More than 500 daily high temperature records were set across the U.S. this week | Hacker News Reader

More than 500 daily high temperature records were set across the U.S. this week

ncei.noaa.gov

38 pointsmyshpa29 comments

I think it’s quite evident that we are going to blast beyond a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

As long as the purpose our our existence is GDP, economic growth and shareholder value, noting substantial will happen. We will never take real, substantial measures because that would hurt shareholders too much. The USA doesn’t even feel a need to care about the poor and homelessness, how can they care about something abstract as climate change?

And the poor, not the rich, will be mostly affected by climate change anyway so is there really a problem at all? /s

At this point, I'm much more worried about shorter-term effects as this reality becomes more tangible for folks.

We already have spikes in heat-related deaths, people dying in their homes. The despair... No, that's the wrong word, nihilism? from young generations is devastatingly sad to me, not to mention alarming.

The political powers in the US have orchestrated the fear and hate just enough to keep the people at each other's throats, always just out of reach of true class consciousness.

These days, I can't really be motivated to play the games anymore either. If no one else cares, in meaningful, impactful ways, why should I?

I feel you are 100% spot on. The class war and the “groomer” scare are just tactical distractions to keep scared people voting against their own interest.

Frankly I don’t see what young people have to look forward to, I can see your point. I’m doing relatively OK and I’m affected by the same nihilism.

Bafflingly, many of steps required to fight climate change increase GDP, create economic growth and increase shareholder value.

Even within that framing, where those are more important than foreign children's lives or ecosystems ignoring climate change is a really stupid thing to do.

Capitalism got us into this mess and it’s not going to solve it. She’ll got out of renewables because it didn’t make profit enough.

We can’t consume our way out of this problem.

I'm all in favour of someone making a successor to capitalism that accounts for all the things that Adam Smith got as wrong as Karl Marx, but there's no guarantee that any successor is going to be better for the environment; and even if it turns out this (currently hypothetical) successor is good for the environment, we're on enough of a time constraint we should still try to convince all the people who think capitalism is The One True Path to do good things for the environment.

It's time for the dialog to move on from 'proving climate change', to what 'we're going to do about it'.

Global heating has been thought to be occurring for longer than anyone has been alive. It's been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt for over forty years. There is no way for a disinterested person to look at the evidence and conclude this is anything other than a man-made crisis. Problem is a whole lot of the public doesn't care about the truth.

I don't know how a democratic society can deal with half its population living in a fantasy world. My guess is it cannot.

This is part of it. We must beat the drum continuously to drown out those making their own music.

We're all going to be bonked on the head with this info literally and figuratively until long after we attempt to implement any solutions.

Yet, if you don't keep the drum beat up then you start hearing the people not playing along, chanting Tonga, fake news, and solar warming.

From my study of the issue and of human nature, I've come to the conclusion that we're going to "get our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames", to borrow the words of Jim Morrison.

Do what you can where you are with what you have, but also try to prepare so that when people start dying you’re not one of them.

Clean energy and net zero trajectories are improving, but we’re experiencing today decisions from decades ago. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

You know, I'd really rather not be the perpetual Debby Downer of HN, but as a millennial, all I've ever heard about the large problems facing my generation is that they're going to get worse before they get better. I've pretty much concluded that things are going to get worse before they get worse. I think live every day like it's your last (because it might be) is about as much optimism as I've got.

I agree with you that its gonna get worse before it gets worse. I'm here mostly to enjoy the continual moderation (flagged and dead) of posters who point out the inevitable, predicted violence that climate changes' pressures are going to force out of our already imbalanced, fractured and well armed society (speaking as an American.)

Its the silencing of the alarm bells across the commercialized internet, and I think it means that when shit suddenly goes south you're gonna have this clueless middle asking "how did this ever happen?!"

It seems a bit pointless, yet it is motivating none the less to try to answer that question when its asked by folks. Starting with, because you live in a bubble that was more interested in selling you things than the scary and unfortunate truth.

Weird that this shot to the top of HN and immediately flagged off the front page before any discussion

Weird? How? That's standard around here.

It was moderated. I know that’s common here

What is the point of the title (which was not the title of the original page)? Is 500 unexpected? I think it would be a lot weirder if only one record high were set in a week.

Would "U.S. Drought: Weekly Report for August 1, 2023" be a better title?

The sentence was taken from the third paragraph:

"Warmer- and drier-than-normal weather was associated with the ridge over the contiguous U.S., Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and much of Puerto Rico and Alaska. More than 500 daily high temperature records were set across the contiguous U.S. this week; only the Pacific Northwest and a few spots in the Great Lakes and Southeast were cooler than normal."

> Is 500 unexpected?

Depends on your views on "abnormal dryness and drought".

"Nationally, expansion exceeded contraction, so the nationwide moderate to exceptional drought area increased this week. Abnormal dryness and drought are currently affecting over 136 million people across the United States including Puerto Rico—about 43.9% of the population"

When you add some 14,200 new temperature reading stations, many near heat-producing urban areas in the United States since 1972, the record tracker is bound to set some new records.

Ah yes, I remember learning in physics class how increasing points of observation of a temperature causes it to increase. /s

‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’

Ignorance is bliss they say.

Weather stations aren't all observing the same temperature, so that response doesn't make sense.

Wait until the average/mean hot days climb as one keeps adding more temperature reading stations together around airports and not forest.

That particular ~ 2008 climate denialist talking point was funded by Koch et al in 2010 to prove climate change was bullshit once and for all.

The December 2012 results just confirmed climate science and debunked the "skewed by urban heat islands" excuse for ever more.

You're literally dragging up dead arguments that are older than your HN account.

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

Backers have no control over their research.

Thanks to Lawrence Livermore Natiinal Laboratory for their largest donation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111128032051/http://berkeleyea...

The relevant part here is that Koch et al backed that research fully expecting it to support the notion that:

    > Wait until the average/mean hot days climb as one keeps adding more temperature reading stations together around airports and not forest.

and instead the research refuted that expectation by finding that climate data scientists weren't that stupid as to allow such obvious bias.

Yet, here you are, eleven years later, dragging that old dog and pony show out for a walk about the park.

A great way of introducing bias. Here we are.

That seems disingenuous at best.

Your ancestoral comment wasn't framed as "here's an example of potential bias that smart people would know how to work through".

It clearly suggested that official global mean tempretures would rise as a result of uncorrected urban heat bias.

Did you actually believe that something that obvious had not been accounted for?

If you didn't think that, then why suggest that it wasn't?

I was replying to predictabl3 not you. I agree that recording temperatures at airports doesn't make sense for climatological purposes. The US has a weather station network that doesn't do this though, iirc.

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