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Average Global Temperatures since 1850
- helenakyso 7y agoThe increasing of the global temperature is really dangerous and humanity seems to do nothing. It is like a human body if its temperature changes a few Celsius degree from its normal temperature, it is the fever. If the person has a fever and it increases a few degrees, it might mean the death of the person. We are killing The Planet, it is a Climate Crisis.
- PhilWright 7y agoIt is obviously not the case that 'humanity seems to do nothing'. The United Nations have the IPCC working on the issue and their reports influence national policy in many countries. There are the Kyoto and Paris agreements that are based on the details from the IPCC reports. Is the world doing enough? No, I don't think countries are doing enough, but to say humanity seems to do nothing is patently ridiculous.
- adrianN 7y agoEmissions are still rising when they should be falling since the Rio summit in 1992. You know, back when we still had a chance of saving the coral reefs and the penguins. Right now it looks like we started triggering the melting of the permafrost, which, once it gets going, will make all efforts we can make totally nil. Whatever humanity is doing, it's got little to do with preventing the climate catastrophe. Remember that the total amount of GHG emissions in the atmosphere is what counts. We're not even getting the second derivative to go in the right direction.
- wrong_variable 7y agoThe problem is that is too little too late. If I get sick, I cant just solve my problem with some ibuprofen. Solving climate change requires a major overhaul in culture, lifestyle, expectation, technology and politics. We did it before, mostly in War situations, I do not understand why this is different.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoPeople on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. I agree with you though. I don’t think we’re willing to do what is necessary to avoid serious catastrophe. We’ve done a good job demonstrating that for 50+ years so far.
- roenxi 7y ago> People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem. 1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally. 2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear activist would have to admit that the risks from nuclear power are localised and that the raw volume of pollution rounds to 0 compared to what we do now. It would take a couple of breakthroughs in battery technology to solve the transport problem and the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.
- BigJono 7y agoYou'd be surprised how much anti-nuclear activists would disagree with your second point. I'm sure I know a couple that would rather watch the world burn than vote for someone that will build a single reactor. I think once an issue like that becomes a left/right black/white thing all logic just goes straight out the window. You can't even say the word nuclear without hearing a cacophony of statements about the price of nuclear vs renewables, as if those claims don't need any actual numbers to go along with them.
- Ygg2 7y agoWhen you break it down, for California (a relatively sunny place) it would take more than $3.63 trillion dollars to be 100% renewable. [1]https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY?t=709 https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY?t=709
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoThe Paris agreement was known since the beginning to be insufficient to meet their own targets. And I believe the US has pulled out of that? We’re seriously behind where we need to be. So yes we’re not doing literally nothing, but perhaps we’re doing nothing that would actually stop climate change from causing catastrophic damage to earth.
- ptah 7y agoall of those things are pure talk, no action
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoI don't think any nation, not one, will meet Paris commitments. Paris was broadly thought to be far from enough at the time it was signed, and science has moved on markedly since then. IPCC reports are the most optimistic interpretation as necessarily they take a most conservative view on every study. IPCC are all government appointed after all. G20 fossil subsidies just went up, again. Why does fossil need any subsidy, anywhere in the world, given how much profit has come from fossil fuel for a century or two? That seems pretty near to nothing to me. Let's say "nothing substantive" then.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoLooks like one nation is on course to meet Paris. Morocco, who emit 0.17% of the world's CO2. https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/morocco/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/morocco/
- ForHackernews 7y agoWe are doing nothing: https://climateactiontracker.org/ https://climateactiontracker.org/ National responses range from "critically insufficient" all the way to merely "insufficient". You are tragically misinformed if you think some responsible people somewhere are taking action.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoShame that site treats all the EU as one bloc - individual countries within the EU diverge quite a bit.
- southern_cross 7y agoOn a millennium scale level an increase in global temperatures has been occurring for about 15,000 years (give or take), since the start of the last interglacial. On a century scale level temperatures have been increasing for about 150 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age. On a decadal level temperatures have been increasing since the great "Global Cooling" scare of the 1970s. So it should be no surprise, then, that right now temps may be a bit on the warm side, comparatively speaking. This situation might be quite inconvenient for us, though.
- lubonay 7y agoI think humans are generally bad at prevention of and good at reaction to catastrophes. The next 50 years are going to be interesting... let's hope we leave the world in a manageable state for future generations.
- pimmen 7y agoYes, pretty much. And the investments we make into long term stability are more fragile than we think, because our will to maintain it is unreliable. Whether it's an independent judicial system, freeways, water reservoirs for drought, public housing projects, bank capital, political alliances or whatever our underestimation of how much trouble we were in before the systems were in place or the desire to appease voters by "saving" their tax money compels us to rather quickly neglect and tear down what was deemed an absolute necessity in times of crisis. It's the same thing with the planet, I'm afraid. We just don't understand how important a stable climate is for the stability of our civilization and thus we don't really have the will to maintain it. Once the crisis has developed into something that's completely unsustainable for the ones with influence and power a reaction will come. I've had multiple talks with managers about the need to invest time and resources in our tech infrastructure after long periods of user and feature growth, only to be turned down because it's not as important as more features. Once a nasty situation rolls around time and resources to make sure this never happens again magically pops up.
- baxtr 7y agoYes indeed, it feels like we behave like bacteria in a Petri dish...
- helenakyso 7y agoclimate migration is going to be a part of it
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoNot sure anything will change. We are frogs in water over a flame it seems.
- 7y ago
- helenakyso 7y agoAny ideas of What, WE, the individuals can do to make politician and countries change?
- disordinary 7y agoJust a ground swell at the local level, cities all around the world are calling climate emergencies including all the main cities in New Zealand. The NZ government will have to follow suit. Bigger cities are following too including New York and Sydney today.
- helenakyso 7y agoBut I think that by the time the government start making changes, it will be too late, as it is too late now. Like humanity must have a dramatic change - from top to bottom. The system is against the world We live in a finite world consuming like it is infinite Every action counts, but it will be hard and it must be super reinforced by law
- disordinary 7y agoWell, depending on where you are you can also vote for the local green party. If you're in a proportional election system then that the bigger the green voting block is the better. If you're in a country with a first-past-the-post electoral system like the US, UK, or Australia then things are much tougher and you should also be campaigning for electoral reform to make your country more democratic.
- arethuza 7y agoThe UK had a referendum on introducing a different voting system and there was no change as the general view seemed to be that "first past the post" gave strong governments.
- disordinary 7y agoYeah, I wouldn't call the current British government strong but I would call the past six NZ governments strong. Each of those governments have been made up of at least three parties working together. The Australian electoral system is first past the post too and is similarly as chaotic as the UK.
- tomohawk 7y agoOnly going back to 1850 is exactly the kind of thing someone would do if they wanted to cherry pick their data to suit a case. You have to go back much further. It is known that at that time we were coming out of a period of much cooler temperatures. See for example the year without a summer (1816). There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now. For example, during the Viking expansion, and during the Roman expansion. Then things cooled off - for example the Viking and Roman contraction. If you go to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, you can see the remains of the only known Viking settlement in the new world. The buildings were made with logs from trees that do not exist there today because it is cooler now and does not support the tree growth required.
- reallydontask 7y agoTo be fair, the longer one goes back in time the less data there is and I would hazard a guess that prior to 1600 there is no direct data at all.
- tomohawk 7y agoWe do have history though Check out the Roman Climatic Optimum, for example.
- reallydontask 7y agoThe point I was trying to make is that history is not direct data and thus not anywhere near as reliable. This is not to say that direct data from 2 centuries back is necessarily reliable but it's a step in the right direction
- cygx 7y agohttps://static.skepticalscience.com/images/Temperature_Pattern_MWP.gif https://static.skepticalscience.com/images/Temperature_Patte... vs https://static.skepticalscience.com/images/Temp_Pattern_1999_2008_NOAA.jpg https://static.skepticalscience.com/images/Temp_Pattern_1999... source: https://skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm https://skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm
- southern_cross 7y ago"The data are a mix of the CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature dataset and the HadSST3 sea-surface temperature (SST) dataset. The HadCRUT4 data are neither interpolated nor variance adjusted." This is your typical half-truth (lie of omission). Even if the HadCRUT4 folks themselves don't make these kinds of adjustments, the folks who provide the data sets which HadCRUT4 is based on most certainly do.
- serpix 7y agoso are you implying someone is methodically rigging up the data to show an anomaly for shits and giggles?
- southern_cross 7y agoThat's exactly what they've been doing! Or, perhaps more correctly, they've let their "algorithms" run amok without doing any quality control on the final results, thereby turning modest warming into "scary" warming. Whether this was intentional or not is debatable (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor), but it certainly looked that way to me at the time. About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorrect statements about local heat levels made by the folks at NOAA or wherever, and then repeated (but very quickly retracted) by our own local weather folk, I went to the trouble of doing a bit of a deep dive on the HadCrut3 data sets. And what I found there was appalling. Other folks did more comprehensive deep dives and found far more problems with it than I had. I could only do what I did at the time because some authority (I forget who) had finally forced the entire data set to be released to the public, over the strenuous objections of the folks who administer that data. Much of that data has since been hidden again, though, from what I can tell. That was the older HadCRUT3 data set. The newest one is HadCRUT4, but I haven't done any kind of deep dive on that. (Without digging further into the matter I don't even know if there is enough data publicly available to do the kind of analysis on it that I did on the earlier set.) But other people have, and have noted serious problems with it, and have even written entire books about that. The short version, though, is that there is an awful lot of "data" out there which they're using that is mostly just made up, and what is genuine has been adjusted so much that it can no longer really be considered "data" at all.
- MrGilbert 7y agoLooking at the raw data, I wonder how accurate it is for the early days? Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? I'm not questioning the data per se, as you can tell from looking at 2000 up to today that the median is rising. I'm just a bit surprised by the accuracy in the late 19th century. I expected less.
- southern_cross 7y ago> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that. This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that allows you to do things like this (derive a higher level of accuracy than the data would otherwise allow) if you know for a fact that the associated errors pretty much all cancel out. But you have to know this, from prior sampling or whatever; you can't just assume it. But that's what these folks are doing - waving their hands and just assuming that the errors mostly cancel out. To add insult to injury, for other portions of the data they state that they have the right to make routine, automated adjustments because of systematic errors in the data. But you can't have it both ways - assuming that the errors mostly cancel out on the one hand, while on the other hand claiming you have the right to make adjustments because, you know, those errors don't actually cancel each other out after all. > I'm not questioning the data per se You should be! Most of the "data" here is either of remarkably low quality, or just pretty much made up.
- zapnuk 7y agoYou provided no evidence to support your claim. Why should one believe your claim that most/all climate research like this http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ has it wrong?
- gameswithgo 7y agointerestingly the person who headed up the berkely earth project made similar arguments to the person you are replying to, and went and did it "better" but got the same result.
- xwdv 7y agoIf it ever gets really bad, the Earth can easily be cooled surprisingly quickly by detonating massive bombs in the right places. We’re talking nuclear scale.
- lanevorockz 7y agoPlease, let's not go back to a debunked theory. Global Warming models did not work and we phased them out a long time ago. The real term for the past decade on climate science is Climate Change and Extreme Environment. There is a lot more data on this graph if you cross fossil data and ice sheet research. Science is the only thing that everyone can agree with. I feel that it is our job to be accurate and not just do lazy one dimensional research. We might solve the wrong problem and just damage the environment on the process.
- dsjoerg 7y agoCan you offer a link to a light introduction to the topic and/or its data? This was my first search and I'm clearly not doing it right: https://www.google.com/search?q=Climate+Change+and+Extreme+Environment&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYkvaRwInjAhXaLc0KHQQ9DjgQ_AUIESgC&biw=1440&bih=797 https://www.google.com/search?q=Climate+Change+and+Extreme+E...
- cafebabbe 7y agoAh yes, denialism latest fancy mask. "ok ok it's actually happening, but it's something more complicated, you're still wrong" https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm