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They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it

They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades. Also, depending on where and how you measure, it will naturally be 'hotter' because the world is getting more urbanized. And cities are artificially hotter. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/city-hotter-countryside-urban-heat-island-science-180951985/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/city-hotter-co... Are they taking more measurements from the artificially warmer cities?

vkou 3y ago
> They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades. It's the hottest it's ever been for human civilization, and it's going to keep getting hotter and hotter.
defrost 3y ago
I'm having flashbacks to a famous decades old climate denialism talking point heavily pushed by the Koch pro oil media think tanks. One so famous that it was studied in depth by a prominent US physics professor [1] and (then) climate skeptic using some Koch funding. The results of the 2013 Berkeley Earth land temperature data analysis on urban heat islands answers your concerns: When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. [1] and The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth
- revelio 3y ago
  You missed the followup. People investigated BEST and discovered it was doing the same things with the same sorts of mistakes as other climatological temperature datasets. For example they classified the weather stations at Bangkok airport as "very rural". Like always with climatology the process they used to do all this is non-replicable, so people could see the mistakes but not diagnose how they happened or attempt to fix them. Plus, although Berkeley Earth claimed UHI was unimportant, basic checks like comparing the warming of cities vs more rural stations showed huge differences. There's also the issue that BEST has diverged drastically from satellite observations. It's not possible for both sources to be true simultaneously as they claim to be measuring the same thing. It's not hugely surprising that they claimed to investigate these concerns and then simply duplicated the bad methodologies that were being criticized in the first place. Berkeley Earth is run by a guy who has said, amongst other things, "I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium." In the same article where he said that he observed that anyone who took issue with the Mann hockey-stick history rewrites were attacked and people had engaged in mass resignations simply because papers disagreeing with it were published. There's a fundamental philosophy of science issue here that can't be resolved with the "one more study" approach. Climatologists don't attempt to improve their source data quality. They don't build and operate weather station networks, they rely on others that were built for other purposes. Although the changes they claim to be monitoring are very small (like 0.1-0.2 C per decade) they don't set up the instruments they need to obtain such precise and accurate measurements. Instead they suck up data from literally any thermometer they can find and then apply algorithms that they claim correct the bias and corruption. This isn't scientifically valid. If scientists have doubts about their source data they're supposed to use error bars, but when did you ever see a temperature graph that had error bars? They never do because many of the stations they use report uncertainty intervals of anywhere from half a degree C to even 5 degrees C. These CIs are much wider than the size of the claimed trend and would thus destroy any ability to detect warming from the ground station network. So, they rely on this algorithmic approach, but that isn't convincing due to how frequently they decided their previous algorithms were wrong and rewrite the history of the climate.
yongjik 3y ago
> People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint. Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic? It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about.
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint. I didn't make a straw man complaint. Also straw man isn't a complaint. It's a fallacious form of argument. > Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic? You completely missed my point. I don't know if it is intentional or not. Maybe this is a language issue? > It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about. No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'.
  - yongjik 3y ago
    > No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'. ... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ... We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose, and most likely quite a bit before that. It's even explained in TFA: > While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century, they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ...
    - goodbyesf 3y ago
      > ... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ... Yes. Either you don't understand what a straw man is or it really is a language issue. Is english your native language? You completely missed my original point. And you missed the point of my response. > We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose Civilization? We are talking about the 'hottest year on record'. Do you know what 'on record' means? It's only a few decades though many people mistake it to mean 'since forever'. It doesn't mean since civilization began. Also, civilization is about 5000 years old. Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. So even if it is the 'hottest' since civilization began, it really doesn't say much. > '> While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century' That's my point. Do you know what that means? > they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ... From 'on record' to agenda driven weasel words like 'almost certainly' and 'probably'. I remember it was 'almost certainly' and 'probably' likely that the world would end due to global warming by 2020.

vkou 3y ago

> They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades. It's the hottest it's ever been for human civilization, and it's going to keep getting hotter and hotter.

defrost 3y ago

I'm having flashbacks to a famous decades old climate denialism talking point heavily pushed by the Koch pro oil media think tanks. One so famous that it was studied in depth by a prominent US physics professor [1] and (then) climate skeptic using some Koch funding. The results of the 2013 Berkeley Earth land temperature data analysis on urban heat islands answers your concerns: When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. [1] and The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth

revelio 3y ago
You missed the followup. People investigated BEST and discovered it was doing the same things with the same sorts of mistakes as other climatological temperature datasets. For example they classified the weather stations at Bangkok airport as "very rural". Like always with climatology the process they used to do all this is non-replicable, so people could see the mistakes but not diagnose how they happened or attempt to fix them. Plus, although Berkeley Earth claimed UHI was unimportant, basic checks like comparing the warming of cities vs more rural stations showed huge differences. There's also the issue that BEST has diverged drastically from satellite observations. It's not possible for both sources to be true simultaneously as they claim to be measuring the same thing. It's not hugely surprising that they claimed to investigate these concerns and then simply duplicated the bad methodologies that were being criticized in the first place. Berkeley Earth is run by a guy who has said, amongst other things, "I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium." In the same article where he said that he observed that anyone who took issue with the Mann hockey-stick history rewrites were attacked and people had engaged in mass resignations simply because papers disagreeing with it were published. There's a fundamental philosophy of science issue here that can't be resolved with the "one more study" approach. Climatologists don't attempt to improve their source data quality. They don't build and operate weather station networks, they rely on others that were built for other purposes. Although the changes they claim to be monitoring are very small (like 0.1-0.2 C per decade) they don't set up the instruments they need to obtain such precise and accurate measurements. Instead they suck up data from literally any thermometer they can find and then apply algorithms that they claim correct the bias and corruption. This isn't scientifically valid. If scientists have doubts about their source data they're supposed to use error bars, but when did you ever see a temperature graph that had error bars? They never do because many of the stations they use report uncertainty intervals of anywhere from half a degree C to even 5 degrees C. These CIs are much wider than the size of the claimed trend and would thus destroy any ability to detect warming from the ground station network. So, they rely on this algorithmic approach, but that isn't convincing due to how frequently they decided their previous algorithms were wrong and rewrite the history of the climate.

yongjik 3y ago

> People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint. Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic? It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about.

goodbyesf 3y ago
> I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint. I didn't make a straw man complaint. Also straw man isn't a complaint. It's a fallacious form of argument. > Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic? You completely missed my point. I don't know if it is intentional or not. Maybe this is a language issue? > It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about. No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'.
- yongjik 3y ago
  > No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'. ... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ... We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose, and most likely quite a bit before that. It's even explained in TFA: > While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century, they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ...
  - goodbyesf 3y ago
    > ... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ... Yes. Either you don't understand what a straw man is or it really is a language issue. Is english your native language? You completely missed my original point. And you missed the point of my response. > We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose Civilization? We are talking about the 'hottest year on record'. Do you know what 'on record' means? It's only a few decades though many people mistake it to mean 'since forever'. It doesn't mean since civilization began. Also, civilization is about 5000 years old. Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. So even if it is the 'hottest' since civilization began, it really doesn't say much. > '> While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century' That's my point. Do you know what that means? > they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ... From 'on record' to agenda driven weasel words like 'almost certainly' and 'probably'. I remember it was 'almost certainly' and 'probably' likely that the world would end due to global warming by 2020.