11 ms·

It snowed heavily in Madrid a couple of days ago for the first time in decades, causing utter chaos. It's around 5C colder than the usual seasonal average where

It snowed heavily in Madrid a couple of days ago for the first time in decades, causing utter chaos. It's around 5C colder than the usual seasonal average where I am. My sense - and the sense of many working in climate science and media monitoring - is that there's a climate change denial industry [1] which is working very hard to lie about the catastrophic effects of developing climate change, and also to shift blame away from those responsible for causing them. [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9_4 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9_...

linuxftw 6y ago
Climate change has always been a thing. The narrative is currently 'global warming' so 'extreme' weather events, even cold ones, are caused by the planet getting hotter. Possibly 'climate change' is 'accelerating' due to this warming, but is that really possible to say? Here's what we know for sure: The topic is highly politicized and used a tool of control.
- tonyhb 6y ago
  No, we definitely don't know that it's used as a tool for control. We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before. We know this is not natural. We know that prior to the 70s the world was cooling. Reversing climate change is an aim to make society and the world better as a whole. Not for "control".
  - abstractbarista 6y ago
    Temperatures rising and falling over hundreds and thousands of years is indeed natural. The system is in constant flux, with or without us. Our acceleration of this process by releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gasses in a relatively short period of time, however, is not. Limiting our interference in this natural process will necessitate vast methods and quantities of 'control'. Nevertheless, it should be done. And fortunately, this process will herald a new economic expansion providing jobs and creativity outlets for countless people worldwide.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    > We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before This is untrue.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Okay so you say "this is untrue". You might be right but why should I trust you? Why did you fail to produce evidence? Your comment is way too short to know for sure.
  - correct_horse 6y ago
    Slight correction - temperatures are not higher than ever before. The eocene (60 million years ago) was 10-14 degrees hotter than now. That level of warming would be bad to say the least, but it has easily been this hot before. Also relevant, a few times in the Pleistocene, 20,000 years ago, temperatures peaked a couple degrees hotter than they are now.
    - snickms 6y ago
      I believe the parent is talking about rate of change rather than absolute temperature. Discounting collisions with large meteors, the statement that the average temperature over time has never risen so fast is true.
      - correct_horse 6y ago
        Hm. I didn't consider that interpretation.
        snickms 6y ago
        When someone talks about anything changing over a period of time, they are talking about slope. There really isn't another interpretation.
        arilotter 6y ago
        The post in question writes "have risen higher", which to me reads as if it's saying that the temperature, as a result of rising, is now higher than ever before, not that the rate of change is higher. I would expect something along the lines of "have risen faster" if we were describing the slope of the graph of temperature over time.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        I don’t think that is true. I read it as the maximum, not the slope. The confusion is from the use of higher instead of faster. Faster would be the rate of change while higher is absolute value. > We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before. This could be a year over year increase in maximum, with a very small slope too
  - johnp314 6y ago
    "...make society and the world better as a whole." How exactly do 'we' (whoever 'we' is) achieve this without control? The verb 'make' assumes control, one does not make anything without having control over the ingredients, and in this case the ingredients are us.
  - gwright 6y ago
    > No, we definitely don't know that it's used as a tool for control. Irrespective of the nature of climate change, humans are humans and a crisis or enemy, if you will, will always be an opportunity for people to assert control. The difficult task is understanding when that control is a reasonable response to the crisis and when the crisis is an excuse to assert control. This is not an exclusive choice, both types of efforts can be going on simultaneously. We seem to have become numb to the large numbers that are now thrown around as part of defining public policy. When you start manipulating multiple trillions of dollars it is naive to think that isn't an opportunity for manipulation of all sorts.
- datenhorst 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    Looks like the current temperature is close to 5k BC. The 45 degree trend line towards the end is also comparing a 50 year period to 500 year periods in history. So, these 'spikes' could be totally normal, but you won't see them because the graph is not honest. Here's what we do know: The earth has historically been much hotter with more CO2 in the atmosphere (much more) than it is today. There's also some evidence that historic rises in CO2 lagged temperature rather than the reverse.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      Please note that the last part of the graph have stippled lines that's because they are comparing year of year with averages over 300 years or so. Anything you average over 300 years will tend to flatten. If you averaged the last 100 years over the last 300 years it would not look as dramatic too. So the graph is manipulative to say they least.
      - snickms 6y ago
        The data points at the top are at 16.6 year intervals. Recent data is represented by a line. The punch line is not the absolute temperature (as this wanders around a fair bit), but the gradient at the end. Because the recent data is over a period of 166 years, you can turn the line into 10 dots which represent each 16.6 year 'line' average. I think you should try this yourself. You will find that the averaging only smooths out brief transients between your new dots. In the case of the comic, it has no effect on the gradient at 2016. Having more data doesn't change the average slope - it simply allows you to measure average slope over shorter distances. So unless you think the joke was "haha we've been at this temperature before", I suggest it is you who is being ... what you said.
        ThomPete 6y ago
- ageofwant 6y ago
  It is only politicized because you and others have allowed yourselves to be manipulated to a point of confusion. The tool has indeed worked you over well and good. Here is what we know: Anthropogenic climate change is a fact[1] [1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000226 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    > It is only politicized because you and others have allowed yourselves to be manipulated to a point of confusion. I'm confident this statement describes others better than it describes myself. Here's what we know: The earth was hotter before, the earth's temperature has been rising for 100's of thousands of years, the CO2 levels have been higher before, there's evidence that CO2 levels lagged temperature increases historically, water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas, all recent climate prediction models have been wrong, historic data has been 'normalized' and changed, repeatedly. Whatever you think has been debunked hasn't. I've been around longer than a day, I've seen the shifting climate alarmists goal posts.
    - esarbe 6y ago
      Dude. No one's claiming that the planet hasn't seen worse. It's been worse. It's been freezing cold for hundreds of millions of years. It's been blazing hot for hundreds of millions of years. No one is claiming that this is either new or dangerous for the planet. It's neither of that. It is however potentially fatal for our global civilization. Since the early 70ies, the climate models have been pretty spot on. Especially before climate change denialism (to protect profit margins) turned climate sciences into a hot potato, mainstream predictions have been pretty good. Now, its not that a few degrees warmer temperature is going to kill people. At least not many. But with rising temperatures, people will start doing what they've been doing since the dawn of time when things got uncomfortable in one place; they start moving and migrating. And do you know what no country with static borders is good at dealing with? Moving populations and migrations. That always causes chaos and turmoil. Then there's the trouble with water; as soon as the weather patterns start changing because of anthropogenic climate change, we'll have conflicts about water. In some parts of the world this has already started. China is currently doing a lot of projects with "its" streams and is redirecting a lot of water. Much to the chagrin of it's southern neighbors. Another source of troubles. And then, finally, is our flailing ecosystem which has been under massive attack for the last 250 years and is -- slowly but surely -- crumbling under the weight of a sheer 8 billion people wanton for food and shelter. Not for nothing we've lost almost 60% of insects in the last 50 years and almost half of the animal populations; impending ecosystem collapse. Fun times ahead!
wiz21c 6y ago
If it's sooooo important to get the word out, then why is this behind a firewall ? Why don't they publish that openly ?
- SpaceL10n 6y ago
  Capitalism, that's why. Daddy's gotta get paid.
- Kliment 6y ago
  chapter 4 of https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9 https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    sci-hub is not exactly publishing, is it ? :-)
    - craftinator 6y ago
      Seems pretty published to me. I can access more than just the abstract, so it's published and available.
tharkun__ 6y ago
And we've had an unusually warm end of December and start of January. Only one big dumping of snow and then hovering around freezing. Not normal where I am. It's too warm here. I see we are supposed to get snow end of Jan now. Of course weather forecasts here really suck and you can't trust the weekend forecast until its Friday afternoon.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>My sense - and the sense of many working in climate science and media monitoring - is that there's a climate change denial industry There is, which is why it's a disservice -- and unscientific -- to say things like: it's colder than usual today == climate change. If you attribute every daily variance in the weather to the climate crisis, is it any wonder people stop believing or caring?
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Good call out. Not just a disservice and unscientific, it’s just plain wrong. An observed variance in weather over one day or even a few days isn’t even climate. It’s just weather activity.
  - titzer 6y ago
    Sorry, but increased variance is very much in line with systemic climate change. In fact, it's one of the main predictions as climate change means disruption of the normal distribution, not just pushing the median but increasing the standard deviation.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Please re-read what I posted more closely. > An observed variance in weather *over one day or even a few days* https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate If you observe a few days of severe weather, you've observed severe weather. Taking a mere observation over one week of weather activity cannot be looked at in isolation and simply called "climate change, tada!" FTA: >When scientists talk about climate, they're often looking at averages of precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind, and other measures of weather that occur over a long period in a particular place. In some instances, they might look at these averages over 30 years. And, we refer to these three-decade averages of weather observations as Climate Normals.
    - tomp 6y ago
      > increased variance is very much in line with systemic climate change Not really, it's also in line with the limited amount of high-quality data we have. E.g. viewed in isolation, recent Gulf of Mexico hurricanes were pretty bad (2019 in particular, IIRC). But if you look into history, 1932,1933 was also pretty bad. Arguably, if we had even more recorded history, such outliers wouldn't seem that exceptional - there still is a possiblity that climate change is affecting hurricanes (making them worse) but you can't just look at the variance (outliers) - trend is also (more?) important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season
LanceH 6y ago
Those warning about climate change are partially to blame. I was saying decades ago that touting the "hottest summer on record" as proof of global warming isn't actually proof and would come back to disrupt the conversation. And here we are, equally "valid" proof that global warming is not real. I'm not absolving the people intentionally distorting the facts, but the people who centered the conversation on local maxima bear some blame for the shakiness of the conversation.
- gbrown 6y ago
  Most discussions of temperature extremes I’ve seen focus on their change in frequency. That’s not a distortion at all, that’s a changing average (and corresponding increase in volatility).
  - LanceH 6y ago
    When? As I pointed out, the stage was set for decades ago with statements like, "see how hot it is?!" I said then that it would cause problems and today you have people equally saying, "see how cold it is!" Neither is proof and now we have a muddle discussion with the media happy to run whatever stirs things up. The proper move some time ago was to center the discussion around some proxy for global temperature (avg ocean temp perhaps) instead of the variable. Even now, we shouldn't be speaking about unusual events in terms of climate change. There are more people in more places with more cameras and ability to report unusual weather.
    - gbrown 6y ago
      Most news articles these days will follow it with language like: "__ marked the hottest July on record. In fact, __ of the top ___ Julys have occurred in the last 10 years." Reputable news outlets are also good about including boilerplate like: "While we can't attribute any single event to climate change, scientists predict an increasing frequency of events like ___." Extreme event frequency is one of the most unambiguous signals of climate change that people can see and relate to. I feel like you're either consuming sub-par media or attacking a straw-man.
sakopov 6y ago
I'm trying to connect your comment to parent comment and I'm struggling to find correlations. Are you implying that there are powers at play responsible for sensationalizing weather headlines to make forecasting seem untrustworthy?

linuxftw 6y ago

Climate change has always been a thing. The narrative is currently 'global warming' so 'extreme' weather events, even cold ones, are caused by the planet getting hotter. Possibly 'climate change' is 'accelerating' due to this warming, but is that really possible to say? Here's what we know for sure: The topic is highly politicized and used a tool of control.

tonyhb 6y ago
No, we definitely don't know that it's used as a tool for control. We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before. We know this is not natural. We know that prior to the 70s the world was cooling. Reversing climate change is an aim to make society and the world better as a whole. Not for "control".
- abstractbarista 6y ago
  Temperatures rising and falling over hundreds and thousands of years is indeed natural. The system is in constant flux, with or without us. Our acceleration of this process by releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gasses in a relatively short period of time, however, is not. Limiting our interference in this natural process will necessitate vast methods and quantities of 'control'. Nevertheless, it should be done. And fortunately, this process will herald a new economic expansion providing jobs and creativity outlets for countless people worldwide.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  > We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before This is untrue.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Okay so you say "this is untrue". You might be right but why should I trust you? Why did you fail to produce evidence? Your comment is way too short to know for sure.
- correct_horse 6y ago
  Slight correction - temperatures are not higher than ever before. The eocene (60 million years ago) was 10-14 degrees hotter than now. That level of warming would be bad to say the least, but it has easily been this hot before. Also relevant, a few times in the Pleistocene, 20,000 years ago, temperatures peaked a couple degrees hotter than they are now.
  - snickms 6y ago
    I believe the parent is talking about rate of change rather than absolute temperature. Discounting collisions with large meteors, the statement that the average temperature over time has never risen so fast is true.
    - correct_horse 6y ago
      Hm. I didn't consider that interpretation.
      - snickms 6y ago
        When someone talks about anything changing over a period of time, they are talking about slope. There really isn't another interpretation.
        arilotter 6y ago
        The post in question writes "have risen higher", which to me reads as if it's saying that the temperature, as a result of rising, is now higher than ever before, not that the rate of change is higher. I would expect something along the lines of "have risen faster" if we were describing the slope of the graph of temperature over time.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        I don’t think that is true. I read it as the maximum, not the slope. The confusion is from the use of higher instead of faster. Faster would be the rate of change while higher is absolute value. > We know for sure that the average temperatures have risen higher in the last 40 years than they have ever before. This could be a year over year increase in maximum, with a very small slope too
- johnp314 6y ago
  "...make society and the world better as a whole." How exactly do 'we' (whoever 'we' is) achieve this without control? The verb 'make' assumes control, one does not make anything without having control over the ingredients, and in this case the ingredients are us.
- gwright 6y ago
  > No, we definitely don't know that it's used as a tool for control. Irrespective of the nature of climate change, humans are humans and a crisis or enemy, if you will, will always be an opportunity for people to assert control. The difficult task is understanding when that control is a reasonable response to the crisis and when the crisis is an excuse to assert control. This is not an exclusive choice, both types of efforts can be going on simultaneously. We seem to have become numb to the large numbers that are now thrown around as part of defining public policy. When you start manipulating multiple trillions of dollars it is naive to think that isn't an opportunity for manipulation of all sorts.
datenhorst 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Looks like the current temperature is close to 5k BC. The 45 degree trend line towards the end is also comparing a 50 year period to 500 year periods in history. So, these 'spikes' could be totally normal, but you won't see them because the graph is not honest. Here's what we do know: The earth has historically been much hotter with more CO2 in the atmosphere (much more) than it is today. There's also some evidence that historic rises in CO2 lagged temperature rather than the reverse.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    Please note that the last part of the graph have stippled lines that's because they are comparing year of year with averages over 300 years or so. Anything you average over 300 years will tend to flatten. If you averaged the last 100 years over the last 300 years it would not look as dramatic too. So the graph is manipulative to say they least.
    - snickms 6y ago
      The data points at the top are at 16.6 year intervals. Recent data is represented by a line. The punch line is not the absolute temperature (as this wanders around a fair bit), but the gradient at the end. Because the recent data is over a period of 166 years, you can turn the line into 10 dots which represent each 16.6 year 'line' average. I think you should try this yourself. You will find that the averaging only smooths out brief transients between your new dots. In the case of the comic, it has no effect on the gradient at 2016. Having more data doesn't change the average slope - it simply allows you to measure average slope over shorter distances. So unless you think the joke was "haha we've been at this temperature before", I suggest it is you who is being ... what you said.
      - ThomPete 6y ago
ageofwant 6y ago
It is only politicized because you and others have allowed yourselves to be manipulated to a point of confusion. The tool has indeed worked you over well and good. Here is what we know: Anthropogenic climate change is a fact[1] [1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000226 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
- linuxftw 6y ago
  > It is only politicized because you and others have allowed yourselves to be manipulated to a point of confusion. I'm confident this statement describes others better than it describes myself. Here's what we know: The earth was hotter before, the earth's temperature has been rising for 100's of thousands of years, the CO2 levels have been higher before, there's evidence that CO2 levels lagged temperature increases historically, water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas, all recent climate prediction models have been wrong, historic data has been 'normalized' and changed, repeatedly. Whatever you think has been debunked hasn't. I've been around longer than a day, I've seen the shifting climate alarmists goal posts.
  - esarbe 6y ago
    Dude. No one's claiming that the planet hasn't seen worse. It's been worse. It's been freezing cold for hundreds of millions of years. It's been blazing hot for hundreds of millions of years. No one is claiming that this is either new or dangerous for the planet. It's neither of that. It is however potentially fatal for our global civilization. Since the early 70ies, the climate models have been pretty spot on. Especially before climate change denialism (to protect profit margins) turned climate sciences into a hot potato, mainstream predictions have been pretty good. Now, its not that a few degrees warmer temperature is going to kill people. At least not many. But with rising temperatures, people will start doing what they've been doing since the dawn of time when things got uncomfortable in one place; they start moving and migrating. And do you know what no country with static borders is good at dealing with? Moving populations and migrations. That always causes chaos and turmoil. Then there's the trouble with water; as soon as the weather patterns start changing because of anthropogenic climate change, we'll have conflicts about water. In some parts of the world this has already started. China is currently doing a lot of projects with "its" streams and is redirecting a lot of water. Much to the chagrin of it's southern neighbors. Another source of troubles. And then, finally, is our flailing ecosystem which has been under massive attack for the last 250 years and is -- slowly but surely -- crumbling under the weight of a sheer 8 billion people wanton for food and shelter. Not for nothing we've lost almost 60% of insects in the last 50 years and almost half of the animal populations; impending ecosystem collapse. Fun times ahead!

wiz21c 6y ago

If it's sooooo important to get the word out, then why is this behind a firewall ? Why don't they publish that openly ?

SpaceL10n 6y ago
Capitalism, that's why. Daddy's gotta get paid.
Kliment 6y ago
chapter 4 of https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9 https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9
- wiz21c 6y ago
  sci-hub is not exactly publishing, is it ? :-)
  - craftinator 6y ago
    Seems pretty published to me. I can access more than just the abstract, so it's published and available.

tharkun__ 6y ago

And we've had an unusually warm end of December and start of January. Only one big dumping of snow and then hovering around freezing. Not normal where I am. It's too warm here. I see we are supposed to get snow end of Jan now. Of course weather forecasts here really suck and you can't trust the weekend forecast until its Friday afternoon.

itsoktocry 6y ago

>My sense - and the sense of many working in climate science and media monitoring - is that there's a climate change denial industry There is, which is why it's a disservice -- and unscientific -- to say things like: it's colder than usual today == climate change. If you attribute every daily variance in the weather to the climate crisis, is it any wonder people stop believing or caring?

dvtrn 6y ago
Good call out. Not just a disservice and unscientific, it’s just plain wrong. An observed variance in weather over one day or even a few days isn’t even climate. It’s just weather activity.
- titzer 6y ago
  Sorry, but increased variance is very much in line with systemic climate change. In fact, it's one of the main predictions as climate change means disruption of the normal distribution, not just pushing the median but increasing the standard deviation.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Please re-read what I posted more closely. > An observed variance in weather *over one day or even a few days* https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate If you observe a few days of severe weather, you've observed severe weather. Taking a mere observation over one week of weather activity cannot be looked at in isolation and simply called "climate change, tada!" FTA: >When scientists talk about climate, they're often looking at averages of precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind, and other measures of weather that occur over a long period in a particular place. In some instances, they might look at these averages over 30 years. And, we refer to these three-decade averages of weather observations as Climate Normals.
  - tomp 6y ago
    > increased variance is very much in line with systemic climate change Not really, it's also in line with the limited amount of high-quality data we have. E.g. viewed in isolation, recent Gulf of Mexico hurricanes were pretty bad (2019 in particular, IIRC). But if you look into history, 1932,1933 was also pretty bad. Arguably, if we had even more recorded history, such outliers wouldn't seem that exceptional - there still is a possiblity that climate change is affecting hurricanes (making them worse) but you can't just look at the variance (outliers) - trend is also (more?) important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season

LanceH 6y ago

Those warning about climate change are partially to blame. I was saying decades ago that touting the "hottest summer on record" as proof of global warming isn't actually proof and would come back to disrupt the conversation. And here we are, equally "valid" proof that global warming is not real. I'm not absolving the people intentionally distorting the facts, but the people who centered the conversation on local maxima bear some blame for the shakiness of the conversation.

gbrown 6y ago
Most discussions of temperature extremes I’ve seen focus on their change in frequency. That’s not a distortion at all, that’s a changing average (and corresponding increase in volatility).
- LanceH 6y ago
  When? As I pointed out, the stage was set for decades ago with statements like, "see how hot it is?!" I said then that it would cause problems and today you have people equally saying, "see how cold it is!" Neither is proof and now we have a muddle discussion with the media happy to run whatever stirs things up. The proper move some time ago was to center the discussion around some proxy for global temperature (avg ocean temp perhaps) instead of the variable. Even now, we shouldn't be speaking about unusual events in terms of climate change. There are more people in more places with more cameras and ability to report unusual weather.
  - gbrown 6y ago
    Most news articles these days will follow it with language like: "__ marked the hottest July on record. In fact, __ of the top ___ Julys have occurred in the last 10 years." Reputable news outlets are also good about including boilerplate like: "While we can't attribute any single event to climate change, scientists predict an increasing frequency of events like ___." Extreme event frequency is one of the most unambiguous signals of climate change that people can see and relate to. I feel like you're either consuming sub-par media or attacking a straw-man.

sakopov 6y ago

I'm trying to connect your comment to parent comment and I'm struggling to find correlations. Are you implying that there are powers at play responsible for sensationalizing weather headlines to make forecasting seem untrustworthy?