This decade is the warmest on record | Hacker News Reader

This decade is the warmest on record

news.bbc.co.uk

13 pointsAndrewDucker18 comments

'on record' is a pretty useless measure.

It's a way to make a story more sensational than it is. You see it in tabloid newspapers often:

Headline: "Man eats biggest fish ever recorded!!!"

Small print: 'records on biggest fish eaten by humans have been kept for the last 6 weeks'.

Is it just me that is extremely uneasy about taking a few years of data, out of the bajillion years the earth has been about, and drawing any conclusions from it?

It's not useless - it's just limited.

"Warmest decade in 160 years" still tells you something. It just doesn't tell you _everything_. As we can never have perfect data on everything, learning to take things in context and understand what they are good for (and what they aren't) is a vital skill.

Here's a great presentation on understanding just how limited the data is: http://web.mit.edu/esi/symposia/symposium-2009/wunsch.html

I would have thought though that 160 years when studying climate, is absolutely nothing.

It would be more accurate to say "warmest since instrumental records began" (160 years ago).

Otherwise you're just playing into the hands of the dinosaur deniers who seem to have found a new branch of science to attack.

"Warmest on record" seems like a pretty accurate way to put it, especially with the quotes.

What do you want them to write? "This decade 'warmest on record' but actually don't worry, because some people think that doesn't mean anything, so actually maybe we shouldn't publish this article at all, after all it may rub some nay-sayers the wrong way, and what kind of news organisation would we be if we ever published news that not everyone agrees with 100%"?

"160 years" tells you a lot more than the current title: for example it tells us that the data is probably a bit useless for making any kind of prophecy about how bad the climate is :)

160 years isn't even a 10th of the time humanity has hung around for (in a "civilised" form). It doesn't even register beyond that :)

I know it is an accurate statement and for people like us who know the limitations it's not too bad. The problem is titles like this are deliberately used to try and cover up the limitations of the data.

It's an interim step for some official to claim "this is the warmest decade since records began, panic everyone". Joe public has no idea of why the limitations are important and how this then forms a small part of the larger puzzle.

Agreed, there are only 16 decades on record, so even if the average global temperature variation was random, there would be a 6.25% chance that the current decade is the warmest one.

Here's some further data, based on indirect evidence rather than recording:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/temper...

As you can see on the graphs, the last decade is still the hottest.

without wanting to labor a point (and that does cover a big portion of human civilisation, I agree) that is still far short of anything I would call "long scale".

I do think we need more work to push it back at least to 10,000 years if possible (particularly because it is important to see the effect of NO organised civilization in comparison)

Truth (or at least data) comes to those who seek. A short google later:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_palae...

It's worth pointing out that if you go too far back in the past, the data is actually meaningless. 5 billion years ago, when it was still being formed, I'm sure the Earth was a lot hotter than it is now - but that doesn't mean we wanna go back there.

The real questions are:

1) Is the climate changing? (very probably)

2) Could the changes cause great disruption, war, famine, loss of life, etc? (probably)

3) Is that climate change induced by us? (maybe, or "probably" depending on who you listen to)

4) Can we do something about it?

The problem is titles like this are deliberately used to try and cover up the limitations of the data.

Please try to assume incompetence before malice. Headline writers optimize for punch not completeness.

Sorry the emphasis was wrong: I don't mean the headline writer (though potentially it was written to sell the story ;)) but others who pick up the story.

The actual article is pretty good. I just think the title in particular, probably due to headline length restrictions, draws a fairly arbitrary line between on record and not.

We know what the temperature was like before 160 years ago from lots of different sources. Indeed that's a big bit of climate science right there.

To act as if there's a big discontinuity between those and recorded temps is a bit simplistic. After all those man-made measurements can be off for a million different reasons too, so you still need to do some science to e.g. average them and throw out crazy outliers because of malfunctions.

Claims that 2009 is the hottest year? Really? The past few years have been cold and wet in the UK compared to the previous few - in a manner that would tie in well with the solar cycle.

I'm not saying yes or no on all the other crap (and it's possible the temperature is offset by hotter temperatures elsewhere) but 2009 has certainly been one of the wettest years here, and not the warmest.

Yes but it is the global avg. not just your neck of the woods. In fact the reason London has been cold and wet is because the added heat has melted a large amount of ice in your neck of woods. Meaning there is quite a bit of extra cold water just hanging around making it cold and wet for you.

And there's the possibility that gobal warming could shut off the warm water that comes to the UK from Florida. If that happens the UK would have weather more suited to its latitude (think Moscow)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_latitude#60%C...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circul...

Of course, there's a chance it might go the other way and we'd get an extra rise in temperature.

The average global temperature is about as useful as knowing the average phone number in the phone book.

The world is an extremely large heterogeneous set of systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com