6 ms·

January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

74 points by perfunctory 7y ago

Najtmare 7y ago
There is unfortunately no stopping this as there is no or very little political will.
- shard972 7y ago
  People won't even have a conversation about Geo-engineering so i don't see why politics is to blame solely.
- lapink 7y ago
  Maybe Americans could start changing their way of life rather than waiting for « political will » or a never coming technological revolution. UE has started reducing CO2 emissions will keeping a very reasonable and increasing level of life.
  - donkeyd 7y ago
    I assume you mean EU. However, while EU countries have made a lot of promises and plans, they're not actually keeping them either and people are complaining about impact on their daily lives. At least the US is transparent in not wanting to change (their President is).
  - brozaman 7y ago
    USA is certainly a problem, but the elephants in the room are China and India.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      Current emissions have the US at 2x India and current emissions are obviously irrelevant since it’s total cumulative emissions that matter, where the US runs away with it.
- donkeyd 7y ago
  It's easy to blame politics, but voters really do have an effect on this and there's hardly any will there either. The fastest growing party in the Netherlands is huge on climate denial and stopping or rolling back anything done against climate change. Their voters are adamant that there's no real issue with climate change, that everything is exaggerated and that it's all a left-wing conspiracy. Most people want to remain at the same level of comfort and luxury, and that's not possible if we want to effectively combat climate change. We'd need to fly less, drive less and consume less and that's the opposite of what's happening in the world.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    Quite. It's really very boring to hear people endlessly whinging about politicians, then refusing to vote for those offering anything different from BAU. There are no perfect democracies, but citizens surely must accept some responsibility for their voting decisions.
- crispinb 7y ago
  It's worse than that. There is very determined political will, across much of the globe, to stoke global heating further for short-term benefit. In my country (Australia) we had a federal election last year. The climate issues were very clearly laid out, and most citizens here accept the science, and have some understanding of the severity of the issue. Yet they voted very decisively against any further action to reduce emissions. Most of the electorate here simply will not countenance changes from business as usual. Of the world's more significant population centres, Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions, the US is weighed down with a sclerotic political system and a huge proportion of the population with dogmatically anti-scientific attitudes, China is backpedalling due to economic worries, and India has enough troubles of its own. We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.
  - clarry 7y ago
    > Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions I think EU is the only significant region to have actually decreased CO2 emissions over the past few decades: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo... That's not to say they couldn't have done more, but it's kinda sad that everyone else is drawing a flat line or going up. EU alone is not going to save the planet, even if they somehow stopped emissions altogether.
    - crispinb 7y ago
      Agree the EU is in better shape than much of the world. There's a lot of technical arguments about how well it's doing in practise. But even the fact that it's at issue shows that at least it has some chance of meeting its 40%-cut-by-2030 Paris target. And it has a fairly solid consensus about the dimensions of the problem, lacking the fake polarisation corruptly injected by the fossil fuel industry into the US and Australia's political systems.
  - titzer 7y ago
1propionyl 7y ago
Well, I met an old man dying on a train. He told me: "no more destination, no more pain." (Note: this is intended as a very harsh condemnation.)
- titzer 7y ago
  I say we kill our heroes and fly. edit: downvotes for finishing the song lyric. Cheers, HN.
  - 1propionyl 7y ago
    Never let your fear decide your fate.
throwaway5752 7y ago
I've been wondering why TSLA has been trading the way it has. A normal short squeeze doesn't adequately explain it. The volume today alone is more than 2x the last reported shares short. We all know something very, very bad is going on with the climate.
- 1propionyl 7y ago
  All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true extent of the outcomes. And we'll likely all die reasonably content knowing it's not our problem. We're among the last generations that can expect to ride the current peak in human success before the hard bounds kick in and things either become much more difficult or more likely just completely collapse. We all love to rest easy on the fallacious idea that (as Carlin put it) "the earth will be fine, it's us who are fucked." It sounds nice, but the reality is far worse. Beyond a certain temperature bound, the entire biosphere collapses... completely. "Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!" And what do they feed on? Organic particulate matter that filters down to them from the rest of the biosphere that depends on relatively tight temperature bounds. Natural selection can only keep up with a certain degree of change in the mean of temperature before it just collapses. If we generate the conditions for the collapse of human civilization, it's more likely than not that we also take all life on Earth with us. And statistically... that means the end of life, period. That our planet happened to have the particular temperature bounds for long enough for life to emerge is vanishingly unlikely.
  - titzer 7y ago
    I'm not gonna be "that guy", but I will say that I fully expect cockroaches and tardigrades to survive. Precious little else will. Kiss mammals goodbye. The biosphere has already got a match in our insane devouring of habitat and industrial-scale poisoning program known as modern agriculture. Not to mention the ocean acidification, garbage patch, and overfishing. People look at me a little nutty, but I seriously think in 100 years the oceans will have nothing alive in them larger than your finger. There will be no tigers, no elephants, no bison, no deer, few or no birds.
adj83 7y ago
"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark, " if you have that sort of deviation its hard to make meaningful statements about the longer term changes, it seems to me
- 1propionyl 7y ago
  An increase in variation is by definition an extremely statistically significant change in behavior. Most families of distributions have two dimensions: mean and variance. And not just under expectation but in general.
seizethecheese 7y ago
"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark". This is outlier journalism. The actual data is more informative (from December): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mntp/201912.png https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mn... On average the globe is warming. In a splotch of northeastern europe very much so. In other places, it's actually colder.
- piva00 7y ago
  Even though this is still a weather variation event it is very strange to be living in Stockholm and feeling like it's spring since December, the cherry blossoms at Kungsträdsgården were blooming in early/mid-January. We had less than 5-6 days of snow in total so far and for two weekends in a row there were days over 8C. Even frost has been rare this winter so far... It is pretty damn strange.
lngnmn1 7y ago
Bullshit. In India and all the Himalayan countries it is unusually harsh. People in Bangladesh died from exposure.
busymom0 7y ago
They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless. The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960. There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax Edit: I am getting quite a few downvotes even though I linked to scientific data. Please let me know what the downvote is for, otherwise it’s disappointing a scientific community doesn’t want to engage in poking holes in the data.
- ozorOzora 7y ago
  I long for the day when I can sort datatables on such central websites.
  - busymom0 7y ago
    At least the link I provided, the data should already be sorted and only listing the date when each date broke the max temperature record. Their FTP however does provide more detailed data from 1200 stations across US.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- toupeetape 7y ago
  > Please let me know what the downvote is for It's for not knowing what the word "globally" means. That is a pretty big hole in your own data. Look at the equivalent data where it exists for South America, Europe, Africa or Asia. The majority have records set in the last 30 years. Of course, none of the Northern hemisphere countries set their all-time record temperature in January so all-time records in the US are pretty irrelevant to the article.
ddmma 7y ago
Comparison is the source of tragedy
hivacruz 7y ago
My parents who live in the South of France had 26°C two days ago. People were swimming in the sea. Crazy.
matthewwiese 7y ago
I don't normally shill subreddits -- and advise everyone to use an ad blocker while on that website -- but for those who find this news alarming and/or shrug it off as media hysteria, I highly suggest popping over to /r/collapse. The immediate reaction (as an ego defense mechanism) is to dismiss what you will read as unproductive fear mongering. However, it is a far worse fate to be surprised by the reality of the situation (both environmental and social) when these processes hit their limit and begin affecting the neoliberal institutions that govern our world. The best way to protect yourself and your family is to stay informed, no matter how dire the truth may be. The time for gradual change was decades ago; the only thing that will save us now (and when I say save, I mean allow modern civilization to continue) is radical action.
Proven 7y ago
"EU Climate Service": what other news should anyone expect from people whose job depends on there being anything else but news that cater to climate alarmists?

74 points by perfunctory 7y ago

Najtmare 7y ago

There is unfortunately no stopping this as there is no or very little political will.

shard972 7y ago
People won't even have a conversation about Geo-engineering so i don't see why politics is to blame solely.
lapink 7y ago
Maybe Americans could start changing their way of life rather than waiting for « political will » or a never coming technological revolution. UE has started reducing CO2 emissions will keeping a very reasonable and increasing level of life.
- donkeyd 7y ago
  I assume you mean EU. However, while EU countries have made a lot of promises and plans, they're not actually keeping them either and people are complaining about impact on their daily lives. At least the US is transparent in not wanting to change (their President is).
- brozaman 7y ago
  USA is certainly a problem, but the elephants in the room are China and India.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Current emissions have the US at 2x India and current emissions are obviously irrelevant since it’s total cumulative emissions that matter, where the US runs away with it.
donkeyd 7y ago
It's easy to blame politics, but voters really do have an effect on this and there's hardly any will there either. The fastest growing party in the Netherlands is huge on climate denial and stopping or rolling back anything done against climate change. Their voters are adamant that there's no real issue with climate change, that everything is exaggerated and that it's all a left-wing conspiracy. Most people want to remain at the same level of comfort and luxury, and that's not possible if we want to effectively combat climate change. We'd need to fly less, drive less and consume less and that's the opposite of what's happening in the world.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Quite. It's really very boring to hear people endlessly whinging about politicians, then refusing to vote for those offering anything different from BAU. There are no perfect democracies, but citizens surely must accept some responsibility for their voting decisions.
crispinb 7y ago
It's worse than that. There is very determined political will, across much of the globe, to stoke global heating further for short-term benefit. In my country (Australia) we had a federal election last year. The climate issues were very clearly laid out, and most citizens here accept the science, and have some understanding of the severity of the issue. Yet they voted very decisively against any further action to reduce emissions. Most of the electorate here simply will not countenance changes from business as usual. Of the world's more significant population centres, Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions, the US is weighed down with a sclerotic political system and a huge proportion of the population with dogmatically anti-scientific attitudes, China is backpedalling due to economic worries, and India has enough troubles of its own. We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.
- clarry 7y ago
  > Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions I think EU is the only significant region to have actually decreased CO2 emissions over the past few decades: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo... That's not to say they couldn't have done more, but it's kinda sad that everyone else is drawing a flat line or going up. EU alone is not going to save the planet, even if they somehow stopped emissions altogether.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    Agree the EU is in better shape than much of the world. There's a lot of technical arguments about how well it's doing in practise. But even the fact that it's at issue shows that at least it has some chance of meeting its 40%-cut-by-2030 Paris target. And it has a fairly solid consensus about the dimensions of the problem, lacking the fake polarisation corruptly injected by the fossil fuel industry into the US and Australia's political systems.
- titzer 7y ago

1propionyl 7y ago

Well, I met an old man dying on a train. He told me: "no more destination, no more pain." (Note: this is intended as a very harsh condemnation.)

titzer 7y ago
I say we kill our heroes and fly. edit: downvotes for finishing the song lyric. Cheers, HN.
- 1propionyl 7y ago
  Never let your fear decide your fate.

throwaway5752 7y ago

I've been wondering why TSLA has been trading the way it has. A normal short squeeze doesn't adequately explain it. The volume today alone is more than 2x the last reported shares short. We all know something very, very bad is going on with the climate.

1propionyl 7y ago
All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true extent of the outcomes. And we'll likely all die reasonably content knowing it's not our problem. We're among the last generations that can expect to ride the current peak in human success before the hard bounds kick in and things either become much more difficult or more likely just completely collapse. We all love to rest easy on the fallacious idea that (as Carlin put it) "the earth will be fine, it's us who are fucked." It sounds nice, but the reality is far worse. Beyond a certain temperature bound, the entire biosphere collapses... completely. "Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!" And what do they feed on? Organic particulate matter that filters down to them from the rest of the biosphere that depends on relatively tight temperature bounds. Natural selection can only keep up with a certain degree of change in the mean of temperature before it just collapses. If we generate the conditions for the collapse of human civilization, it's more likely than not that we also take all life on Earth with us. And statistically... that means the end of life, period. That our planet happened to have the particular temperature bounds for long enough for life to emerge is vanishingly unlikely.
- titzer 7y ago
  I'm not gonna be "that guy", but I will say that I fully expect cockroaches and tardigrades to survive. Precious little else will. Kiss mammals goodbye. The biosphere has already got a match in our insane devouring of habitat and industrial-scale poisoning program known as modern agriculture. Not to mention the ocean acidification, garbage patch, and overfishing. People look at me a little nutty, but I seriously think in 100 years the oceans will have nothing alive in them larger than your finger. There will be no tigers, no elephants, no bison, no deer, few or no birds.

adj83 7y ago

"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark, " if you have that sort of deviation its hard to make meaningful statements about the longer term changes, it seems to me

1propionyl 7y ago
An increase in variation is by definition an extremely statistically significant change in behavior. Most families of distributions have two dimensions: mean and variance. And not just under expectation but in general.

seizethecheese 7y ago

"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark". This is outlier journalism. The actual data is more informative (from December): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mntp/201912.png https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mn... On average the globe is warming. In a splotch of northeastern europe very much so. In other places, it's actually colder.

piva00 7y ago
Even though this is still a weather variation event it is very strange to be living in Stockholm and feeling like it's spring since December, the cherry blossoms at Kungsträdsgården were blooming in early/mid-January. We had less than 5-6 days of snow in total so far and for two weekends in a row there were days over 8C. Even frost has been rare this winter so far... It is pretty damn strange.

lngnmn1 7y ago

Bullshit. In India and all the Himalayan countries it is unusually harsh. People in Bangladesh died from exposure.

busymom0 7y ago

They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless. The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960. There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax Edit: I am getting quite a few downvotes even though I linked to scientific data. Please let me know what the downvote is for, otherwise it’s disappointing a scientific community doesn’t want to engage in poking holes in the data.

ozorOzora 7y ago
I long for the day when I can sort datatables on such central websites.
- busymom0 7y ago
  At least the link I provided, the data should already be sorted and only listing the date when each date broke the max temperature record. Their FTP however does provide more detailed data from 1200 stations across US.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
toupeetape 7y ago
> Please let me know what the downvote is for It's for not knowing what the word "globally" means. That is a pretty big hole in your own data. Look at the equivalent data where it exists for South America, Europe, Africa or Asia. The majority have records set in the last 30 years. Of course, none of the Northern hemisphere countries set their all-time record temperature in January so all-time records in the US are pretty irrelevant to the article.

ddmma 7y ago

Comparison is the source of tragedy

hivacruz 7y ago

My parents who live in the South of France had 26°C two days ago. People were swimming in the sea. Crazy.

matthewwiese 7y ago

I don't normally shill subreddits -- and advise everyone to use an ad blocker while on that website -- but for those who find this news alarming and/or shrug it off as media hysteria, I highly suggest popping over to /r/collapse. The immediate reaction (as an ego defense mechanism) is to dismiss what you will read as unproductive fear mongering. However, it is a far worse fate to be surprised by the reality of the situation (both environmental and social) when these processes hit their limit and begin affecting the neoliberal institutions that govern our world. The best way to protect yourself and your family is to stay informed, no matter how dire the truth may be. The time for gradual change was decades ago; the only thing that will save us now (and when I say save, I mean allow modern civilization to continue) is radical action.

Proven 7y ago

"EU Climate Service": what other news should anyone expect from people whose job depends on there being anything else but news that cater to climate alarmists?