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You can grab global average temperature data from NOAA[1] or NASA[2] and play with it yourself. Things immediately jump out at me, such as: Of the top 20 hotte
by falcrist 5y ago
You can grab global average temperature data from NOAA[1] or NASA[2] and play with it yourself.
Things immediately jump out at me, such as: Of the top 20 hottest years on record, the only one that isn't from the past 20 years is 1998. The year that got bumped out of the top 20 is 2008, which sits at 21st place. That seems like a pretty clear trend to me.
[1] - https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/ytd/12/1880-2020 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/globe/land_...
[2] - https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_Mean_Estimates_based_on_Land_and_Ocean_Data/graph.txt https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...
- soco 5y agoAnd then come people saying "oh but there were always ups and downs". Hockey stick or not, natural causes or human causes debate aside, what this argument forgets is that insects and animals and plants and by extension humans will suffer through this a lot and we know we can mitigate it by lowering our own emissions. So why not doing it, even if the catastrophe would be from natural causes? Don't we want to avoid a natural catastrophe even if it's natural? Everybody agrees we should blast an incoming asteroid and nobody proposes to let it hit because "yeah we had already a few during history"...
- 5560675260 5y agoAlternative to suffering from rising temperatures is adapting to them. Lowering emissions is also going to cause suffering and might be as effective as blasting (into general direction of an) asteroid with a water cannon.
- adrianN 5y ago"Adapting" to higher temperatures will mean moving at least tens of millions of people away from their homes because the area becomes inhospitable. Large refugee streams tend to cause a lot of suffering, both for the refugees as well as in the countries where they go to.
- soco 5y agoLet's take a step back and look at the entire picture: Earth is not only people. Where can we move the refugees if the bees are dying off?
- falcrist 5y agoAs climate undergoes significant shifts and certain regions become more or less habitable, there will be wars over resources. It's essentially inevitable that conflict will arise under such circumstances. "Large refugee streams" is really an understatement. The US Department of Defense has done risk analyses regarding this exact topic. Here's one that got some media attention: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/21/2002877353/-1/-1/0/DOD-CLIMATE-RISK-ANALYSIS-FINAL.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/21/2002877353/-1/-1/0/DOD...
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoWe probably can't adapt fast enough. Change sea level a few inches - coral reefs die off and start regrowing at the new optimal shore location. It takes 100 years to rebuild. Meanwhile fish populations oscillate. When they are low, people (2B of them) go hungry. Hungry people protest, governments change or fall, wars start. Remember those thousands of Syrian refugees that caused such a stir? That was a few thousand people. Raise that to 10,000, then 100,000, then 1M, then 10M, then 100M. We have no conceivable way to humanely cope with worldwide upset of that magnitude. If it comes to pass, it will surely collapse civilization. As it has repeatedly in the past - Mayan, Babylonian, everybody throughout human history. And that's just fish.
- ipspam 5y agoIf we are coming out of an ice age, should this not generally be true? The more accurate the measurements, the more records ascertained.
- falcrist 5y agoWe're not coming out of an ice age. Changes in temperature are not only much faster than they have been in the past, they're rapidly accelerating.