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Using events like this to illustrate that global warming is happening is about as scientifically significant as when Trump used the recent US cold snap to imply

• discoursism 9y ago
  I don't know global warming is happening because of this news article. This news article worries me because I know global warming is happening.
  • vixen99 9y ago
    How does the 'I know' bit advance the discussion?
    • aaomidi 9y ago
      The discussion isn't about whether we know it's happening or not. We should stop letting deniers move the goal posts. The discussion is we know this is happening, what do we do to stop it?
    • skywhopper 9y ago
      At some point, it's silly to expect every comment to make a full and comprehensive argument. Like how I can worry about something falling from the sky because "I know" gravity exists. So when I see something straight above your head growing larger coming straight towards you as it falls, I know it will not change course, and I don't feel the need to explain general relativity to you before I suggest you ought to get out of the way.
    • discoursism 9y ago
      I don't understand what you mean by "advance the discussion."
• GuiA 9y ago
  Isolated abnormal events aren't significant to illustrate global warming is happening, but an increasing frequency of abnormal events is.
  • briga 9y ago
    Granted, but I can just picture the people posting this to Facebook citing it as definitive proof that the world is melting.
    • tachyoff 9y ago
      There’s definitely a fine line, but let’s be real, Facebook was never really about fine lines and nuance.
    • IntronExon 9y ago
      If your standard is worrying about what people will post on FB then paralysis is your only option.
      • briga 9y ago
        What? Facebook shapes public opinion, so does this site. Is public opinion not worth worrying about?
        • IntronExon 9y ago
          A huge majority of public opinion as expressed on FB is just the echo of some bot, somewhere. Maybe it matters in some sense, but again, if you pander to thst standard you will never say a word.
    • baddox 9y ago
      The fact that it is easy to imagine someone misusing a piece of data is hardly worth mentioning. There is no conceivable piece of data which couldn’t easily be misused by someone.
  • Applejinx 9y ago
• mrow84 9y ago
  The scientific significance of these two events (Arctic warming and the recent US cold snap) is not comparable. If you would like more information, you can start by referring to the wikipedia article on climate change in the Arctic [0], and the skeptical science page on why cold weather isn't evidence against global warming [1]. There are numerous other publications available online which discuss these issues that I'm sure you will be able to find. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Arctic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Arctic [1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather.htm https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather...
• jacquesm 9y ago
  When Trump uses the expected weather for the time of year to illustrate nothing is happening it is not exceptional so does not prove a thing. But if something exceptional happens it is a data point in a data set indicating there is a change. Hot weather in July in the Northern hemisphere is not unusual and does not require explanation or study. Snow in July would be unusual and would require explanation and study.
• brentm 9y ago
  At this point believing or not believing in climate change is analogous to religion. I have trouble believing any facts or data would swing a significant portion of either side of the debate. Denying climate change is easy. We're not going to see places like New York City move swiftly underwater and the problem is so abstract it's easy to call BS. Short of Trump changing his mind and using his super power of convincing conservatives to go along with things they otherwise never would have gone along with we will continue in this pattern for probably our life time.
  • zipwitch 9y ago
    Climate change denialism has more in common with Flat Earth Theory than religion of any stripe. (Which makes so many Americans buying into it all the more frighting.)
    • bleachedsleet 9y ago
      ...and flat earth theory also has a lot in common with religion. I'm sorry, but it is impossible to be a truly intelligent person that also believes in any religion without serious cherry picking or psychological compartmentalization. I say this as someone that loves studying religion (I have a degree in it), but I study it as an artform of human expression or an oddity that once was, not as a serious pursuit of self-completion. Hopefully, we can one day study those that deny basic climate science and geology the same way...
      • discoursism 9y ago
        > ...and flat earth theory also has a lot in common with religion. I wouldn't say so. At least not in the epistemic/anti-epistemic way that parallels climate-change denialism. Most religions make a lot of unfalsifiable claims. Since opponents cannot conclusively falsify those claims, it gives religious adherents an epistemic place to hide and claim personal religious experiences, etc. Most religions have not, in the main, been conclusively refuted, since they involve events that happened thousands of years ago, and even when something is shown to have not happened, the adherents have good precedent for claiming that a given portion is allegorical. Since religious interpretation is rife with different viewpoints, they'll even have a respected theologian to point to who called it in advance. Flat-eartherism is a horse of a different color. It makes a bunch of falsifiable predictions, which have subsequently been falsified many different ways. Then its proponents just ignore the evidence and keep on believing their viewpoint anyway. Epistemologically, climate change denial has a lot more in common with this than it does with religion. I say this as an anti-theist. I don't have much good to say about religion, but I'd rather deal with someone who believes things which can't be proven rather than someone who believes things that have been conclusively disproven. Religious people are in that way a lot like anyone else. They aren't as deluded as someone who can look at clear evidence and simply ignore it.
• lisper 9y ago
  Even single data points can be statistically significant if they are extreme enough. But here is a fact that often gets ignored: the Northwest Passage, which was famously impassable for centuries, now regularly has civilian cruise ships navigating it in the summer. I was on such a cruise a few years ago. Not only was the NWP navigable, we actually had to go out of our way to find any sea ice at all.
• bromuro 9y ago
  We are talking about average values with an high degree of deviation - so it is normal the values to be out of the average (“normality” never happens in meteorology). The problem is how much and how often this happens: global warning is very likely to be caused by human activity. Future looks ugly, everybody is (maybe unconsciously) afraid and at fault. And instead of looking for a solution I use my brain 40 hours/week to solve useless problems. Those who have also money send cars in the space. What could go wrong.
  • analogic 9y ago
    Solution easy, just get all countries in the world to agree to stop burning fossil fuels now whatever the cost. Then just have to tell all the poor people in [poor country] that they can't live like we do because we got there first and messed it all up. We're all sure gonna be kicking ourselves after it all goes Mad Max. Completely avoidable, yet all but inevitable with no off-switch in sight in the real world.
    • KozmoNau7 9y ago
      We can barely even get people to sort their trash or turn off the lights when they leave a room. So yeah, we're doomed.
  • Applejinx 9y ago
    It's all about chaos theory. The degree of deviation is directly relative to the amount of energy in the system. Cool the system off, and the deviation (weather) will cover a smaller range. Add energy to the system, as we are doing, and what you EXPECT to see is a titanic chaotic system behaving as chaotic systems do: becoming more chaotic, and widening its range of possible outcomes (and most likely, shortening their duration, because everything becomes more unstable). Insane heat waves AND insane cold snaps is very much part of 'global warming', or the consistent moderate increase in energy we're doing. Thousand and ten-thousand-year storms and extremes become yearly or monthly events as the range of the system's outputs has changed. Expect other cold snaps… and ridiculous, dangerous heat waves… and other sorts of dangerous and destructive weather events.
• joshuahedlund 9y ago
  They're different by orders of magnitude. This spike is occurring in context of record low winter ice following a record low the previous winter following decades of a declining average. Yeah, the 25 number is a spike on the edge of the bell curve, but this bell curve is consistently shifting, and thus so are these spikes.
  • nashashmi 9y ago
    That's OP's point. It is only a spike, not an event that points to climate change. A climate change event example would be an average yearly temperature changing significantly.
    • ianai 9y ago
      As a lay person, I think the poles are much more symbolic of the total state of the weather/water system in the micro level than anywhere else on earth. An observation with several sigmas of difference from average at the poles probably translates to very widespread conditions.
• noiv 9y ago
  > bell curve The thing is the curve is moving towards higher temperatures and we get unexpected deviations more on one end than the other. And have you considered these events may be not significant - yet, because the science department is hopelessly understaffed?
• graeme 9y ago
  This comment shows up on every thread on this topic. Have a look at this data another user posted: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php The last three years have been highly above average in the arctic. This isn't "arctic has one warm day!". It's "the entire year is abnormally warm in the arctic, like the past three!" The appropriate comparison would be the US having a whole winter which is 10-20 degrees colder than normal.
• mikeash 9y ago
  This is a false equivalence. The reasons they’re being linked are important too. When Trump and others point to cold snaps as evidence against climate change, they’re just drawing a straight line from one to the other with no rationale or explanation in between. When extreme events like this are linked to climate change, they’re presented as illustrative of a well studied phenomenon that definitely causes this sort of thing to happen. It’s like if I take the Lord’s name in vain and then get sick and you tell me this shows that I shouldn’t swear. Then you lick a handle on the subway and get sick and I tell you this shows how disease is transmitted by germs. The two may look superficially similar, but the underlying reasoning is important.
  • notdonspaulding 9y ago
    I don't think the main thrust of your argument is wrong, however, your sickness example is also a false equivalence. There's nothing logically or philosophically or scientifically preventing both explanations for why we each got sick from being simultaneously true. You're attempting to draw a dividing line between "religious thinking" and "rational, scientific thinking". No such division existed throughout history. Even today many "scientists" think along religious terms while many religions are evidence-obsessed. Counter-examples abound.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      It’s not about one explanation being logically impossible. It’s about one explanation being factually untrue.
• nareiber 9y ago
  I think this is meant just to be a 'cherry on top' type of data point, as it's almost universally understood that our climate is indeed changing.
• sinh 9y ago
  There is a qualitative difference which makes it beyond improbable that the changes we observe happen by chance. Let's say your assumption is that the things we observe happen by chance. Now, we have, say 100 years of temperature records. If only the last year just happens to be the warmest year of all observations, there would be an 1:100 probability that this was by chance. Now, Wikipedia says: "A 2013 article published in Geophysical Research Letters has shown that temperatures in the region haven't been as high as they currently are since at least 44,000 years ago and perhaps as long as 120,000 years ago. The authors conclude that "anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth."[12][13]" So it is way more than one warm year in 100 years. But to comprehend the unlikelihood that this happens by chance, consider another record. Look at this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg/480px-Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Gl... It shows that the instrumental temperature record sind 1880 to today. You see that since 1980, every year was warmer than all the years before. What is the probability of that for the hypothesis this happened by chance? From 1880 to 2017 are 137 years. The last 37 years have higher temperatures than all the years before. Assuming that no systematic change is happening, the probability is the same as putting the numbers from 1 to 137 into a box, drawing blindly 37 from them, and discovering that you have drawn the numbers 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, and so on, until 137. What is the probability of this? It is given by the binominal coefficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination with n = 137, k=37, 1 : n! / (k! (n - k)!). Using Python: >>> def fak(n): ... if n <= 1: ... return 1 ... return n * fak(n-1) >>>def binom(n,k): ... return fak(n) / (fak(k) * fak(n-k)) >>> n=137 >>> k=37 >>> binom(n,k) 3902541575254646835963436276286280L So, the probability it happens by chance is 1 / 3902541575254646835963436276286280 Do you still think it happens by chance?
  • posterboy 9y ago
    I think OP was implying that your kind of reasoning is desperately needed, not just isolated evidence (although, I didn't read the article yet). Alas, your comment is preaching to the choir, not the audience OP might have had in mind. Although, the article is on an academic site -- so much for the audience. xkcd had a nice illustration: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/