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Summers Are Getting Hotter
- CalRobert 9y agoI wonder when people in places that are proud of their weather will start to realize their base assumptions may no longer be valid. I lived in San Diego the summer of 2015 and it was brutally hot. People kept saying "the last few years have been pretty warm", but were generally dismissive when presented with the possibility that this was the new normal.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoYou got me wondering and apparently the average max temperature in SD in August 2015 was 81. Here, it was 83 degrees at 11 last night and it's been a relatively cool summer. But wait, there's nothing like a humid 98 degree day in the middle of August. SD doesn't sound too bad. The fact that human beings lived in places like Houston before the advent of air conditioner suggests that new normal will get adapted to pretty quickly. How did they do that?
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoI know someone that just moved to San Diego and apparently one of the selling points is their year round good weather. Not too hot, not too cold. I'm sure human beings can exist in warmer, or colder places, but whether they want to is another matter.
- nsp 9y agoAs someone who grew up without ac in Houston, it's pretty miserable. Lots of showers + a silly number of fans helps, but not that much. If you look at the historical population of Houston, it skyrocketed starting in the 50s as central air became widespread, so to answer your question most people didn't.
- eesmith 9y agoAs someone who grew up w/o a/c in FL, it's doable ... in a house built before the 1950s so it wasn't designed around central air. High ceilings, entire house on cinder blocks so there's a 3 foot crawlspace under the building, a large porch, roof-vents, etc. Florida cracker style. It helps that we had the option to visit the public library or movie theater for a/c on the worst days, or go to a public pool. Worst is to live in a house designed for a/c but not using it. Did that one summer, because we weren't home during the day and wanted to save money. Just left the windows open. Mold started to form, so we decided it was better to run the a/c with its built-in dehumidifier.
- CalRobert 9y agoIt's amazing how quickly people forget the value of a good awning, double-hung windows, and the high ceiling you mentioned. To be fair, there were days when it wasn't too hot outside but the apartment was sweltering.
- eesmith 9y agoAs a downside, because there was effectively no insulation, when it was 40F outside, it was also 40F inside. We pulled out the space heaters to warm up the bathroom for the couple of weeks of winter.
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoHaving grown up in Houston I know that sadly, before air conditioning, a lot of people died from heat exposure. Predominantly the elderly and sick. [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study-home-air-conditioning-cut-premature-deaths-on-hot-days-80-percent-since-1960/2012/12/22/5b57f3ac-4abf-11e2-b709-667035ff9029_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study...
- hyperbovine 9y agoEven today this happens in highly developed countries where AC is not common. A 2003 heat wave in killed 20,000 people in France, Spain and Portugal, in addition to tens of thousands more related deaths in the years that followed.
- volkk 9y agoafter a quick wikipedia read, it seems the number is as high as 70,000 (although this is across all of europe). insane. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
- Someone 9y agoThat number looks worse than it is. Many of the deaths were elderly people who already were of poor health, and would not have lived for long if that heat wave hadn't occurred. A way to show that is true is by looking at the death rate shortly _after_ that heat wave; it is slightly lower than expected. If you want to compare this number with e.g. car accidents, it would be better to count QALY's lost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year), rather than deaths.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- s_kilk 9y agoIt's already happening. This summer flights were grounded in Arizona because ambient temperatures were higher than the safe operating range of commercial aircraft. That's the kind of thing (along with food shortages) that are impossible to ignore.
- strict9 9y agoMoved to Chciago about 10 years ago in small part to escape the summer sweat in NC. The first few winters were seemed brutal, and the summers pleasant. Past few years have changed: hot summers and mild winters. It's almost downright pleasant during the past several winter seasons. My snow shovel hasn't been getting much use and was wondering if it was all in my imagination.
- cylinder 9y agoThe shock will be from electricity prices, not weather itself. San Diego heat is nothing. Houston and most of the rest of the south are unlivable without constant dehumidification (AC). Currently they exist with really cheap energy. But what if carbon is taxed or exports of Nat gas become more preferable than domestic consumption? With cheap energy, they can always just Add More AC™. Public places in Houston are kept at 68F in July. Look at Dubai where it's even hotter.
- Kenji 9y agoGotta love a graph with an x axis of "extremely cold - cold - normal - hot - extremely hot" Why not put it in numbers? It's not like we are strangers to numbers in degrees celsius or fahrenheit. Only a fool would do axes like that.
- ianai 9y agoIt always depends on your audience. Also, this gives them a way to mix both humidity with temperature - the "feels like" temperature. But, yes, not great.
- stvnoerst03n 9y ago> this gives them a way to mix both humidity with temperature They could have just used this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index
- vturner 9y agoThis article is an example of why I find it difficult to intellectually buy into the warming climate theory. It would seem if one is trying to convince the public of "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever the current term is, that scientists would at least publish articles that lay-scientists like myself could read and be convinced. But that's not what we have here, no what we have here is a hyped-up oh my its getting hot article... First off, your observation of the ridiculous x-axis labels. Really, "Extremely Hot" Is that supposed to scare me or something? Second, what does this mean... "...compared actual summer temperatures for each decade since the 1980s to a fixed baseline average." Did you sample at the same location each summer? Did you sample at the same point in the summer? Did you account for any changes in winter/spring/fall temperatures? And finally...did they happen to point out the time periods are not all of the same length?
- moultano 9y ago> This article is an example of why I find it difficult to intellectually buy into the warming climate theory. If your concern is lack of rigor in a pop science article, go to the primary documents instead. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
- virtuexru 9y agoI like the graphic; it's very scary. But why were they not inclined to put actual units in the x-axis. Kind of hard to compare what is "cold" vs "normal" vs "hot" without having some kind of basepoint reference.
- 09bjb 9y agoYeah absolutely. Without an explanation of what the units are it's worse than useless. "Here's a diagram of an arbitrary metric I invented. Scary, isn't it?" I'm no climate science denier but stuff like this just adds fuel to the fire. You might say we're just supposed to take it on faith ;)
- mturmon 9y agoI would counter that it's up to you to engage your curiosity and track back to the paper if you're interested in the particulars. You don't have to take it on faith, the link is right there in the article.
- mturmon 9y agoIf you track back to the 2016 paper, Fig. 6, you find similar graphs (not as pretty, not interactive) with this explanation: "Frequency of occurrence (vertical axis) of local seasonal mean temperature anomalies in unit of local standard deviation of Northern Hemisphere land areas." It takes some time to unwrap the words there. The "anomaly" is the difference of an observation at a particular place and time from a seasonal and/or regional mean value. As you probably know, anomalies are pervasively used in geosciences. So in essence he's standardizing into what in statistics would be called a z-score, z = (x - mu) / sigma where mu is the regional/temporal average, and sigma is the local standard deviation. I guess the above is probably the reason the NYT graphic did not explain it fully.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vonzeppelin 9y agoI'm looking forward to growing peanuts in Kentucky.
- microcolonel 9y agoSome folks are growing olives on a Canadian island just off Vancouver. They had their first successful oil pressing from the trees just this last December. I'm looking forward to bamboo in New Hampshire. Live Tree or Die!
- yellowapple 9y agoBamboo is nothing to look forward to unless you're using it as construction material or otherwise have a real use for it. Bamboo is basically a giant weed.
- microcolonel 9y agoI understand that it also makes good biochar. Some varieties make good textile fiber, I personally like the feel of bamboo and bamboo hybrid textiles, and the ones I own seem to hold up better than cotton after washing. The fact that it is basically a giant weed (more specifically a grass, everyone's favourite type of weed) is great, because you can abuse it, and it'll still take up tonnes of space for you. It's not too hard to contain if you make sure to moat, vinegar, and block it thoroughly. A good place for an expired family pet or a political enemy. When compressed thoroughly (three or four thousand tons per square meter) with the fibers aligned, it makes for unusually uniform and dense planks, beams, and boards. If assembled while green, then treated with borax, it can make for very interesting (and outrageously strong) structures if you know what to do with it. If you go to extra lengths, it can be a centenarian building material. The shoots are also good eats when cooked in rich stew or broiled with mayonnaise and chili.
- camiller 9y agoI have to buy green coffee to roast it myself. Looking forward to growing my own coffee in Nebraska.
- IanDrake 9y agoCan anyone explain why the base period is 29 years but then they step forward by 10 years? Seems kind of arbitrary and when these types of things are arbitrary I wonder what alternative time frames with the same data might look like.
- TomSawyer 9y agoThis is the best answer to that, that I've seen: https://twitter.com/corbettmatt/status/891003236412469248 https://twitter.com/corbettmatt/status/891003236412469248
- cbcoutinho 9y agoTo my understanding it's a thirty year baseline - beginning Jan '51 to end Dec ' 80 (inclusive) is thirty years.
- georgecmu 9y agoTo address several questions of why there are no "actual units in the x-axis": If I understand correctly how this graph and the categories are constructed, the plotted data do not have associated temperature units. The temperature data from each location is first normalized and expressed in terms of standard deviations relative to the local temperature distribution in the baseline period. These normalized readings are then binned together to create the bell curve plots. That's why there are no "extremely hot" data points in the baseline period: by definition these data points lie outside the local baseline distributions. UPDATE: This approach makes sense: different locales will have different temperature distributions; that means that a single measurement (presented as a deviation from the mean temperature expressed in absolute units: e.g. 7 degree F higher than average) can be extremely anomalous in one locale, but can be within 1 standard deviation in another. But once these measurements are expressed in standard deviations, the absolute temperature units disappear.
- stochtastic 9y agoI wrote a chapter of my PhD explaining why the linked PNAS paper is highly misleading (see the letter we published in PNAS in response for a summary: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/7/E546.full http://www.pnas.org/content/110/7/E546.full and a somewhat extended comment including figures here: http://stochtastic.blogspot.com/2013/02/temperature-extremes-variance-or-mean.html http://stochtastic.blogspot.com/2013/02/temperature-extremes... ) TL;DR: While regional normalization makes sense in a stationary climate, the presence of trends tends to exaggerate extremes by increasing the apparent variance of the distribution. Eyeballing the data from the NYT article, it appears that the authors have continued to make the same statistical mistakes. It is unfortunate that NYT would publish this, as the field (climate science) is quite aware of the problem with the original 2012 paper.
- guelo 9y agoLooking at your graph here[1] it looks like your correction affects the shape of the distribution but not the shifting median. Is that a correct reading? [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XN8uKkAKWbw/UJlrmG-yBfI/AAAAAAAADZw/Gwe3nkuEddU/s1600/comment.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XN8uKkAKWbw/UJlrmG-yBfI/AAAAAAAADZ...
- jrs235 9y agoHow much affect does AC have on increasing the outside air temperature? What and how much direct effect does the heat exchange have? What about the energy required to run the units?
- Top19 9y agoIn Cairo this is a very big issue. I have heard something like it raising the outside temperature by 15 degrees in the city proper. Those are likely going to be older air conditioners not following the latest standards though, and I don't know what the broader impact beyond Cairo is.
- humanrebar 9y agoI'm not a climatologist, but it's my understanding that pouring concrete and asphalt has a larger effect than A/C units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
- jsjohnst 9y agoDepends on where very dramatically. If the A/C units are venting to the outside, not likely to have a dramatic impact outside the immediate area of the coils. In the NYC subway system however, it apparently had a dramatic impact. From what I read (source not handy), before A/C came to trains the tunnels were relatively ok (<90°F), but since adding A/C to the trains, tunnels and platforms now hit way over 100° (L platform has been >115°) in the summer.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoEnergy can't be created or destroyed, only moved around. So the heat generated by an air conditioner can be calculated exactly by how much electrical power it consumes.
- jrs235 9y agoI get that. The amount of energy "created" by the AC is the amount that is consumed (electricity). However, AC is also a heat pump, displacing the heat in the air inside a structure to the outside of it. If you calculate all the inside AC air space in New York City and figure out that volume and the amount of the heat displaced, what local affect does it have on the air temperature on the sidewalk?
- frabbit 9y agohttp://www.realclimate.org/images//THE-EPA-A-TEAM.jpg http://www.realclimate.org/images//THE-EPA-A-TEAM.jpg
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cydonian_monk 9y agoAn overwhelming number of people I know are convinced all of this data has been falsified (usually by Democrats, but I hear all manner of wild conspiracies), and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. To them summers are not warmer, and anyone who remembers otherwise has a bad memory or isn't old enough to know better. Is there anything at all we can do to change the minds of such entrenched folks? Or do we just write them off and move on?
- jeremyt 9y agoBe transparent with the data. Stop making adjustments that are questionable and coincidentally result in increased warming. Stop blacklisting scientists who disagree with the consensus. Stop getting hacked and releasing emails showing people discussing how to "hide the decline". Stop gaming peer review by having the papers reviewed by a group of people who all agree. Stop making hyperbolic predictions about the future which are completely falsifiable and indeed end up to be false. Stop insisting that the models are completely accurate even though they have been completely inaccurate thus far. Stop accusing people who have questions about mitigation strategies as "climate deniers". That would be a good start.
- woodandsteel 9y agoThe commenter seems to be saying that if the clmate scientists did all those things he prescribes and the data showed the world is getting hotter, he would believe them. However, I think that is not at all what he really thinks. To start, he lays out a pattern of purposeful deception that it would make sense for the climate scientists to do only if they knew the data actually shows the world is not getting hotter. But how can the commenter know that unless he already knows that this is in fact the case? And on what basis could he know that if the true data is hidden? My best guess is the commenter is a fanatic believer in conservative economic theory, which assumes that nature must be such that it is possible for the free market to expand without limit without governmental regulation and in the process bring only good to the human race.
- graeme 9y agoFalsiable predictions are the right kind to make. An u falsiable hypothesis is not one you can test. Who has said models are completely accurate? They're just estimates. (They can be under-estimates as well) From what you say, it sounds like you don't think temperature is increasing. Is that correct?
- tmaly 9y agoI would like to point out that this summer is probably one of the coldest in a while. My flowers that are usually in full bloom from the hot summer, have yet to bloom. My friend in Finland said the summer there is one of the coldest in the last 50 years.
- melling 9y agoYes, the earth’s temperature has only risen something like 1C on average. All these anecdotal stories about the weather don’t help. Deniers who are experiencing cooler weather can simply point to that.
- Oletros 9y ago> Yes, the earth’s temperature has only risen something like 1C on average And in the Ice Age the earth's temperature was only 4C below the average. 1C in the global Earth temperatue is a lot of energy
- 0xFFC 9y agoI would like point out quite opposite. Here in iran the summer has been so far one of the warmest summers anyone ever remembers. Last year was too. This year is so far hotter than last year. I do live in very cold area in Iran. It is unbelievable how much weather has became warmer. Even i do remember when i was child , weather was noticeably colder. ( and I am in my 20's) . Let alone old peoples, who are literally ( all of them) in shock about how warm the weather became in last 5/10 years.
- microcolonel 9y agoBuy land in New Hampshire and Detroit.
- bolololo12 9y agofinally! Can't wait here in UK until it will finally get hotter, they keep saying about the climate change.. Always raining and cold here
- bolololo12 9y agofinally! Can't wait here in UK until it will finally get hotter, they keep saying about the climate change.. Always raining and cold here
- okreallywtf 9y agoA serious question for those who are generally skeptical about climate change: Why do you think that so many scientists, nations, and people are generally in agreement that climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity. Who do you think gains by pushing the (in your mind, false) climate change narrative? I honestly want to know, I'm not trying to belittle. Even ignoring the data (whichever way you interpret it), those of us who accept anthropomorphic climate change see a pretty clear case of "look who benefits" in terms of climate change. The vast majority of money and power is on the climate-change-is-fake side in America (if not worldwide). Huge, extremely powerful interests have a great deal at stake in whether or not we work to reduce carbon emissions and by how much. The switch from fossil fuels to renewable resources could lose some very powerful people a lot of money. On the climate-change-is-real side, its much harder to tell. Climate scientists don't have that much to gain, maybe a little research money here and there but nothing in comparison to say the oil and gas industries and those that use petroleum and petroleum derivatives. Renewables are an emerging industry. Batteries, solar panels, wind farms, tidal power etc all represent a financial opportunity to whoever gets out front. China is making large strides in this industry, but still its an industry in its infancy, it doesn't have nearly the political and financial clout that entrenched fossil-fuel industries do. Do you see why it might be confusing for some of us to see regular people essentially defending the powerful against the weak, as it were? I think that the overall of the research indicates that the earth is warming and we're the primary cause (in that we're the cause that it is increasing so rapidly, as opposed to at historic rates), I know there is some bad science as there always will be, but this situation just makes absolutely no sense from a logical perspective. It would be the most confusing conspiracy probably ever to have a worldwide, grassroots coordination to move to cleaner energy sources for bogus reasons and defeat the most entrenched and wealthy interests in probably all if history in the process. For what? If the reasons are bogus why do all these scientists care? Who benefits?
- benlorenzetti 9y agoI believe in climate change and I am proud of some of the successes of the EPA/other US policies have had in protecting the global commons (ozone, lead, NOx, etc). But following your point, ignoring this to focus on a "who gains" perspective... Trump used now-unsurprising hyperbole when he said that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese, but he was alluding to this point. China has over a billion citizens, a disproportionate number of young men, and quasi open economy + closed political system where who you know & schooling strongly affects your ability to succeed. Also, like the US and Russia, it has tremendous natural & mineral wealth available for traditional enterprises. In such a <em>political</em> climate, China has made it a national policy to out-compete America for traditional manufacturing jobs to keep all those people, particularly young men employed and rising. Cheap energy is a major manufacturing consideration and if you can get the American government to deficit spend money or regulate private industry on this, that fits China's national goals nicely. (Encouraging deficit spending by the US helps keep the Renminbi cheap relative to the dollar in our crazy fiat world) Russia has an even stronger incentive to encourage environmentalist policies by the US government because of its fossil fuel wealth and ambitions for the opening Arctic ocean without US competition there. Ironically, historically, betting against American ingenuity and worldwide technological advancement has been a mistake; some minimally invasive level of US government intervention is probably worth it for mitigating global warming and blunting oil-rich oligarchies. But it is also still in the interest of current Chinese/Russian/Iranian/Venezuelan leaders at this time. Finally this can be viewed two ways in US politics. On the one hand, environmental protectionism logically hurts the working class in America, to some difficult-to-quantify extent in the immediate term/recent past. On the other hand, America is a world leader. We may have some moral imperative, plus gains in technology financed in America lift all boats, including ours which is the largest and finest. (may have to reevaluate the phrase "lift all boats")
- okreallywtf 9y agoSince the comments have become a general discussion of climate change, I decided to look up polls to see what public perception are. Fears of climate change seem to more or less track temperatures. http://www.gallup.com/poll/206030/global-warming-concern-three-decade-high.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/206030/global-warming-concern-thr...