Technically more people die per year from cold than heat. Why do you want more people to die?? /Slight sarc

The article is talking about averages so there can be local outliers.

A global temperature average is utterly meaningless.

https://off-guardian.org/2023/07/12/reality-check-no-we-didn...

That reads like a rant by someone with an axe to grind, and not just because they put scare quotes around the word "pandemic" in a list of other things they don't believe.

Hint: when you're confidently a degree above the temperature range for 100 to 0.05 kya, you don't need to establish two decimal points in that period to say you're exceeding it, only in the recent period where you're closer (which in this case is entirely in the period with global satellite-based temperature data).

I shouldn't have even bothered skim-reading given the starting point of trying to argue that "average temperature" is meaningless, given that temperature is literally only a thing at the scale of averages.

But then, I have actually used satellite records of global surface temperature, so of course I'd be annoyed at a random blogger who thinks this is done today with a bunch of weather stations.

>Overall, we rate OffGuardian a Strong Conspiracy and Strong Pseudoscience website that frequently promotes unproven conspiracy theories and false information regarding the Coronavirus.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/offguardian/

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