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UK Met Office Climate Dashboard
- jackpeterfletch 7y agoawwww shit
- bythckr 7y agoTranslating to British English...Bloody Bollocks!!!
- esotericn 7y agou wot m8
- jackpeterfletch 7y agoThis is a serious comment. We're boned.
- dang 7y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- xvx 7y agoNothing that the earth hasn't been through before, at much higher degrees.The earth will be fine and will recover. Humans, hopefully, will not.
- KitDuncan 7y agoEdgy
- ptah 7y agothe rate of change this time is ridiculously high. that is the problem, not the actual temperature
- black6 7y agoI hear the rate of change argument a lot, but I haven’t been able to comfortably arrive at how the comparison is made. Historic temperatures (pre-nineteenth century) have to be inferred from proxies—ice formations, fossilized tree rings, et cetera. Those, in turn, must be put into a date range based on some form of (I assume) radiometric dating. Carbon dating can get you +- 80 years. The other common techniques have even less precision. Uranium-lead dating can peg down a 2 million year window, for example. How can researchers say that the rate of change is so much greater now when, not even counting propagation of error, the granularity of measurements pre-nineteenth century is, at best, of the same order-of-magnitude as the WHOLE of the era of modern precision measurements? EDIT: I realize my question is inconvenient, but downvoting without meaningful response is no way to counter skepticism. This topic gets more religious as time goes on.
- ptah 7y agothis is how science works. it is the best model and projection using current data. if you can improve it, please go ahead
- superqwert 7y agoYou aren't addressing the arguments at all here. With the error bars that black6 suggests, we cannot possibly infer anything of meaning over long periods of time.
- black6 7y agoI knows how science works. That is why I am asking how we can compare the rate of change when the sample rates being compared are three orders of magnitude off. EDIT: more benefit-of-the-doubt for orders-of-magnitude difference — three instead of six. For example, if we take the yearly average, that’s a sample rate in the micro-hertz. A sample rate of +-80 years is in the nano-hertz range.
- marliechiller 7y agoSince CO2 emissions increased dramatically around the 1700s, that 80+- of carbon dating becomes feasible, no?
- pengstrom 7y agoHow do you approach people who doesn't have trust in science? It feels so surreal that the science is settled, but some people still don't believe climate change is real.
- cs02rm0 7y agoStuff like this. Although there's an argument you don't have to, you just have to convince a relatively small number of politicians. I think sites like this help. Quite a poor job has been done of pushing the data to the front and keeping publishing it without changing the metrics or methodology and I'd imagine most people will respect that eventually. You can't win everyone. That said, I'd have been crucified in school for starting a graph from a number other than zero (CO2 PPM) because of the impression it creates, I'd probably have got away with the route round that the difference graphs employ though.
- moduspol 7y agoProbably the same way you approach people who don't trust every claim of "soft" sciences, like human psychology. You do the best you can with what you have, and continually work to improve the science.
- simonsarris 7y ago> It feels so surreal that the science is settled ???????? Is the global mean temp for the earth hotter: 1. Right now 2. During the Bronze Age ? What parts of the entire field of psychology from the last 50 years have not failed to replicate? What parts of nutrition science from the last 50 years are useful, or at least predictive? What assumptions were we certain about in anthropology and history 50 years ago that we now know are completely wrong? It feels so surreal that people think science is something you settle, at all. I cannot imagine the confusion that would lead an educated person into in thinking that.
- akuchling 7y agoYeah, but climate change rests upon radiation absorption, thermodynamics, and a bunch of other 19th century science that was largely unaffected by the 20th century's upheavals in physics.
- ekianjo 7y agoHow do you measure the level of the sea at the mm precision? It is highly doubtful we are able to do that with any kind of instrumentation, more so around the whole world at the same time. EDIT: they say they measure everything with satellites, but that does not mean there is no incertitude in the measurement. No measurement is 100% accurate, and I'd certainly like to see the error range of satellites, when even GPS can't do better than +/- 30 cm precision.
- hadrien01 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_gauge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_gauge
- throwaway744678 7y agoThese do not account for the movement of the ground itself, it wpuld only be a relative measure.
- superqwert 7y agoIf the ground is sinking rather than the sea rising, the impact will be pretty similar!
- pygy_ 7y ago1) Make a lot of imprecise measurements. 2) Average them. The more measurements, the closer the average will be to the truth.
- throwaway744678 7y agoOnly if the error is distributed evenly.
- pygy_ 7y agoSince we're interested in the delta, even if it isn't even, it will not matter as long as the error distribution is constant during the whole experiment.
- mistermann 7y agoThis is brilliant. If you ask me this is exactly the type of approach that has been missing from the climate discussion. As a natural born skeptic, the current approach of simplistic, repetitive, and often technically incorrect news articles and half-informed scolding by politicians, celebrities, and internet armchair climatologists smells way too much like propaganda or a cult. > The front page shows the main indicators. Beneath each one there is additional detail, drilling down into why the indicator is important, how it has changed and how it was calculated. The pages also link through to the data so that you can explore it for yourself. Just the facts (well, it's a start anyways) presented visually (presumably honestly) so the the meaning is obvious, with the ability to drill down to learn why the numbers are important, where the data comes from and how to get to it yourself, as well as links to where to learn more. Beautiful. Under democratic governments, people need to largely align their opinions before we can finally start doing something about this problem, and I believe this is a crucial part of the type of persuasion it is going to take. I think there is still room for improvement, but I haven't seen this approach taken before and hope it becomes more popular. In fact, I believe the "pro" side should team up and produce one single authoritative website, and advertise the hell out of it - the fact that such a resource doesn't exist has always added to my skepticism.
- perfunctory 7y ago> If you ask me this is exactly the type of approach that has been missing from the climate discussion. Missing? Did you live under a rock? All these charts aren’t new information. It’s always been just one click away if you cared to look. Ok, maybe two clicks.
- kaybe 7y agoI can recommend looking at the IPCC reports for anyone missing data plots from the discussion: https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/ eg https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ Each of the report pages has 'Graphics' subpages for the chapters that give you just the figures and some explanations. (You might need to look at the pdf for some more details.)
- driverdan 7y agoAll of the charts should use the same time scale. It's confusing and misleading to use different scales for each. The argument for doing it is likely because that's all the good data we have for each, but it would still be better to scale them the same way.
- egwor 7y agoHow do you mean? They're different units and it is well documented (titles/legends, etc.) which should avoid confusion
- driverdan 7y agoIf they're the same time scale you can easily compare what has changed over time. With different scales it's hard to match them up.
- has2k1 7y agoThe graphs are independent and you can easily read each. What kind of comparisons do you want amongst them? Other than the 2 of them, the y axes of the graphs have different units.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoOn a phone they stack up vertically, in that setting it’s quite natural to want to have the time axis aligned too. It makes correlations stand out more.
- Bantros 7y agoI wonder why the chart for CO2 concentration starts at 1960 vs 1850 for the global mean temperature difference
- kohanz 7y agoWithout knowing, my guess would be that's when we started measuring & recording those things?
- ntzm 7y agoGlad to see climate change denialism has spread HN, what the fuck is happening?
- aldoushuxley001 7y agoPeople being reasonable and skeptical?
- dageshi 7y agoLot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening. Genuinely, I think HN is now worse than reddit, only reddit has some actual funny/entertaining comments while HN is just... I don't know low effort tedium pretending to be insight? Maybe HN got too popular?
- antisthenes 7y agoContrarianism is when you're well informed about both viewpoints and slightly leaning towards the less popular one. Flatly denying the other side's points isn't contrarianism - at best it's trolling and at worst - willful ignorance.
- fdsonvbno 7y ago> low effort tedium pretending to be insight I've never heard it described better. Somehow the culture of a pedantic top comment that 'refutes' the article took off. It's the extension of the infamous dropbox comment to climate change posts.
- ryanobjc 7y agoMy friends introduced me to a new term for this site... the orange site. It’s hard to say if it’s people espousing heartfelt views, trolls, bots, or who knows what other internet monster?
- WhompingWindows 7y agoAre you serious?? There's no way HN is worse than reddit...the front page of reddit for me has about 1/3 twitter posts, 1/3 memes, and 1/3 teenage-culture references. This is not funny or entertaining...there are maybe 5-10% of posts MAX that I find enjoyable...only if I head to r/aww will I find genuinely worthwhile content.
- aglionby 7y agoInteresting graphs, but it's a little confusing that all but one of them use difference of the metric (i.e. relative values) instead of absolute values -- what and when are the differences relative to?
- roter 7y agoThe titles indicate the baseline for each graph. e.g. "Global mean temperature difference from 1850-1900" They are plotting the anomalies which tend to be much more useful for climate studies than the absolute values. e.g. [0,1] [0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/dyk/anomalies-vs-temperature https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/dyk/anomalie... [1] https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/abs_temp.html https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/abs_temp.html
- aglionby 7y agoRight, so what is plotted is the deviation from the mean reading in the time range given? Thanks for the links, those are insightful.
- ocschwar 7y agoAll of these metrics have subtleties regarding the methodology, which makes the long term relative shifts more important than the absolute values.
- lopmotr 7y agoAbsolute sea level (from the bottom of the ocean?) is meaningless for people concerned about coastal flooding. Absolute temperature is also meaningless in deg C because the zero is arbitrary anyway. Even if they used kelvin, nobody cares how far we are from 0K.
- breck 7y agoWhat about charts for the positive counter-cyclical measurements? Off the top of my head, if there's more CO2 there should be more plant growth, right? Is there a chart for that? The problem with these current charts is while momentum is usually a good predictor, if you aren't looking at the full picture you might miss key indicators that could drastically change the future (ie. if you just looked at charts that showed the WeWork narrative you want to present, the future would look predictable until a couple months ago).
- kaybe 7y agoMore CO2 might not be a good thing for plant-based carbon sinks: Some plants with less stored carbon might outcompete others, lowering the sink storage. This issue is quite involved. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-strange-case-of-the-liana-vine-and-its-role-in-global-warming https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-strange-case-of-the-liana...
- breck 7y agoInteresting. Thanks for the link. More reason to have more charts on this dashboard tracking countercyclicals like plant density, green acreage, etc
- powerbroker 7y agoI like the facts-based graphs, with multiple data-collecting sources. However, I think somewhere among these graphs should be some kind of 'speculative' graph that shows potential remedial efforts impacts on one or more graphs. Even something as simple as a "when we are gone" graph that predicts what would occur if all industrial, agricultural processes stopped... just so people can see what is the realistic asymptote of moderating conditions we can expect, under an extreme condition. Or, perhaps, put in a more optimistic tone, a 'magical-antimatter-grid-power-source-without-co2' scenario.
- kaybe 7y agoThe IPCC has many of these, for example here: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/ The older reports have even more of them. I find this one especially informative: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/FigSPM-10.jpg https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/FigSPM-10.jp... There is historical data and the results for different emission pathways (timelines of human emissions).
- LessDmesg 7y agoOh dear, we're all doomed! Manhattan is going to be submersed underwater by 2012! Better stop driving and buy a horse before cow farts fake climate graphs kill all humanity!
- lopmotr 7y agoWhy can't people just make honest graphs? If you're trying to convince a skeptical person, the last thing you should do is use known dirty tricks for deceiving them. CO2 and arctic sea ice graphs' vertical axes don't start at zero, making the change look worse than it really is and meaningless without something to compare PPM or km^2 to. Other graphs use a sensible difference for the axis because there's no meaningful absolute zero. It would be nice if they aligned the time axes on all of them for extra readability. The different start dates are a red flag because they might be cherry picking the start date to avoid something embarrassing before that. I guess they just used easily available data which is fine if they don't have the resources to do it more thoroughly, and they explain that for sea level. But it would be more transparent to show a longer history with clear explanation of how start dates were chosen. Actually, sea level really needs a longer history because it has been rising since the ice age and it's important to separate that natural increase from the anthropogenic one.