5 ms·
First, to anyone reading who has family or connections to the area – this is just awful, and there's really no words to offer that can change that. This summer
by gdubs 3y ago
First, to anyone reading who has family or connections to the area – this is just awful, and there's really no words to offer that can change that.
This summer has been absolute madness in terms of extreme weather. El Niño, combined with the reduction in shipping aerosols, against the background of just way too much human emissions building up in the atmosphere is producing some very dramatic events – many tragic.
From the extreme flooding in Vermont, to the blistering heatwaves across the southwest, China, Europe, to one freakish hail storm after another.
Many will chime in and say "it's just social media amplifying the worst", or "The Earth goes through cycles", or "how come the charts start 100 years ago". But, for anyone who's been paying attention to Climate Change for a long time now it's pretty clear that the future we've been warned about has arrived.
It's very sad that this issue was successfully politicized. We have one planet.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoXkcd’s earth temperature timeline is really helpful when addressing the “Earth goes through cycles” narrative. Like all good propaganda the statement contains some factual information. It omits the crucial fact that the current cycle is thousands of times shorter and clearly caused by us humans changing our own biosphere. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- adammarples 3y agoThis data is reconstructed, it's smoothed and acknowledges as much in the picture.
- dryrun 3y agoAnd the data from the last century, where we can see the difference in speed, is also smoothed, so that doesn't change much to the scenario we are in, does it?
- adammarples 3y agoToday's data is measured using thermometers, and averaged across the globe. The reconstructed data are composed of many different proxies, across many different studies, which are averaged out. I'm not trying to deny climate change here, I'm just saying that the reconstructed data will not capture the kind of rapid changes we're seeing now, for some time, and anyone reconstructing the 21st century from a vantage point 2000 years in the future using tree rings etc won't see the short term rapid changes we see now. The actually reconstruction methods are fascinating, and many of them contain a lot greater variance than we see in this graphic, and many of them disagree with each other too so you have to smooth things out a bit and have a best guess. That's not a restriction we have now with modern thermometers.