Climate Zones | Hacker News Reader

Climate Zones

pudding.cool

83 pointscolinprince26 comments

I generally love the stuff Pudding does but I found this really hard to follow. Key colors not matching map colors, very similar (indistinguishable) colors used in one case, and the crux new-zone projection looked like a word salad. Haven’t looked on desktop but on mobile I found this whole thing borderline illegible.

Yeah, the concept is cool and there's a lot of neat visual effects going on here, but it doesn't come together well

It was impossible for me to tell the difference between "Temperate - Dry summer, warm summer" and "Temperate - No dry season, warm summer" on the map.

I clicked on the little '?' for more info--it wasn't much help.

This is the most animation for the least information. The cities are grouped together and the most detail I got was that it goes below 0' C and above 22' C and doesn't qualify as a 'dry' summer in any month. Is this supposed to compel climate action or change opinions (or is it to showcase animation/scrolljacking skills)?

This other story today[0] has no animation and only colored bars.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40753317

I don't like how it only works via animation. Let me click around on the map!

I don't usually express my frustration by shouting at a pile of HTML but this one had me going "LEMME LOOK!"

This is about Koppen and simulated shifting due to climate change:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Köppen_climate_classification

In the US, for construction, the IECC's system is used, and there was a recent update to a few dozen counties:

> However, with new research based on measured temperature data from over 4000 weather stations throughout North America over the last 25 years, the IECC designated changes to the CZ map for the first time in nearly 20 years. The outcome was that about 10% of counties in the U.S. were placed in a new CZ. In nearly all cases, the shift was to a warmer (lower) CZ, reflecting a general warming of the climate in those areas. The first set of maps below show the old CZs on the left and the new ones on the right. The shaded area across the west in the image on the right highlights the "dry" sub-climates. In most cases, the shift in CZ is relatively subtle.

* https://www.jm.com/en/blog/2021/march/understanding-the-iecc...

* https://theber.com/iecc-climate-zone-updates/

* https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

Some buggy JS — it only reports one city's temperature transition numbers, then those same numbers are repeated for each selected city.

The happened for me only in Celsius. It looks like in Fahrenheit the temperature updated for me.

Some beautiful visualizations here. However, one problem with it is that we are still talking about averages. This doesn't demonstrate the increase in weather variability that global warming will bring. These climate zones will have crazier extremes than in the past.

While the temperature increase is an average, the increase in extreme temperatures will be non-linear.

This. For example, "Tokyo's average temperature increases from 58.3°F to 63.6°F and remains in Temperate" sounds distinctly meh, unless you've actually suffered your way through a stiflingly hot Tokyo summer (100° with 80% humidity) and can imagine what it would feel like to add 5° on top of that.

Absolutely. Classifying the number of heat wave days, or cold front days across time would be the type of visualization that's needed. Or the spread in the rainy season.

My intuition is that the uncertainty in variance is much higher than the uncertainty in the average. So, it's more difficult to make concrete predictions that we are reasonably sure will pan out.

I loathe "keep scrolling to animate pages". Just give me the information, and stop showing off.

What I couldn't see, or what wasn't mentioned, is the imminent collapse of the Gulf Stream. I had read that this would paradoxically lead to a "new ice age" for Western and Northern Europe in the next 100 years. Is this scenario ruled out by science after all, or is it simply not taken into account here?

It would be such a drastic change that it appears to be beyond our ability to model, as we lack the empirical data to make any accurate prediction.

A full collapse of the Gulf Stream is not going to happen. Change is going to happen here, but it’s more complicated than a simple collapse

Why do headlines say otherwise? It’s due to an oversimplification of the currents that drive global climate. People conflate the Gulf Stream with a more complex system of currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.

…

But even if the deep-water portion of the AMOC did shut down, the Gulf Stream would continue to flow. As noted by MIT physical oceanography professor Carl Wunsch in 2004, “The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both.” Neither will happen, even in the most extreme climate change scenarios.

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/will-the-gulf-stream-re...

There are contradictory scientific assessments regarding the likelihood and timing of a collapse.

Powerful stuff. Really helps make it feel more real by drawing comparisons to knowable reference points.

Feels like not many discuss how Climate Change would effect Geopolitical tensions. This page makes it obvious how Western enemies like China and Russia may benefit from land now frigid becoming more temperate

Maybe I'm deeply cynical, but it doesn't seem far-fetched that Putin would be perfectly fine with opening up some Russian warm water ports with the happy side benefit of destabilizing chunks of the United States and western Europe.

It is a weird coincidence that the major American political party most vehemently against recognizing anthropogenic climate change is also the one most likely to be caught with their hands in the proverbial Russian cookie jar...

China is already suffering heavily from desertification; I don't think global warming would do it much favor.

Sorry to be negative but this website is completely awful on mobile. And some of the map colours are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

Love it, but at where Los Angeles moves to become like New Delhi in the 4 columns shown, my MBP 2016 GPU spiked to 880% and gets stuck til I shut down the process. Needs some optimization.

The website does its part to fulfill the predictions. ;)

Seems like the old -> new temperatures are the same for each city.

I grew up in Austin. People are arriving in droves for the cool scene and bustling economy, which is great. But a few degrees in Austin means a shift from having part of the late summer that's obnoxiously hot to having a part of the year when it's literally dangerous to go outside because of the heat.

Feels like we fail to understand how perilous just a few degrees might be to certain cities already on the climate edge...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com