19 ms·
July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
- cconcepts 10y agoI initially thought this was a NYTimes self promotion piece. As in "Think NYTimes is hot right now? Just Wait".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sevenless 10y agoThese maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. But wouldn't a hotter world tend to exacerbate emission trends, with human needs for AC and desalination rising, plus forest fires? Moreover, there might be some tipping point for large scale methane release. The 'tail risk' to global warming has appreciable density a long way out.
- viach 10y ago> These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. I think this is a very realistic assumption. Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890...
- Noseshine 10y agoI think you misread the comment you responded to (only the first sentence and then you assumed the rest?). He asked the opposite. The question asked about the other direction, up/more, not down/less. Goes to show we should hear one another out...
- oDot 10y agoIrreversible as in "won't fix itself" or in "don't even bother with CO2 extraction [edit: from the atmosphere]"?
- colejohnson66 10y agoThe earth goes through cycles (to an extent), so I like to believe that if everyone died, given enough time, the earth would return to its former self. However, I could be wrong.
- sevenless 10y agoIt seems likely. 500 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than even the worst projections allow humans to create. CO2 eventually weathers into limestone and gets subducted under continental plates. Ultimately, geological activity renews the balance, and stops us turning into Venus.
- sanxiyn 10y agoNPR article is "irreversible in 1000 years scale". Yes, things are different in million years scale. But even immeidately achieving zero emission today will not cool the planet, at least for 1000 years.
- jandrese 10y agoBasically it is irreversible on a human level timescale. Many generations of life on this planet are going to have to adjust to higher average temperatures. It's going to be (and already is really) a mini-extinction event. Unless we don't change course, then it might be a mass extinction.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoI'm not sure. Many of the countries with the largest emissions per capita are in regions where houses are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Given that indoor temperature is ~ 20C, the ∆T for heating can be much greater than for cooling, since cold outdoor temp can easily go as low as -20C, while really hot weather won't go much above 40C. Thus, in a warmer climate where you need less heating in winter and more cooling in summer, you might actually end up using less total power for AC.
- throwanem 10y agoThat assumes power consumption is constant for a given ∆T regardless of the method used to produce it, which seems optimistic.
- sevenless 10y agoYeah. I don't think thermodynamics works like that.
- VLM 10y agoShockingly that is pretty much how heat pumps work to a first degree (oh the pun), they don't much care which side is the evaporator and which side is the condenser. There are minor details in size of fan and design of coil vs tolerable noise level vs quality of insulation on connecting pipes. Also the pressure vs temp graphs are a little non-linear which does show up at the extremes (and the extremes are a small fraction of total operational time) In the west most cooling is done with a heat pump permanently wired into refrigeration mode aka a conventional air conditioner. There's a widely held belief that the entire system coefficient of performance is exactly 1 with somewhat less popular urban legends claiming a small fraction of 1 or only analyzing 100% efficient theoretical gas table cycles of 30 or whatever. However real world deployed average systems including air handler (aka fan) power and a realistic depreciation or embedded energy of manufacture etc results in about 3. So in the real world the total cost to the environment is about a kilowatt/hr to move about 3 kilowatt/hr of heat out of a building. It scales better than linear with size, something to do with moving air being expensive and larger AC being connected to larger buildings having a better surface area to volume ratio. Anyway for better or worse a kilowatt into an electric heater costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and generates about 1 KW of heating in a typical building, whereas a kilowatt into an AC or heat pump costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and moves about 3 KW of heat out of the building. In practice it takes less energy to cool than to heat although in theory a heat pump has difficulty telling the difference between 90F outdoor and 50F outdoor temps.
- staticelf 10y agoWell the trend has so far been that countries increase their emissions generally and not the reverse. Especially with emerging economies like China and India. A lot of Swedish politicians claims that Sweden has lowered it's emissions and while that is true we also outsourced a lot of production and increased our consumption rendering our emissions actually higher when you count that in.
- jandrese 10y agoThis is a big concern of mine. One of the grand results of local environmental regulation plus globalization has been to export pollution from first world nations to third world nations. Pollution (at least Carbon pollution) is a global issue, and tackling it only at the local level has proven to be ineffective. It's a shame that it is politically impossible for the UN to make its own version of the EPA--complete with an enforcement arm that has teeth. Without it dirty manufacturers simply go where the pollution laws are least stringent (or at least poorly enforced) and continue to kill us all slowly.
- madaxe_again 10y agoNot only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. So yet more air conditioning will ensue, consuming more energy, warming oceans further, raising humidity, and thus exacerbating the problem. Positive feedback cycles sure are great. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
- ythl 10y agoWell if you don't believe in God, you might want to start since it appears he's the only hope we have left for a doomed climate.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- antisthenes 10y agoAnother unmentioned consequence of rising CO2 levels is the lost productivity and quality of life that will accompany that. Consider the levels of CO2 rising from ~280 in the pre-industrial era to maybe ~700 by 2100. A 420 CO2 PPM outdoors also increases by at least that amount the air indoors, which leads to much higher CO2 concentrations, which are uncomfortable for people to breath in. I notice fatigue, grogginess and reduced cognition at levels above 1500 PPM, which are quite often reached in poorly ventilated offices and bedrooms. So levels that might be okay right now at ~1200 won't be okay by the end of the century. This is assuming a constant CO2 rise for the next 85 years at 3 PPM/year, which is quite optimistic. Depending on how bad the positive feedback cycles are, the rise might be much higher and will result in very poor indoor air quality for most people.
- flukus 10y ago> Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.
- Pitarou 10y agoIf there's a methane tipping point, we may have already passed it. Have a look on YouTube, and you'll see people in Siberia happily creating fireballs by poking a stick in the ground and holding a lighter over the hole they've just created. And more methane is bubbling up from the Arctic continental shelf every year.
- imtringued 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI
- dredmorbius 10y agoWe've known the basic climate math since the 1960s. The first political attempts to reach global agreements on emissions controls were in the early 1970s. 45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on_the_Human_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on... I'm not particularly sanguine. There are many books and authors on this topic. For the energy angle, I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil. For the political dynamics, William Ophuls is among the best I've read. His 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is a brief, but commanding overview of the problems and dynamics. It's long ago enough that many of its predictions are testable. While pessimistic on population and food, much the rest has held up, and Ophuls' predictions specifically on China and the former Soviet Union are uncannily accurate. He's written more since, with what he says is his final book being published in 2012. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-prologue-to-a-political-theory-of-the-steady-state/oclc/2524932&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc... http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the-age-of-ecology/oclc/753684198&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the... http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language/oclc/854845095&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language...
- factorialboy 10y agoFUD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
- sevenless 10y agoIgnorance of the (irreversible) consequences is sufficient reason to avoid messing with the composition of the atmosphere, no?
- fsloth 10y agoFUD of what? Generally FUD is used to gain some financial advantage. The only party who has anything to gain from continuing with the economic policies which acerbate climate change are the owners of fossil fuel sources. These constitute billions of dollars of future profit - but only if it's burnt up into the sky. Everyone else is only going to lose in the long term. If one does not understand anything of climate science, one use the help of political insight to understand the underlying dynamics of the discussion: who has the greatest incentive to lie?
- blahi 10y agoI am personally acquainted with the dealings of several environmental NGOs. Not climate related, but I extrapolate. And we are talking branches of the biggest NGOs out there. They have a very big incentive to spread FUD and they do it all the time. They are basically extortion and defamation platforms used as a political lever. At least here. But I very much doubt it's much different elsewhere.
- pedro2 10y agoInteresting.
- misja111 10y agoSo 14 of the 15 hottest years ever have taken place since 2000. I'm wondering, if this is the result of global heating due to emissions, why do we see so many new record highs only now? The industrial revolution has been going on already for over 150 years. Why were there so few records broken in, say, 1980 - 1996, and so many in 2000 - 2016?
- pjc50 10y agoI think you're misunderstanding the arithmetic. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record#/media/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_recor... The Nth "hottest years" are relative to the present day. So in the graph, it looks like 1981 would have been a record hot year - but now it's only the 30th (or whatever) hottest year. If the graph were a completely smooth upward-sloping line, then you'd expect that 15 of the 15 hottest years would have been since 2000.
- RobertoG 10y agoI find interesting, in that graph you are linking, that there is a spike in the years of the second world war. It would be interesting to know if there is causality between human activity in those years and that spike.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- misja111 10y agoThanks for the chart. To me it still seems like we are missing something. If you look at the period of 1940 - 1980, then there was not really an upward or downward trend. But in the 36 years after 1980, the global temperature has been going up like crazy. Should all of that be attributed to statistical noise? To me it looks like some new factor has started to influence the climate in the recent years, whatever that factor may be.
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- aangjie 10y agoThis graphic could've used a Brett victor style tangle.js based simulation model. Then we could play around with it assuming future emission rates going down or up etc.. http://worrydream.com/Tangle/ http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- artursapek 10y agoI didn't know if it was just because I now have a 2 year old, but New York summers have definitely seemed harder to deal with each year I've lived here. Is there a commonly accepted minimum temperature difference threshold that is perceivable by humans? E.g., if summer in 2016 was hotter than 2015 by X, I will notice?
- dsr_ 10y agoHumans are lousy at comparing temperature differences over the course of a year. What we remember are extreme events: four years ago we had deep snow all winter, last year I only had to shovel twice. Remember when we didn't turn on the A/C except for one week in August?
- mabcat 10y agoThis is a "just noticeable difference", stacks of research on it. In some situations the JND for temperature is as small as 0.02 degC. Whereas if I sneak the room temperature up over the course of about 10 minutes you may not notice a 5 degC change. From one summer to another? I'm going to speculate that people have no idea whether it was cooler last year.
- bluedino 10y agoIt's an average over time. People were talking about going to the local lake this weekend because the local weather service reported it was going to be the warmest ever water temperatures for this year - 0.1 degree warmer than last year.
- tombert 10y agoThe part I find especially frustrating is that, on average, a New Yorker has a lower carbon footprint than the typical American, probably due to the heavy use of the train. So even when I do the (I think) eco-friendly thing by not having a car and using public transit, I'm still being punished for what the rest of the US (and the rest of the world) does.
- Diederich 10y agoEven more troubling: we are being punished by what the world did, generations past. This stuff has, by our standards, long delayed effects. The implication is disconcerting: a FULL STOP of excessive green house gas emissions right now will have, at best, a notable impact in several decades.
- harryh 10y agoWithout all the stuff generations past did you might still be living in a cave and hunting and gathering for food. All in, the gains you've received from your ancestors FAR FAR outweigh the losses.
- tombert 10y agoI don't know really what you're arguing. I don't think that the poster was suggesting that we go back to the flintstones-age, and I'm sure he/she was appreciative of the work that's been done in the past, but that in no way deters from the fact that current and future generations are going to have to do a lot of cleanup from the past generations.
- harryh 10y agoIf your parents died and left you an inheritance of $1000 and also a debt of $100 you're still $900 ahead. Most people wouldn't call that being "punished."
- Diederich 10y agoOh, I totally get that society has benefited from our 150 years focus on using the concentrated energy found in the ground. The hell of it is that we've only had a reasonable understanding of the dangers associated with using this energy for a few decades. I find no fundamental fault associated with their decisions back in the day.
- arethuza 10y agoFound this link with similar maps for Europe: http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-16-scariest-maps-from-the-e-u-s-massive-new-climate-change-report/ http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-16-scariest-maps-from-th... NB from 2012. Interesting that it actually predicts that the UK will have a distinct benefit from warming when it comes to agricultural productivity.
- Karellen 10y agoPhil Plait of Bad Astronomy also has a good (if now depressingly repetetive) take on it[0]. [0] http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/08/16/july_2016_was_the_hottest_july_on_record.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/08/16/july_201...
- staticelf 10y agoI am lucky I live in the northen parts of Europe. I do not wish to live in America in ~50-100 years from now since there is so much guns and other weapons easily available. People who care about their childrens future should start planning now. I think when the shit hits the fan it will hit hard and fast.
- sevenless 10y ago> People who care about their childrens future should start planning now. If you believe this, wouldn't the ethical thing be to not have kids? Besides, global warming-derived refugee flows into Europe could well put it in a much worse position than the US.
- staticelf 10y agoWell.. yes. But I think a lot of people are going to have kids nonetheless and a lot of people here maybe already have kids.
- collyw 10y agoOr nephews and nieces or other kids that they might actually care about leaving an inhabitable world for.
- goodcanadian 10y agoIf you believe this, wouldn't the ethical thing be to not have kids? I see this over and over . . . If you don't have kids, who exactly are you saving the world for?
- sevenless 10y agoI take it the world isn't going to be 'saved'. The question is how we respond to that. Why do you see 'saving the world' as a priority? The natural (non-human) environment doesn't have any right to exist. Our priority should be to avoid harming humans, and people born into a world that's mostly uninhabitable for them will have pretty shit lives. Long term, the world will be fine, we won't.
- harryh 10y agoPersonally I think that the idea that these trends can ever be revered by some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream. People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes. As long as they're rich enough to do so you'll never stop them. The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.
- JustUhThought 10y agoI staunchly agree with your first point. I staunchly disagree on the second point. Technological solutions generally "solve" one problem at a time. Desalination solves the fress water problem. Carbon sequestration solve one part of the greenhouse gass problem. Electric cars solve another part. Green energy production and batteries mitigate another part. Next we need to solve pollution from ocean freightliners. Then the methane problem. Next the landfill problem. Followed by the issues created by how much we've changed global ecosysyems and weather patters due to strip mining, covering massive tracts of land with asphalt and concrete and monoculture, and deforestation. Then we need to discuss how we plan to stop poisoning the oceans because of our reliance on petroleum based fertilizers and chemical pesticides. And turtles all the way down. Untill we learn to live in balance with nature, rather than separate from it, in an extractive relationship, treating side effects as problems to be isolated and solved, it will always be more of the same.
- clarkevans 10y agoWhy is this voted down? In the end, balance is a global political issue that we must address in addition to the specific concerns.
- dasboth 10y ago> some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream This has been my conclusion recently too. Sure, we can all do our own bit individually, but I can't realistically see a global shift in conscientiousness taking place.
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- codecamper 10y agoSolar panels now sell for about 45c a watt out of China. Cost to create is around 36c / watt. This allows deployments such as in Chile & Dubai where the cost/kwh is 3 cents & below. This now cheaper than coal, without subsidy. Remove the subsidies that oil, gas & coal receive, and you will witness a new day. Only problem for solar right now is over supply caused by a sudden drop in demand. China reduced its subsidy a bit. Also the US extended subsidy for 5 years, which is great, but it has removed the urgency to complete utility scale solar plants before subsidy cutoff, causing the utilities to sit it out & wait. Better act soon! (250 years to clear CO2 from atmosphere, feedback loops only now being discovered.)
- geomark 10y ago"Remove the subsidies that oil, gas & coal receive, and you will witness a new day." Yes. But you will also need to remove the anti-dumping import duties on Chinese-made PV cells. Those are some pretty big special interest groups (particular the first one) receiving government protection from foreign competition. So good luck with getting those protections removed.
- codecamper 10y agoYou think these duties will stop the Chinese? Ha ha ha. Already the major chinese manufacturers are opening fabs in Malaysia. First Solar and Sunpower (US PV companies) also manufacture in Malaysia. I'm not saying they are actually doing this, but how hard will it be to ship modules from China to Malaysia and then onto final destinations?
- fratlas 10y agoAlso the power grid cannot accommodate in it's current form. Older substations struggle to do with the load fluctuations that are caused by solar panels, which is why they are discouraging them in Hawaii. A huge investment would be required to upgrade these substations. But yes, soon solar will be cheaper than coal.
- codecamper 10y ago
- bnolsen 10y agoif almost half you input data is made up" and not raw observations then you can falsely come to this conclusion. The real data shows spiking in the mid 1930s far above current levels.
- G43nm45ji 10y agoCan you elaborate? I would like to know where you get this information.
- kbart 10y agoSource? Pretty much every temperature graphics I've seen looks like this: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
- Pitarou 10y agoThis claim has been thoroughly discredited. Even the climate change denier Andrew Watts agrees that it is false. And in any case, it makes no sense -- to believe this claim is to believe that all climate scientists are part of some conspiracy. Politifact do a nice job of debunking it. http://politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/25/steve-doocy/foxs-doocy-nasa-fudged-data-make-case-global-warmi/ http://politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/25/stev...
- throwanem 10y agoIt never ceases to bewilder me that nuclear power isn't taken seriously as a replacement for fossil-burning baseload generation.
- Pitarou 10y agoAgreed. We no longer have the luxury of being prissy about ionising radiation.
- throwanem 10y agoIt's not even something we need to be prissy about. We've pretty much had the basic "we don't know everything we don't know yet" accidents. Stopping at this point is as much a waste as giving up on aircraft development in 1965 or so would have been.
- pjc50 10y agoDo we have the luxury of giving up multiple hundreds of square kilometers for the exclusion zones if there is a failure, though? And the technology doesn't scale well. Few big plants that take ages to build, compared to panels on every roof and turbines put up one by one.
- VLM 10y agoIsn't that extremely small area compared to submerged coastline and harbors and coastal cities? Some industrial processes and some datacenter services require baseload power. "most" power demand doesn't truly require baseload. Conveniently they require approx no people. Go build the plants and the data centers and the aluminum refineries in the desert next to the a-bomb test sites and no one will notice or care. As an example my cheap old refrigerator "needs" 24x7 power but with better insulation and higher thermal mass it could trivially run once a day, or even less, at peak solar production. Another example is culturally we "need" to have retail and service businesses open during the lowest solar generation times of the day, but that cultural demand has no technological basis. There are cultural and economic reasons walmart can't replace all its gigawatts of light bulbs with skylights but no technological reasons. Another cultural example is there's no reason we "have to" have millions of people living in deserts, and no matter how much environmental damage it causes we're not going to depopulate the West USA down to a sustainable level for purely political and cultural reasons. Ditto the far south. We as a culture have decided no level of environmental damage is too large to stop providing water and air conditioning for millions to live in historically unlivable climates, even if there's plenty of land in livable climates. In that way, ionizing radiation doesn't matter any more than the destruction of the Colorado River matters, for example.
- chukye 10y agoOK, but... any ideas how can we solve that?
- Pitarou 10y ago1. Reach a firm global consensus that this is a problem and we need to do something about it. (I'm looking at you, United States and Australia.) 2. Implement a top-down program of transition to low-carbon technologies. Switch from coal power stations to nuclear, switch to electric vehicles, and so on. 3. Invest heavily in R&D to find ways to cope with global warming. Heat-tolerant crops, "cloud brightening", flood mitigation, and so on and so on. We must have the necessary tools and technology to hand before we need them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- _ph_ 10y agoMove to renewable energies as fast as possible. Wind and solar is now cost-competetive, especially if you look at solar in the south of the US. If anyone operates an AC unit at home, why is it not powered by solar? Especially as you really need it when the sun shines. Tesla have shown: electrical cars are a thing. The quicker the automotive sector moves to electrical, the better. We can't solve the problem over night, but thats the reason we should start now. There is a lot we can do. Last year, Germany produced 30% of its energy with renewables, up from 25% the previous year. As I write this, German solar produces 22 GW of solar electricity alone.
- dredmorbius 10y agoEmbrace limits.
- DropbearRob 10y agoyes, Decreasing the CO2 emissions - which wont happen due to losses in profits. Reduce deforestation - which wont happen due to losses in profits. Increase the planting of grasses, and fast growing carbon sequestering crops such as hemp - Wont happen because it costs money, unless its triggered by individuals (Green plants absorb infrared and sequesters CO2). For those people who say, OH! but the CO2 cycle is neutral for growing plants because they rot... B.S. what do you think permafrost is and not to mention... oil. Seed the oceans with iron to encourage algal blooms, and dredge it all up and bury it deep. Change the mode of Air Transport to reduce contrails as studies have suggested that ‘contrail cirrus’ is a contributing factor and leads to greater forcings. We need widespread Maglev trains, or dare I say it something revolutionary such as Hyperloop (but one that actually gets made.. lets focus on what we have already)
- bjourne 10y agoAnyone else who feel that the climate-related news are getting very scary? If for every month for the last year, there was a new sprinter breaking the last months world Record in 100 meters you'd know something was fishy. Like some kind of incredibly potent anabolic steroid runners were ingesting. With new and improved versions of that steroid being released every few months...
- kleiba 10y agoI would take it with a grain of salt. In Germany, we had warm summers in recent years, but this year's July has generally been cold and very rainy.
- pinaceae 10y agoand today we learn about the concept of average...
- acomjean 10y agoclimate is long term, weather is short term[1]. Its a subtle difference and often confused, especially if english isn't your first language. [1]http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_wea...
- ThomPete 10y agoWhat on earth does language have to do with it? Other countries write about climate change too :)
- Klathmon 10y agoBecause to a non-native speaker the 2 words can be confused as synonyms. Hell I didn't even know there was a distinct difference between the 2 words until just now (and i've been speaking english my whole life), and I had just assumed that these kinds of discussions were talking about the "long term" data.
- novalis78 10y agoand here we are, still without any thorium reactor anywhere on the planet in operation.
- return0 10y agoAs someone who does not tolerate heat well, i can confirm. And it isn't over yet.
- kelvin0 10y agoWell clearly it has nothing to do with man-made pollution, it's nature taking it's course and these rampant wildfires. Oh wait, what causes the wildfires you ask? :-)
- triangleman 10y agoEl Nino + urban heat island effect. According to satellites, July 2016 is the 2nd hottest July since the 70's when satellite records began. The hottest is July 1998, also El Nino. Take a look at weather stations that have been situated in the same place for 100 or more years, far from cities: http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm
- MrZongle2 10y agoI'm surprised you haven't been called a "denier" yet. Edit: my comment was originally made tongue-in-cheek, but it's clear that some acolytes are highly offended. I'll take it as vindication.
- cromulent 10y agoThe scientists been taking the heat island effect into account the whole time. See box 2.1 here, it explains it quite well: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/052.htm#2221 http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climat... In relation to the El Nino, sure, it is a factor in the heat every 5-7 years or so, including last year, but it doesn't explain the trend.
- davidf18 10y agoThere is much we can do in the US to decrease air pollution within a very short time. These reductions also contribute to lowering asthmatic episodes and hospitalizations and various forms of heart disease in the elderly, especially women. 1. As of a few years ago, 10% of the 450 coal powered electric power plants produced half the air pollution by coal powered plants (according to an Environmental Pollution Agency report). Take the top 45 polluters off line. The Obama administration is already to shut down some of these plants. 2. Many buildings in the Northeast and Midwest burn old #6 and #4 fuel oils for heat during the winter which are very polluting. New York City, where I live, has now banned the dirtier #6 oils, but politics has intervened and significantly delayed the banning of #4 oil. But other cities should ban the burning of these dirtier fuel oils. The shutting down of the top 45 polluting coal powered electric plants and the banning of #6 and #4 fuel oils for heating buildings would not be hard to do and would make a significant difference to reducing air pollution.
- gadders 10y agoIt looks like the actual increase was minimal and within the margin of error: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced this week that according to their calculations, July 2015 was the hottest month since instrumental records began in 1880. NOAA says that the record was set by eight one-hundredths of a degree Celsius over that set in July 1998. NASA calculates that July 2015 beat what they assert was the previous warmest month (July 2011) by two one-hundredths of a degree. But government spokespeople rarely mention the inconvenient fact that these records are being set by less than the uncertainty in the statistics. NOAA claims an uncertainty of 14 one-hundredths of a degree in its temperature averages, or near twice the amount by which they say the record was set. NASA says that their data is typically accurate to one tenth of a degree, five times the amount by which their new record was set. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/23/tom-harris-global-warming-deceptive-temperature-re/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/23/tom-harris-g...
- mikeash 10y agoAre we supposed to ignore the established long-term warming trend just because the records now being set aren't sufficiently beyond the ones from one anomalous year?
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoTwo weeks from now: "August was hottest month ever recorded, according to NASA."
- elcct 10y agoI planted palm trees and bananas in my London garden to reflect that :)
- mfer 10y agoNot to negate the issue at hand, which is important, there there's an interesting note on perception here. "ever recorded" is used but how long have we been recording? The last study I checked on that made a claim like this was about 100 years. "ever recorded" sounds more sensational. In any case, how we treat our planet... our ecosystem... is important. Seeing it go downhill is saddening and motivating. Glad to see things pointing out the change, its direction, and possible impact.
- izzydata 10y agoNo wonder my electricity bill was so insane. Maybe this winter will be the coldest winter ever recorded.
- undersuit 10y agoIt could be the hottest January on record. Seeing as half the world is experiencing winter right now, what do you think will happen to global temperatures when the southern hemisphere experiences their summer?
- flukus 10y agoNot much, the southern hemisphere has a lot more water than land, leveling out the temperature. Records are created or not based off what happens in the northern hemisphere.
- bcarrell 10y agoI own a home built in the 1960s in the northeast US. My home (like many others, I'm sure) uses an oil-fired boiler to provide heating and hot water. I don't have gas lines to my house. The gas company won't run them unless I pay ~$5,000 for them to do so. Even if my home used natural gas instead of oil, I feel like it's not really solving the problem. What are my options here? Is solar viable? What can _I_ reasonably do to improve consumption? I use only LED lighting, eat meat rarely, use a programmable thermostat, have new windows/doors, etc. Improving the situation seems either not economically viable for most people or an incremental improvement. Just wait?
- maxerickson 10y agoPropane can be moderately cleaner than oil. Depending on the age of your boiler, you might get a big boost in efficiency by replacing it. The difference can be quite substantial: http://energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers http://energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers As much as 25% more energy directed into the home instead of out the chimney.
- bcarrell 10y agoMy current boiler is ~85 AFUE.
- ianlevesque 10y agoBetter insulation was missing from your list (or was maybe part of "etc") but if you want a more efficient heating / cooling system ground source heat pumps are an option. They can run from the grid more efficiently than most other sources of heating or cooling or optionally be combined with solar.
- bcarrell 10y agoWalls were stripped to studs approx. 8 years ago and new (fiberglass) insulation installed at that point. Attic has batt insulation.
- pjc50 10y ago
- spdustin 10y agoI've come to the (I feel) inevitable conclusion that we are already well and truly fucked. I will still do what I can to slow the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy, in the hopes that the majority of my children's lives will be made incrementally better, should they choose to remain on this planet (and, it is assumed, that they may actually have a choice, but there's no way I can know). We're on the wrong side of the story arc here. It's too late. The damage has been done, and it will continue to snowball even if we stop putting carbon (as both CO2 and methane) into the atmosphere today. Anyone who cooks can instinctively understand how "carryover heat" works - the temperature gradient hasn't yet finished equalizing, the latent energy (and, for that matter, the latent GH gasses) stored in the oceans and, indeed, the land itself hasn't yet made its full effects felt, and we've successfully argued and argued and argued about it without actually doing anything substantial enough to make a meaningful difference. But that sort of hopeless talk makes me sound like a crackpot, and I've typed this sort of message into many a text field on the Internet over the past year before deleting it, or pressing cancel, or closing the browser tab. But today, in a moment of vulnerability, or for another reason I can't hope to know, something is telling me to press "submit".
- ak217 10y agoWe need a Mahnattan Project for carbon sequestration.
- James001 10y agoI can take all that money if you'd like and plant a few trees?
- ak217 10y agoAbsolutely, that should be part of it. Fleets of drones planting forests. But artificial photosynthesis modules in the desert and engineered algae could also play a huge role.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
- blondie9x 10y agoWe all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem. What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar and wind energy is starting to become incredibly efficient and cheap but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves. What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
- rybosome 10y agoThe problem is that not enough people care. I've tried bringing it up with many of my friends. Responses include: "We can't risk damaging the economy" "The biggest priority in this country should be the mistreatment of minorities, you wouldn't care so much about the environment if you weren't white" "It's not a big deal, we will just relocate cities when flooding happens" "Scientists are wrong plenty of times" ...and on and on. Nobody really takes it seriously that we could be destroying the conditions which allow human life to exist on this planet. They are shielded by a raft of excuses, the issues which they are most concerned with, and endless high-budget entertainment. Unless there is a technological miracle that makes all of this simple, I believe that we are (in the words of another commenter) well and truly fucked.
- kpwagner 10y agoSergey Brin made a statement regarding global warming: something like, "I'm not worried about it. We can put solar-powered carbon scrubbers in the deserts of the world and essentially fix the problem with an investment in the tens of billions (relatively small)." I forget where I heard this and wasn't able to dig up a source. I think it was a Jason Calacanis podcast or video of an interview. Either way it was secondary information. Bad sourcing, I know--sorry. I agree with many who suggest reducing consumption is a risky gambit at best. How practical are counter-measures? Can we just geo-engineer our way out of it?
- ak217 10y agoBrin has the right idea. The only thing that will realistically help - aside from massive reforestation efforts or maybe bioengineered algae - is a mass-produced, maintenance-free solid-state artificial photosynthesis module. The problem is, very few people - almost all academics - have even been thinking about such a thing, much less engineering it. So there's enormous amounts of work to do.
- colordrops 10y agoIf any individual was capable of financing and building these scrubbers, it would be Brin. What is he waiting for?
- p4wnc6 10y agoI took off all my clothes.
- webXL 10y agoWhere, New York Times?
- Zigurd 10y agoThe answer will probably be complex and unpleasant: We'll get serious climate disruptions before people get serious. We'll need to choose to deliberately forego energy sources, and energy is tightly linked to economic growth. The nuclear proponents will have to demonstrate that nuclear power can be economical and safe. If it is not economical, as it has not been so far, it is useless. If we are past the point of preventing large scale calamity, geoengineering will probably have to be part of the solution. It's very risky, not least because it will lead to complacency if it works at all.
- brooklyndavs 10y agoI'm just a software developer with a side interest in climate science so please excuse any ignorance on this topic. What I find troubling is it seems, from what I have read, our climate models currently have a poor handle on co2 and methane feedbacks, both positive and negative. For example there seems to be a general scientific consensus that NOx from industrial sources (mostly coal power plants) is having some cooling effect. When these are removed, which will happen slowly but steadily as coal is retired, there will be a warming response but it is not clear how much this response will be. Similarly, you have positive feedbacks coming into place like the decline of sea ice in the arctic, less forests and more combustion of those forests, and co2/methane releases from permafrost. These are other feedbacks are known but nothing I have read has convinced me we have a full scientific understanding of the impact that these feedbacks will have. Thats why like others in this thread I feel rather hopeless about humanity ever getting global warming under control. We of course have the problem of humanity to continue putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere via our economic activity. This of course is co2 but also methane and HFCs. The challenge of bringing these down to safe levels while keeping not only the standard of living we enjoy currently in the west but also bringing billions more people into the middle class world wide is impossible with existing technology and incredibly hard with emerging technology. To get to a carbon neutral prosperous, middle class society for everyone on the planet will take many decades. If we ever get to that point I'm afraid feedbacks and built in system inertia will be so strong that the planet will keep on warming for 1,000s of years despite our best efforts. TL;DR I think we as humans really screwed this up and I don't have much hope of us collectively being able to fix it.