7 ms·

March Temperatures in Alaska: 20 Degrees Hotter Than Usual

89 points by ciconia 8y ago

cagenut 8y ago
my general read at this point is that the ipcc numbers have been dead on, the "pause" was ocean warming, and now the pause is over, so things are gonna escalate quickly. like popcorn in a microwave (over the next few decades).
bb2018 8y ago
Does anyone have good information for how rare this actually is? To me - as someone who believes in global warming but believes the media does a disservice exaggerating its effects - this seems like a misleading article. How many times during a 365 day period does the temperature read 20 degrees above (or below) the average? How many times does this happen per day, per weekly average, per month? As someone who grew up in New England it doesn't seem like it would be that rare. There were weeks in July where it was over 95 when the historical average was probably 75 and weeks in February when the average was 10 even if the historical average was 32. What is the standard deviation for temperature in certain areas and how rare is it to see 20 degrees variation if you are looking at multiple windows of time that vary in length? Sure, global warming did not cause it to be 20 degrees higher than usual? If anything it would be +3 degrees global warming +17 degrees random variation? Why run with 20 in the title if there is no way that global warming would be responsible for the random variation.
- spectramax 8y ago
  I think we need to stop saying “As someone who believes in Global Warming”. It is as ridiculous as saying “As someone who believes in theory of gravitation”. It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. Same thing with debates about whether earth is flat or earth is 6000 years old. The fact that these debates take place gives undue credibility to the non-scientific opposition and elevates to the same stage as the scientific views.
  - ebg13 8y ago
    > It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. This is a pretty odd take. Believing anything is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.
    - spectramax 8y ago
      That’s my point. Believing in anything is optional - except for hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally to a “believable” level relative to the other side which is presenting anecdotal evidence. Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That’s besides the point.
      - ebg13 8y ago
        > Believing in anything is optional - except... Except nothing. > hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.
        spectramax 8y ago
        Fair, you are absolutely correct. Science is in building models about how nature works. Mathematics is in the business of proving, I guess. I think we are engaging in unproductive pedantry while going away from my original point. I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.
- cagenut 8y ago
  this criticism, while accurate, is just utterly pointless sophistry. yes news articles are not infographic packed reports, nor are they academic research papers. your overdeveloped contrarian reflex is an impedance mis-match here. it is well past time to make a conscious decision of which side of the 'debate' you choose to lend your voice to. regardless of what caveats you may put up front.
  - ebg13 8y ago
    > this criticism, while accurate, is... Forgive me, but doesn't your response boil down to "this criticism is accurate" and then, accuracy be damned, railing against it? If the answer is "it's really fucking rare", then that's exactly what the OP is asking for. If the answer isn't that, well...
- behringer 8y ago
  The 3 degree rise is an average, not a total. Also, I suspect warming is way under estimated right at this moment. I would be completely unsurprised if we lose the polar ice caps in just a couple of decades.
RickJWagner 8y ago
I'm all for reading science data, but an article like this makes me wonder about Buffalo, NY. Or Chicago, or Minneapolis. Why pick Alaska to report on?
- ip26 8y ago
  Alaska, along with the rest of the far north, is seeing both the largest shifts as well as the most obvious shifts. Waving my hands a bit, a twenty degree difference in Arizona means it's hotter; a twenty degree difference in Alaska means melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, and widespread brood failures for migratory bird populations.
  - bretpiatt 8y ago
    A 20° increase in Arizona (picking Yuma where my father grew up) would mean much worse. The record high is 124° from 1995[1], at 144° and 5-10 minutes of exposure we'd see death[2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate [2] https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human-survival.html https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human-survival.html
    - miemo 8y ago
      we talking about averages here, not maximums
      - bretpiatt 8y ago
        Unclear to me why average temps would move up and at the same time the variance in the range of temps would shrink? If the average goes up 20° why should we expect the potential maximum temperature to go up less than 20°?
japhyr 8y ago
I live in southeast Alaska, and anyone who's been in Alaska for a while starts to know people from around the state. We don't always talk about climate change as a global phenomenon, but people are always talking about the specific changes they're seeing and experiencing. Southeast Alaska is a temperate rainforest. When I moved here in 2002, I spent my first years relishing the short periods of clear skies we had. I'd plan longer hikes for those days, and squeeze in a few of those hikes each year when the weather cleared. I liked going hard outdoors when it was clear, and then enjoying some inside time when it was gray and gloomy. It was a perfect place for a programmer, because you play hard for a while when it's nice and then spend longer periods working indoors while it rains. I like the rain too, but it was nice to plan some bigger hikes for dry spells. Now I make myself do indoor work when it's nice out, because we have regular month-long dry spells. It's not just me; many people talk about how they've adjusted their lifestyle away from a focus on rain. We all still talk as if the rain keeps us inside, but it's less of an impact every year. Around the state it's the same story, local changes have a wide range of direct impacts on the everyday lives of residents here. Three miners in Nome got stranded on an ice floe because the ice broke up in March for the first time in at least 120 years. [0] If you're curious to hear about Alaska weather on a regular basis, Brian Brettschneider is an Alaskan climatologist who regularly provides informative commentary on long-term patterns and recent changes. [1] [0] - http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued-drifting-sea-ice http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued-drif... [1] - https://twitter.com/Climatologist49 https://twitter.com/Climatologist49
- grecy 8y ago
  I live in Whitehorse, Yukon. Tons of locals talk about how they used to drive onto the River in Whitehorse for the annual Rendezvous festival in February - park cars on there, put up tents, have a huge party ON the river for a week. It hasn't frozen over solid even once in 10+ years.
BurningFrog 8y ago
PSA: It's only 11° Celsius
- phpnode 8y ago
  only? 11°C is huge!
  - war1025 8y ago
    But if your default temperature unit is C, then 20C seems like a heck of a lot more than 11C.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    But less than 20.
cconroy 8y ago
Does anyone know of the implications of a year-round ice-free artic? Is the artic salvageable at this point? It seems evident that soon the artic will have a short period of being ice-free, kickstarting an inexorable process with yet longer periods of being ice-free. It is safe to assume at this point climate change is like an asteroid on a trajectory of near term collision with Earth. I'd rather be wrong and alive then right and extinct on this one. But thats me.
- Asooka 8y ago
  Scientists were saying that if something wasn't done in the late 80s climate change would be irreversible and catastrophic. The people in charge couldn't be arsed and here we are. You can bet that when my generation sits down to write the history books they won't be kind to our elders.
  - techdreamer 8y ago
    Citations at all...In the late 80s the biggest worry was the Ozone Hole and nuclear winter. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Not to worry, Gen Zed is reaching late teens and early 20s now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
11235813213455 8y ago
Those news are great, but do people actually change their lifestyle? do governments change too? The solution is to stop being over-consumerists, limit births of course, and to have more permacultures to bring back more life, better recycling, plant trees... We are spending so much energy and resources analysing a black-hole (which is fantastic for Science, but our ship is sinking), entertainment sports... Every individual can and should change. Personally I did, I'm living with a really low environmental fingerprint compared to the average here in Western Europe, I eat mostly region-scale local vegetables, fruits, rice.., ride a bike, and buy the strict necessary
skosch 8y ago
Carbon pricing, carbon pricing, carbon pricing. It's the one thing virtually all economists agree on as the most efficient way to catalyze large-scale change (although we'll still need regulation and sequestration as well). Politically, the most realistic way to get this done without a huge public backlash is via a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. There's a bill before congress right now [0]. Canada implemented a variation on this at a federal level recently. One of the most active groups supporting this kind of legislation is Citizens' Climate Lobby – if you care about this issue, please consider joining. [0] Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116th.pdf https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116...
- oceanplexian 8y ago
  If China subscribed to such a system and agreed to operate on a level playing field, then I might give more credence to it. However they aren't, and they won't. No amount of sequestration in the United States or Canada will have a meaningful impact on world pollution unless the world's largest polluter is held accountable. Anything less than that is counter-productive, putting us economically at a disadvantage to a country, and a communist regime, that would like nothing more than to chip away at US hegemony in the world.
  - skosch 8y ago
    China already has the largest carbon trading market in the world [0]. Perhaps it's not aggressive enough, but they're significantly more ambitious than the US, and their population isn't nearly as wealthy to begin with, so it'll hurt them more. Either way, we can chose to invest now, or pay the price for this silly game of chicken later. Besides – how do you suggest we get China and India to cut emissions without doing the same, if not more, at home? Perhaps Border Adjustments [1] can alleviate some of your fears; they would protect domestic industry. All of this has already been worked out to stupendous levels of detail by legal scholars and Nobel-prize winning economists [2] – your armchair criticism just shows that you're decades behind the policy wonks. Leave it to them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_trading_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin... [1] https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/ https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science-nobel-prize.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science...
Proven 8y ago
> The heat is an extreme example of the general climate-change trend in the state No it's not. It's an example of a whether phenomenon.

89 points by ciconia 8y ago

my general read at this point is that the ipcc numbers have been dead on, the "pause" was ocean warming, and now the pause is over, so things are gonna escalate quickly. like popcorn in a microwave (over the next few decades).

bb2018 8y ago

Does anyone have good information for how rare this actually is? To me - as someone who believes in global warming but believes the media does a disservice exaggerating its effects - this seems like a misleading article. How many times during a 365 day period does the temperature read 20 degrees above (or below) the average? How many times does this happen per day, per weekly average, per month? As someone who grew up in New England it doesn't seem like it would be that rare. There were weeks in July where it was over 95 when the historical average was probably 75 and weeks in February when the average was 10 even if the historical average was 32. What is the standard deviation for temperature in certain areas and how rare is it to see 20 degrees variation if you are looking at multiple windows of time that vary in length? Sure, global warming did not cause it to be 20 degrees higher than usual? If anything it would be +3 degrees global warming +17 degrees random variation? Why run with 20 in the title if there is no way that global warming would be responsible for the random variation.

spectramax 8y ago
I think we need to stop saying “As someone who believes in Global Warming”. It is as ridiculous as saying “As someone who believes in theory of gravitation”. It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. Same thing with debates about whether earth is flat or earth is 6000 years old. The fact that these debates take place gives undue credibility to the non-scientific opposition and elevates to the same stage as the scientific views.
- ebg13 8y ago
  > It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. This is a pretty odd take. Believing anything is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.
  - spectramax 8y ago
    That’s my point. Believing in anything is optional - except for hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally to a “believable” level relative to the other side which is presenting anecdotal evidence. Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That’s besides the point.
    - ebg13 8y ago
      > Believing in anything is optional - except... Except nothing. > hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.
      - spectramax 8y ago
        Fair, you are absolutely correct. Science is in building models about how nature works. Mathematics is in the business of proving, I guess. I think we are engaging in unproductive pedantry while going away from my original point. I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.
cagenut 8y ago
this criticism, while accurate, is just utterly pointless sophistry. yes news articles are not infographic packed reports, nor are they academic research papers. your overdeveloped contrarian reflex is an impedance mis-match here. it is well past time to make a conscious decision of which side of the 'debate' you choose to lend your voice to. regardless of what caveats you may put up front.
- ebg13 8y ago
  > this criticism, while accurate, is... Forgive me, but doesn't your response boil down to "this criticism is accurate" and then, accuracy be damned, railing against it? If the answer is "it's really fucking rare", then that's exactly what the OP is asking for. If the answer isn't that, well...
behringer 8y ago
The 3 degree rise is an average, not a total. Also, I suspect warming is way under estimated right at this moment. I would be completely unsurprised if we lose the polar ice caps in just a couple of decades.

RickJWagner 8y ago

I'm all for reading science data, but an article like this makes me wonder about Buffalo, NY. Or Chicago, or Minneapolis. Why pick Alaska to report on?

ip26 8y ago
Alaska, along with the rest of the far north, is seeing both the largest shifts as well as the most obvious shifts. Waving my hands a bit, a twenty degree difference in Arizona means it's hotter; a twenty degree difference in Alaska means melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, and widespread brood failures for migratory bird populations.
- bretpiatt 8y ago
  A 20° increase in Arizona (picking Yuma where my father grew up) would mean much worse. The record high is 124° from 1995[1], at 144° and 5-10 minutes of exposure we'd see death[2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma,_Arizona#Climate [2] https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human-survival.html https://www.livescience.com/34128-limits-human-survival.html
  - miemo 8y ago
    we talking about averages here, not maximums
    - bretpiatt 8y ago
      Unclear to me why average temps would move up and at the same time the variance in the range of temps would shrink? If the average goes up 20° why should we expect the potential maximum temperature to go up less than 20°?

japhyr 8y ago

I live in southeast Alaska, and anyone who's been in Alaska for a while starts to know people from around the state. We don't always talk about climate change as a global phenomenon, but people are always talking about the specific changes they're seeing and experiencing. Southeast Alaska is a temperate rainforest. When I moved here in 2002, I spent my first years relishing the short periods of clear skies we had. I'd plan longer hikes for those days, and squeeze in a few of those hikes each year when the weather cleared. I liked going hard outdoors when it was clear, and then enjoying some inside time when it was gray and gloomy. It was a perfect place for a programmer, because you play hard for a while when it's nice and then spend longer periods working indoors while it rains. I like the rain too, but it was nice to plan some bigger hikes for dry spells. Now I make myself do indoor work when it's nice out, because we have regular month-long dry spells. It's not just me; many people talk about how they've adjusted their lifestyle away from a focus on rain. We all still talk as if the rain keeps us inside, but it's less of an impact every year. Around the state it's the same story, local changes have a wide range of direct impacts on the everyday lives of residents here. Three miners in Nome got stranded on an ice floe because the ice broke up in March for the first time in at least 120 years. [0] If you're curious to hear about Alaska weather on a regular basis, Brian Brettschneider is an Alaskan climatologist who regularly provides informative commentary on long-term patterns and recent changes. [1] [0] - http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued-drifting-sea-ice http://www.nomenugget.com/news/nome-gold-miners-rescued-drif... [1] - https://twitter.com/Climatologist49 https://twitter.com/Climatologist49

grecy 8y ago
I live in Whitehorse, Yukon. Tons of locals talk about how they used to drive onto the River in Whitehorse for the annual Rendezvous festival in February - park cars on there, put up tents, have a huge party ON the river for a week. It hasn't frozen over solid even once in 10+ years.

BurningFrog 8y ago

PSA: It's only 11° Celsius

phpnode 8y ago
only? 11°C is huge!
- war1025 8y ago
  But if your default temperature unit is C, then 20C seems like a heck of a lot more than 11C.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  But less than 20.

cconroy 8y ago

Does anyone know of the implications of a year-round ice-free artic? Is the artic salvageable at this point? It seems evident that soon the artic will have a short period of being ice-free, kickstarting an inexorable process with yet longer periods of being ice-free. It is safe to assume at this point climate change is like an asteroid on a trajectory of near term collision with Earth. I'd rather be wrong and alive then right and extinct on this one. But thats me.

Asooka 8y ago
Scientists were saying that if something wasn't done in the late 80s climate change would be irreversible and catastrophic. The people in charge couldn't be arsed and here we are. You can bet that when my generation sits down to write the history books they won't be kind to our elders.
- techdreamer 8y ago
  Citations at all...In the late 80s the biggest worry was the Ozone Hole and nuclear winter. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Not to worry, Gen Zed is reaching late teens and early 20s now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

11235813213455 8y ago

Those news are great, but do people actually change their lifestyle? do governments change too? The solution is to stop being over-consumerists, limit births of course, and to have more permacultures to bring back more life, better recycling, plant trees... We are spending so much energy and resources analysing a black-hole (which is fantastic for Science, but our ship is sinking), entertainment sports... Every individual can and should change. Personally I did, I'm living with a really low environmental fingerprint compared to the average here in Western Europe, I eat mostly region-scale local vegetables, fruits, rice.., ride a bike, and buy the strict necessary

skosch 8y ago

Carbon pricing, carbon pricing, carbon pricing. It's the one thing virtually all economists agree on as the most efficient way to catalyze large-scale change (although we'll still need regulation and sequestration as well). Politically, the most realistic way to get this done without a huge public backlash is via a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. There's a bill before congress right now [0]. Canada implemented a variation on this at a federal level recently. One of the most active groups supporting this kind of legislation is Citizens' Climate Lobby – if you care about this issue, please consider joining. [0] Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116th.pdf https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116...

oceanplexian 8y ago
If China subscribed to such a system and agreed to operate on a level playing field, then I might give more credence to it. However they aren't, and they won't. No amount of sequestration in the United States or Canada will have a meaningful impact on world pollution unless the world's largest polluter is held accountable. Anything less than that is counter-productive, putting us economically at a disadvantage to a country, and a communist regime, that would like nothing more than to chip away at US hegemony in the world.
- skosch 8y ago
  China already has the largest carbon trading market in the world [0]. Perhaps it's not aggressive enough, but they're significantly more ambitious than the US, and their population isn't nearly as wealthy to begin with, so it'll hurt them more. Either way, we can chose to invest now, or pay the price for this silly game of chicken later. Besides – how do you suggest we get China and India to cut emissions without doing the same, if not more, at home? Perhaps Border Adjustments [1] can alleviate some of your fears; they would protect domestic industry. All of this has already been worked out to stupendous levels of detail by legal scholars and Nobel-prize winning economists [2] – your armchair criticism just shows that you're decades behind the policy wonks. Leave it to them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_trading_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin... [1] https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/ https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science-nobel-prize.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science...

Proven 8y ago

> The heat is an extreme example of the general climate-change trend in the state No it's not. It's an example of a whether phenomenon.