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Climate Spiral [video]
- YashdharaC 4y agoLoved this 'climate spiral' designed by Prof. Ed Hawkins at Univ. Reading. The visualization presents monthly global temperature anomalies between the years 1880-2021. Data came from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), a NASA laboratory.
- pvaldes 4y agoVery cool and clever plot. How it was done?
- photochemsyn 4y agoI think it's based on the plots they have on big storage freezers in in the biology world. These circular plotters are used because if there's a temperature spike (power failure etc.) at midnight for some reason you can see it next day by glancing at the plot. For this, they're basically just taking the normal temperature graph plot and wrapping it around a year over and over again. Mathematically, a switch to polar coordinates would be used I think.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoJust gotta accelerate thru this brah
- titzer 4y agoYerp, they forgot to add all the shareholder value that was created
- backtoyoujim 4y agoMaybe the real treasure was the production surplus stolen from the proletariat along the way.
- enviclash 4y agoThese are actually great ideas for discussing more figures, with a focus on the human dimensions of global change.
- smitty1e 4y agoI find data presented in such a manner, without comment, quite a bit more compelling than much of what passes for debate these days.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoAll debate will soon be settled by reality.
- chasing 4y agoA significant part of the debate is simply scientists going, "please, for the love of god, look at the data."
- LoveGracePeace 4y agoThere are a few real scientists who realize there is too little actual data on a geologic scale to do anything more than paint pretty but meaningless graphs.
- adrianN 4y agoThe majority consensus among climate scientists is that's is getting warmer due to human emissions and the error bars on "how much warmer" are not big enough to justify continuing business as usual. But even if you believe that we don't have the data for accurate predictions, that is not an excuse not to be concerned. Quite on the contrary, it could be much worse than what the IPCC reports.
- incomingpain 4y ago>A significant part of the debate is simply scientists going, "please, for the love of god, look at the data." Nobody! wants to look at the data. Climate change isn't about science or data anymore. It's about politics. The first group of climate change I find are the doomers. They got bored with Mayan calendars and Y2k dates. They jumped into climate change and we are literally on the verge of extinction always. When deadlines come and go, they just give us another 10 years. Right now, we have 10 years left until we are all dead. Climate change is the equivalent of 4 nuclear bombs a second... This is also the group who sees political violence as necessary because by not solving climate change you are literally killing them. So they will be politically violent to get their way. Self-defence right? The next group is the politicos whose 'solution' to climate change is a planned economy. Nothing really to do with fixing climate change. Unanimously voted against in the USA multiple times now. Hilariously even named after Roosevelt's new deal which never survived. Realize government expands constantly and virtually never cancels stuff. Yet the new deal by roosevelt was so destructive that it has been entirely dismantled. The next group are the investors or financial incentives. They have significant financial benefit to see at least temporarily a big boost to climate change related stocks. Great long term investments and I have invested this way, but this group isn't about climate change, they are in it for the $. Climate scientist? You're never going to speak against your own team. Your job security depends upon you also pushing that the climate is blowing up. Otherwise what are you being paid for? Then you have the worst group. The 'you're a science denier' group. They have no intention to look at or even consider the data. If you don't accept the unscientific 'consensus' from financially biased climate scientists. Then you're a science denier. How about the very real problem that climate science is REALLY BAD. Nothing is ever reproduced. Nothing is ever peer reviewed. Correlation factors are less than 10%. Huge history of failed predictions and flawed systems. Climate science is worse in terms of replication crisis than psychology. Even better... this is the group who produces the illegitimate content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... So what are those black/red dots for predicted 2050 and 2100 ranges? IPCC AR5 RCP8.5 is very official sounding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway#RCP_8.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... Seriously... the picked the most blown out of proportion prediction that is certainly not going to happen as the best option for this graph? They had to do that though didn't they.
- MrsPeaches 4y agoI really like this one as well: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4978 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4978
- TSiege 4y agoWow. Really doesn’t paint a happy picture for the northern hemisphere
- moistly 4y agoIndustrialization happened first and most in the northern hemisphere, so it makes sense that there’s a larger co2 warming effect.
- gmuslera 4y agoIt is important to show that the warming and anomalies are uneven, because in the north (specially over the northern polar circle) a few positive feedback loops happen, like permafrost thawing that emits CO2 and methane that were frozen there for very long time. I'm not sure that that reinforcement of the trends were taken into account in old models, or how much it can accelerate things over old predictions that may still be used to dictate policies.
- Wohlf 4y agoVery cool visualization! What are the causes of the rapid acceleration starting in the 80s, I assume globalization had something to do with it?
- dgb23 4y agoClimate effects are typically delayed by decades.
- turtledove 4y agoThe post war era saw a huge jump in resource usage, and the discovery of the Haber process resulted in huge agricultural returns, enabling a massive population spike.
- LoveGracePeace 4y agoThe post war era led to the massive population spike, not improved farming. Anyone apart from their honey for more than a week knows that.
- turtledove 4y agoIt's not so simple. Haber's process increased the population the globe could support by billions. So yes, baby boomers came from post war era, but global availability of food meant that the generations following didn't starve or cap out.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 4y agoProbably what sibling comment said, and the economic boom after WW2. This op-ed[1][2] says: > For a few years, I’ve startled people by pointing out that over half of all of the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that have ever been produced in the history of humanity have been produced in the past 30 years — since Al Gore published his first book on warming; since the U.N. established its climate-change body, the I.P.C.C.; since the premiere of “Friends.” Which is fucking shocking. Later on he says "At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the global promise was to avoid “dangerous” warming.", if I were the editor I'd point out that's 30 years ago and that he should add something like "the cutoff-year after which we've emitted in 30 years the same amount of fossil fuel emissions of the last several millennia until that point". Obviously this is "citation needed" territory, but I'm relying on the reputation of NYT to have hired a researcher that backs up what he's written with hard data. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/india-heat-wave-pakistan-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/india-heat-wave-p... [2] https://archive.ph/GTtXP https://archive.ph/GTtXP
- a-dub 4y agoso here's a fun question: it's become quite trendy in policy circles in california to incentivize the removal of lawns and gardens as part of water conservation efforts. doesn't removal of fertile topsoil and replacement of it with rocks and cacti at scale actually reduce carbon sequestration and heat absorption capacity?
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoThe water conservation need outweighs the marginal carbon sequestration I’d imagine.
- Victerius 4y agoWhat was the vegetation like before humans arrived? We should go back to that.
- ceejayoz 4y agoGrassy lawns and lush gardens in dry areas require so much water any water any possible benefit of carbon sequestration is counterbalanced by the irrigation infrastructure required.
- 0des 4y agoDo cashew farms and strawberries next
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- gwbushey 4y ago
- callumprentice 4y agoI made an interactive version 4 years ago. https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/climate_temperature_change/index.html https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/climate_temperature_ch... - I should probably update it with recent climate data.
- veltas 4y agoThis visualisation is misleading because the visual area covered increases quadratically as the radius increases, and (less misleading) the velocity of the 'pen' increases linearly too. But it's measuring a difference (not an absolute quantity): so velocity and (especially) area are arbitrary. I could take the same graph and apply it to the period between 1890 and 1945 and it would seem just as concerning, with a different scale.
- alfor 4y agoThe change of color also and the fact that it’s temperature anomalies, not average temperature. I wonder what is actually behind ’temperature anomalies’, what does it mean, how is it calculated?
- veltas 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly As I understand it, this is a more useful number when trying to measure changes of average temperature over time.
- alfor 4y agoOk, I found the answer: it’s supposed to be the average of the difference of temperature over close to a million of region on the earth.
- turtledove 4y agoHere's the data source, which includes links out to papers on how the data is collected and calculated. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
- titzer 4y agoIt could be misleading the other way too, if the starting radius was extremely large and the increments very small, then it could be made to look like no big deal. But that's the thing with temperature. We rarely start graphs at absolute zero (-273C), so what's your point again?
- LoveGracePeace 4y agoCool graphic from NASA. The Earth has been around for 4 billion years. When we have 1 million year's worth of temperature measuring, we might then be able to comprehend the Earth's environment on a geologic scale as well as human impact, if any.
- piva00 4y agoIs it my impression or are you denying that anthropological climate change is a thing and leaning to: only empiricism over a period that is as long as human kind has existed will enable us to know if humans are changing global climate? Just want to know before assuming too much.
- titzer 4y ago> The Earth has been around for 4 billion years. And maybe when you've been around on this Earth for 200 million years you'll understand how pissed off most lifeforms are that we are quickly eradicating the places where they live.
- Geee 4y agoIt's misleading to imply that this is an exponential process, rather than an S-curve. If we look where all the oil came from, we could deduce that by burning it all we would be just going back to similar environment. I.e. the absolute worst thing that could happen is a tropical paradise.
- turtledove 4y agoThe problem is not the end state, it's the speed at which we are approaching that end state. Think about a car moving down the highway, when you gradually apply the brake, you can safely decelerate to 0. When you hit a stationary barrier, getting to 0 is potentially deadly and also damages the car. Rapid climate change kills species, disrupts supply chains, increases damaging weather like hurricanes, destroys agricultural lands, and erodes shorelines. All of which we could cope with over thousands or millions of years. But doing it over hundreds is going to be a catastrophe.
- Geee 4y agoAgree. Still, most people seem to be under the impression that there's a "tipping point" and then temperatures will spiral into infinity. It's disruptive, but nature and humanity is adaptive. Many species will also thrive, and total agricultural output will rise with more co2 in atmosphere.
- adrianN 4y agoThe transition from today's world to tropical paradise would include mass extinctions and a lot of human suffering.
- hotpotamus 4y agoThe real question is - is any of that human suffering going to be my own?
- EForEndeavour 4y agoA "tropical paradise" at the poles, with uninhabitable equatorial regions, and untold disruption to human civilization as we know it. The transition to that global configuration is unlikely to look paradisal.
- spicyusername 4y agoTo be honest, for a problem that's only been around for 50 years and that requires major technological and economic disruption combined with global geopolitical cooperation to solve, I'd say we, as a species are doing pretty good at coming together to combat climate change. Is it easy to imagine going faster, easily. Are we doing absolutely everything we can, assuredly not. Is there still going to be dramatic ecological fallout, definitely. But still... humanity's historical track record for these kinds of changes is on the order of centuries or millennia, not decades.
- Deritiod 4y agoOn the other hand we never had so much knowledge. Your comment reads as an excuse in why it's okay that we are that slow.
- sizzle 4y agoThese visualizations are so simple to understand and shocking to the core. We need more examples like this in mainstream media.
- YashdharaC 4y agoDo you think if people saw more of these in mainstream media there would be more action demanded by them from their governments/policy makers?
- sizzle 4y agoYes I can see them reaching a wider audience and having more impact