Just how hot was July? Hotter than anything on record | Hacker News Reader

Just how hot was July? Hotter than anything on record

npr.org

66 pointsjshen84 comments

I heard an excellent quip on the Dan Le Betard radio show (which is in Miami for context) with a bunch of 20 something contributors, which kind of went like this?

"Hey, Sara, did you know this was the hottest summer recorded?"

"You mean the summer that in 20 years we look back on as being a nice comfortable summer?"

Which brings home the reality: the global temperature is going to keep going up, no matter what. The train is moving faster and faster, and it is a biiiig train

It’s not the hottest summer of your life, it’s the coolest summer for the rest of your life!

... why is this flagged? This is the exact quote I was looking for.

Ireland had the wettest summer since records began :(

what makes me mad - is the seasons are now so screwed up and unpredictable. that life is barely enjoyable anymore.

what also sucks is the effect on 3rd world countries - which due to lack of industrialization are low polluters.

but the biggest thing that makes me -- mad are the climate change deniers.

Why does that make your life barely enjoyable? Curious to know what kind of lifestyle or living you have that the weather would have such a big impact on you.

Being in nature and sunlight is arguably one of the few truly enjoyable activities on this planet

At current temperatures outdoor exercise in Singapore even after dark is waaay less enjoyable than even a few years ago. It will be unenjoyable soon.

>but the biggest thing that makes me -- mad are the climate change deniers.

Don't say things like "life is barely enjoyable anymore" if you have any aspirations of changing their minds. (and you should if you care about the environment)

It's primarily an in/outgroup deal and what they perceive as melodrama just makes the divide worse. These people usually hunt/fish/enjoy the outdoors too. You can connect with that.

cool heads prevail. The division is a political ploy. I understand you anger as I feel it too. Don't let the hate poison the conversation. Sadly we need patience for unity, and unity to solve this long run.

> solve this long run.

What “long run”

When nature kills enough of us off that industrialized societies collapse because they lack enough people to run it.

At this point, climate change denial is indistinguishable from rooting for a Mad Max existence. Even if someone is not convinced, they should still go along with changes to reduce emissions the way scientists propose because the price of being wrong is nature deciding to reduce emissions its way. And, as we are seeing, that involves a whole lot of destroying everything.

"in the long run" means "over the long term"

I know what it means, I was making a statement as to the actual time available for a solution to be developed. Everyone appears to be talking about how incremental improvements over time to the hull of the Titanic will somehow stave off the immediate sinking that’s going on.

You can't stop the immediate sinking. Getting frustrated at people for not coming up with a "solution" faster is counterproductive. There will be some survivors. These survivors will need to solve the problem in the long run.

> You can't stop the immediate sinking.

Technically we can. Those in power don’t _want_ to. They don’t have our best interest at heart.

These kind of “it is inevitable” attitudes are a big part of the problem.

Yeah but this ain't an iceberg, it's a leak. Gradual improvement CAN fix it as long as people don't panic or give up.

> Yeah but this ain't an iceberg, it's a leak. Gradual improvement CAN fix it as long as people don't panic or give up.

The available data, as well as the interpretation of all credible climate scientists strongly begs to differ from your opinion.

Third world countries are the biggest polluters from ruining their rivers and in emissions.[1][2]

but the biggest thing that makes me made is people posting misinformation on the internet while acting righteous about it.

[1] https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons... [2] https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/most-polluted-rivers-...

Way colder than average in Europe, except for Spain which hit 40+

Sea temperature has also been pretty low for this time of the year

Sure sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_European_heat_waves

I live in Europe and it has been a colder than normal summer. Two/three weeks ago kind of felt like autumn already and we got pelted with hail at the end of July. Have I just been feeling the weather wrong or something?

You live “in europe” (oh wow small place), “feeling the temperature”.

High quality measurement right there.

https://climate.copernicus.eu/july-2023-sees-multiple-global...

It has european data too. Knock yourself out, no need to add hallucinations to the training set for HNGPT

By that logic there is no war in Ukraine, I live in Europe and I haven't been shelled

Great strawman you got there. There are other people from different people in this thread confirming my anecdote, are we all wrong?

You think multiple people cannot be wrong about something as subjective as recollection of the weather? They could even be right, but not representative, and thus pretty meaningless.

If you think the man is tampering with weather data, by all means, read up on empirical meteorology, get together a group of geographically distributed individuals, and verify away. Or join one of the existing groups. But I think temperature and rainfall are already pretty bulletproof, frankly.

You can be locally right and globally wrong. Just like 10 people surviving cancer doesn't mean cancer is harmless.

July has been pretty mild in California, while the rest of the US baked in misery. Geography interacts with the weather and interacts localities in different ways. The cooler temperatures and higher levels of rainfall (eg in Ireland) are also attributable to climate change, when you take things like mountain ranges and the gulf stream into account.

I guess france, greece and Germany don’t count.

And we complain about LLMs hallucinating.

The Media: When it’s really cold , weather is not climate. When it is really hot it is definitely climate change.

False. When Texas was hit with an unusually cold weather event a couple years ago, causing the power grid to fail, plenty of reports highlighted this as an example of climate change. Don't be obtuse, it sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn't persuade anyone.

That's very not true

We had a cold summer in Switzerland, I am disappointed because I was promised some heat! I got hail, rain and cold summer days instead.

July wasn't record setting in Switzerland, but still 1-2C hotter than the long term average 1990-2020. So no, not cold.

https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/ueber-uns/meteoschweiz-blo...

I'm happy it's been cooler this year, summers have been getting too warm, my flat does not keep cool well. I always liked the summer storms here though, especially if you have a good vantage point to watch them roll in.

I've lived in roof apartments all my life (my bedroom in my parents house was a loft conversion), but for the first time moved into an apartment on the second floor.

The difference is night and day. No longer do I sweat in summer, freeze in winter, and stay up all night listening to the rain (albeit I do sometimes miss the soothing quality it had). I think roof apartments are going to get a lot less popular in the next decade

I think most of Europe above (and in) the alps was cool and wet this summer.

Except the northern parts of Sweden (and Norway?) which had a really nice summer.

Same for the Baltic side of Poland, though heat is rising.

Northern Sweden hasn´t really had that great a summer, colder July than normal, the far north of Norway seems to have had a good summer though.

Same here in South England.

July and August haven't been great, but June was the hottest June on record

People are downvoting me for pointing out facts that I have observed that are contradicting the NPR narrative? I thought hacker news was better than this. Very disappointing.

You gave an anecdote about how you personally felt as if it was a valid counter point for scientifically measured continent wide record breaking temps

Of cours HN will trash you... what did you expect

There are plenty of other people from different parts of Europe confirm my anecdote of having a cooler summer. We should not fall for the fallacy of appealing to authority when we can easily collect data ourselves and confirm the findings.

I thought hacker news immune to such fallacies but it seems I was wrong. Very disappointing.

> There are plenty of other people from different parts of Europe confirm my anecdote of having a cooler summer.

And plenty who say it's warmer than usual, so what now ?

> We should not fall for the fallacy of appealing to authority

The data is out there, you're free to look at it, most countries publish historical weather data from as far as they have been recording it

> when we can easily collect data ourselves and confirm the findings.

Can you ? I personally don't own a continent wide array of weather stations, but if you do please publish your findings

"It's so disappointing that hacker news doesn't believe my conspiracy theory!"

Well, the article is about Europe, and Switzerland is one of the smaller countries in Europe, to say you're contradicting the narrative is a bit of a stretch.

There are other people from different parts of Europe saying they didn't have a very hot summer.

I'm pretty sure you could plot them out across all of europe and with your brilliant detective skills work out which parts were cooler and which were warmer and then make an average, and plot it out over time

Yeah, we're better than weighting in anecdotal data when there's plenty of high quality measurements from multiple sources readily available.

You had hopes for HN? This place shouldn't be taken seriously. Both the upvoting/downvoting system and the majority of users are dumb.

Considering the top comment is also an anecdote about 3rd world polluters being the least guilty or "being mad at climate change deniers" are you really surprised?

I am disappointed.

Actually the Earth is known to have had hotter conditions in the past through extrapolation. It just doesn't line up with the Current Thing so it's inconvenient to talk about.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11647-climate-myths-i...

No, it's not inconvenient at all to point out that the earth warmed in the past and mass extinctions resulted (according to the article). In fact, it's a great data point. Did you even read the article you linked, or just don't understand what a mass extinction means for humanity?

The last time global temperatures rose anywhere near this fast, it resulted in the extinction of 90% of macroscopic species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

Given the age of the earth - 4.543 billion years - the roughly 200 years of human recordkeeping, even assuming a true statement, makes that 4.4e-6 percent of the age of the earth. Or put another way, the record doesn't account for the other 99.99956% of earth's history. Just a reminder.

"Earth used to be a molten rock so what's 5 degrees more, nothing to see here"

That's how this argument sounds

It's obviously not quite such a nonsense statement, 99.999% of human history is in that range, too.

> not quite such a nonsense statement

In itself yes, maybe, but what's the point of it in the context of climate change or in the context of this discussion ?

When the water reaches 100c does the frog care it was 20c when it started ? It even used to be ice cubes before we turned up the heat, what is there to fear ?

For a long stretch of time, carnivorous dinosaurs roamed the Earth. For a long time, it was molten rock.

Would you like dinosaurs or molten rock in your apartment? I wouldn't.

Also a reminder that human record keeping is not the only way we can know what range past temperatures were.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natu...

This is not a random sampling issue. There is a pattern over years, that any engineer can recognize.

The record accounts for more history than you are giving it credit for [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record

I like how you pretend not to know about the existence of ice core samples or geology. Honest people make their best arguments first, shills their worst.

I’m always surprised why people make this argument.

Is this argument “it’s normal and not man made?”

Is the argument just normal grammar Nazis stuff, intentionally latching on to the ability to redirect context?

Is the argument that earth will be fine, implicitly dismissing we should care about our species sustainability?

Why oh why I wonder.

“Just a reminder, “Just asking a question” and “I find this interesting”… are basically smokebombs people throw into a conversation- but why?

“Just asking a question” here…

Maybe its not an argument at all and someone is just pointing out statistical facts? Any inference from that statistic is entirely in your own brain, with your own thoughts, interpretations, biases, etc.

I program computer chips and have a high school level of earth science under my belt so I have a hard time understanding how we extrapolate out things like 1 degree increase in temp means we're cooking the planet and there's no turning back. What I would like someone to explain is how our 200-300 years of measuring things can be extrapolated out to have any certainty around future or past events.

I (and I assume others) aren't asking to "smokebomb a conversation". I genuinely see headlines and understand we haven't been taking measurements for very long in comparison to Earth being here, and actually wonder these things. I would love to read thru something that presents it all in layman's terms (with references) that can describe how we arrive at any conclusions. I'm not denying that the temperature is increasing or that humans have a detrimental effect on the atmosphere. When I read mainstream media "reporting" on things I am knowledgeable about they get lots of details wrong and often come to wrong conclusions. Knowing that, I'm more like a 5 year old that keeps asking "how do you know that? / why?" Thanks for reading thru my brain dump.

> I have a hard time understanding how we extrapolate out things like 1 degree increase in temp means we're cooking the planet and there's no turning back.

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

Although I don’t believe you’ve never heard of runaway. It’s not as if this is some niche argument; it’s a well-understood mechanic that underpins most arguments about climate change. If this is new to you, I daresay you’ve been wearing some extremely heavy duty blinkers.

The last ice age had average global temperatures that were about 6-8 degrees (centigrade) lower (if I remember correctly) than global temperatures in the 19th century. Large parts of Europe, Asia and North America were under a permanent ice shield during that time, flora and fauna looked dramatically different.

Currently, global temperatures are 1-1.5 degrees higher than in the 19th century. This is already a massive shift that comes with severe consequences. Temperatures will rise further even under best case scenarios and if we do not curtail CO2 emissions radically, we will see temperatures rise to +2 degrees and more.

Not sure about you but I’d rather not find out what”a third of an ice age but hot “ looks like.

The argument is it is easy to manipulate statistics for both fun(power/control) and or profit!

Back in my day science wasn't so defensive. They would simply explain how they can use this tiny amount of data to draw the conclusions they are presenting.

There's literally hundreds of pages detailing the methodology,data and conclusions in IPCC reports that have been published for decades now.

It's not science's job to do your homework.

> There's literally hundreds of pages

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

> It's not science's job to do your homework.

It isn't my homework. I'm not the one demanding that I be given the levers of power.

You said you wanted explanation, then deride the available explanations as a Gish gallop - incorrectly, because they are used to support hypotheses rather than thrown into a debate to bog down an opponent.

You can claim to want an explanation while refusing to read it, but don't expect anyone else to take you seriously.

you realize that calling the IPCC report a gish gallop doesn't really help your case, right?

I assure you I am correct. The paragraph that proves it is somewhere in a tale of two cities.

I thought we were not supposed to do our own research and trust The Science.

What do you mean?

He's trolling, poorly.

I see you are choosing to avoid the question. I rest my case.

https://climate.copernicus.eu/july-2023-sees-multiple-global...

explains it well enough. The data available by Copernicus is exhaustive and high quality.

ERA5 records go back to 1940. But it could have been supplemented with other records…and it appears that 1936 was hotter than 2023. So NPR could have at least mentioned that.

* July 2023 set a record for the highest monthly sea surface temperature anomaly (+1.78°F or +0.99°C) of any month in NOAA’s 174-year record.

1850 - 2023

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla...

1936 was below the long term average, 1937 was above ... but still much cooler than 2023.

> Global daily surface air temperature (°C) from 1 January 1940 to 31 July 2023

I didn't find the part where they explained how they know that's sufficient data to draw all the conclusions that are being made about climate.

> I rest my case.

Alright then. I'm unconvinced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com