6 ms·

Climate Pulse

76 points by gscott 3y ago

willsoon 3y ago
It looks like anything to me.
defrost 3y ago
The graphics displayed here are based on data from the ERA5 climate reanalysis, a global dataset produced for C3S by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF): About ERA5: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysi...
oceanplexian 3y ago
So, to cherry pick an example, the chart has data from 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik. How high is the confidence in the global surface air temperature data before the existence of satellites? Because, surely, ground based measurements are going to be less accurate if not completely missing from large chunks of the planet. Antarctica alone is 5.2 million square miles. What percentage of the continent did we have accurate measurements for in the 1950s? What about Asia? How many and how accurate were the air temperature measurements in the first half of the 20th century?
- defrost 3y ago
  Given ground based measurements were used to tune and "ground truth" satellite readings your concerns are exactly arse backwards. Given the spread of civilisation across the globe and relative nearness of cities to each other (with the obvious exception of Perth, Western Australia) and the "coarseness" of a global mean .. the law of averages and the heat equations provide a mean that has high confidence. How high? Truly an exercise for the reader .. and the numerate coder with modern GIS datasets who can work backwards from 2022 data for locations only present in 1940 to "guesstimate" a mean for 2022 and compare that with the modern result using high res infill. It's not like you're the first to raise this "objection".
- kinow 3y ago
  > What about Asia? e.g. "How Well Does the ERA5 Reanalysis Capture the Extreme Climate Events Over China? Part II: Extreme Temperature" https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000149226/149105484 https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000149226/14910548... >The conclusions are as follows: the original daily temperatures (mean temperature, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature) can be well reproduced by ERA5 reanalysis over China. ERA5 tends to exhibit more misdetection for the duration of extreme temperature events than extreme temperature intensity and frequency. In addition, ERA5 performed best in the summer and worst in the winter But even in Europe the dataset can have some issues, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/4/543 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/4/543 > Comparing ERA5 with the other two datasets, ERA5 temperature presents more extreme temperature and small outliers for regions southern of 40° latitude and less extreme temperatures in areas over the Black Sea. In Scandinavia, ERA5 temperatures are more frequently extreme than the observational ones There are more articles like these on how well ERA5 captures temperature/wind speed/etc, or certain global events, extremes, anomalies, etc., in different locations and time, but I couldn't find more for your other questions (on mobile).
kinow 3y ago
Pinatubo erupted in 1991 and affected global temperature in the next years [1]. Adding 1991 and -3 to +3 years to the plot should show the trend change. > Huge quantities of particles from Pinatubo's tall ash cloud injected into the global wind system in the stratosphere. These particles affected the weather in two ways. Tiny aerosol droplets reflected sunlight away from Earth causing cooling at the surface. Scientists observed a maximum global cooling of about 1.5°C. Sunsets and sunrises were more brilliant because of the fine ash and gases high in the air. I wonder if artists painting pleinair before/after the eruption would show the intensity change of sunset/sunrises in their work too. [1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazard/stratoguide/pinfeat.html https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazard/stratoguide/pinfeat.html
- itishappy 3y ago
  Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9963082/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9963082/
drsopp 3y ago
So I guess we will need to seed the sky with dust soon. Lets just hope that we can do that in the best way possible.
- gscott 3y ago
  Yellowstone just needs one well placed nuke.
  - telesilla 3y ago
    Please, don't be giving Hollywood ideas.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Movie 2012 already kind of did it. Showed Yellowstone erupting. But, not by a nuke. Guess that would be new plot.
roughly 3y ago
Click on over to the Sea Temperature graph on that page if you’re looking for a good time.
- stavros 3y ago
  Oh yeah, comparing 2024 to 1981 was a hoot.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    Seems like an extreme jump this year.
- api 3y ago
  There's a hypothesis going around that we recently cleaned up ship fuels, and that this has had the side effect of massively increasing ocean temperatures. Turned out we may have been doing some unintentional geoengineering via sulfur emissions from shipping for years, and just stopped doing this. Should we put the sulfur back? Or maybe something else.
  - raziel2p 3y ago
    That's a very convenient explanation. Are there any good studies or research on the subject? Considering there's tons of research on the topic of global warming and climate change in general, and I don't remember hearing this hypothesis anywhere before...
    - api 3y ago
      I called it a hypothesis because I do not believe it's proven. I have heard it a few places. It would explain how sudden this shift has been.
- jijijijij 3y ago
  Holy shit. This looks bad. I mean the gradual increase is one thing, but a totally unprecedented jump in water temperatur within a year like that? Oh boy. I guess weather is gonna be wild this year... Is it related to El Nino?
xenator 3y ago
[flagged]
- drsopp 3y ago
  Why do you think it is nonsense? What would it take to convince you it's not?
  - briandear 3y ago
    Assuming Nature is correct that climate change costs just under 1% of GDP[1] in terms of extreme weather event costs. As an exercise, let’s double it to 2% of GDP. Now, given that climate mitigation is projected to cost 1-7% of GDP [2]. Economically, trying to “solve” the climate costs as much or more than it saves. It also results in a lower quality of life. For example, people not using their air conditioners because of high energy costs, or people spending 10 hours on a train rather than 2 hours on an airplane, or people being coaxed to eat insects rather than steak. Not to mention high energy costs which impact the poorest people disproportionally more than they do for the Al Gores of the world. It would seem that in terms of worldwide health, that reducing actual pollution (particulates, poisons in water, chemicals in food, carcinogens, etc.) would have a far greater positive impact on the world than trying to fight temperatures. I wholehearted support reducing environmental toxins and improving our seemingly poisoned food supply. All of this is assuming that human-derived CO2 is having a material effect on temperature, which is extremely hard to prove to a strong enough degree to warrant literally changing the entire world’s economy. During the lockdowns, California roads were almost empty. Air travel was significantly reduced worldwide, Industrial output was severely curtailed. This was true in many places across the world and yet, was there even a single degree of temperature difference? Was there even a tenth of degree effect? If shutting down the economy didn’t affect temperatures, then covering the landscape with windmills and solar panels is going to do even less. Driving up energy and transportation costs when even a near shutdown of the world economy didn’t change anything seems to be foolish. Taxing “carbon” is ridiculous. Literally everything is carbon. A tax on carbon is a tax on life itself. We might as well tax breathing. Which probably is the goal. Make breathing more expensive so fewer people choose to do it. It’s dystopian and this whole discussion in not dissimilar to the “settled science” of eugenics 100 years ago. “Science,” celebrities, and popular politicians of the day were all convinced that Eugenics would save humanity. Hitler took that idea to its natural extreme which made people realize that Eugenics wasn’t all that great when it meant that you were next in the gas chamber. “Science” was convinced on their Covid theories. The six foot social distancing was made up [4], natural immunity was ignored [5], and masks didn’t do anything, and school closures were a disaster. The “vaccine” was a joke (the first vaccine in history that made you more likely to get the disease it was supposed to prevent.) Remember when the lab leak theory wasn’t just criticized, but even sharing the theory would get you banned on social media? Yet a virus that started in a town where they had a lab doing gain of function research on viruses just like the Covid virus — it was apparently completely ridiculous to conclude that the virus came from that lab? Two weeks to flatten the curve? Really? If we got Covid so wrong despite “Science” and politicians being so sure and the pundits being so convinced that closing beaches and telling people to stay inside to day drink was safer than people going outside in the fresh air.. then is it too crazy to suspect that these same “experts” are probably wrong about other “Science” as well? Fool me once.. I’m convinced that climate policy isn’t about climate. But about an attempt to redistribute wealth and control society. [3] So yes, for many of us, this is nonsense. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1#:~:text=Climate%20change%2Dattributed%20economic%20costs%20from%20extreme%20weather%20events%20vary,annually%20over%20the%20study%20period https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1#:~:text=C.... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-023-00041-w#:~:text=Total%20costs%20of%20global%20climate,1a https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-023-00041-w#:~:text=T...). 3. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/05/thomas-piketty-it-is-impossible-to-seriously-fight-climate-change-without-a-profound-redistribution-of-wealth_6003038_23.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/05/thomas-... 4. https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottlieb-nobody-knows-where-six-foot-distancing-recommendation/amp/ https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottli... 5. https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/nih-scientist-testifies-government https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/nih-scientist...
isodev 3y ago
We’re a bit like the dinosaurs only when the asteroid is approaching, we put all our energy and resources into making NFT photos of it and train AI models to generate photos of asteroids based on a text prompt.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mchaver 3y ago
  For extra morbidity, you can even use those AI models to pretend to talk the asteroid before it hits you!
- roenxi 3y ago
  What threat are you foreseeing that is comparable to an asteroid? The linked article suggests we just had a year at about +1 degree over average and we seem to have sailed through unscathed. Unless we can link climate change to the Russia invasion of Ukraine, there seem to be bigger problems right now. Mostly linked to incompetent diplomacy rather than, say, China's industrial successes.
  - 0xdde 3y ago
    Unscathed? We just had the warmest summer on record in North America and a record-breaking wildfire season that blanketed huge swaths of the US and Canada in smoke, just to name two effects that come to mind. Clearly we'll just sail through the coming years, as well.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >a record-breaking wildfire season that blanketed huge swaths of the US and Canada in smoke, just to name two effects that come to mind I'm no climate change denier, but it seems weird to attribute this on climate change when it's arguably also caused by poor forestry management practices (ie. suppressing forest fires for decades leading to a buildup of flammable material), if not more so.
Alifatisk 3y ago
Looks like we are about to achieve a new record this summer. It sucks to see the climate slowly deteriorate while knowing there is little I can do to prevent it.
- jijijijij 3y ago
  It's a collective issue, not an impossible one. Collective issues need leaders and role models for action. You can normalize the optics of change, get involved, educate people. Additionally, you can help make your community resilient for crisis and hardship. For example, reforestation doesn't just help sequester carbon dioxide, it's also stabilizing the local weather and water cycle. Build local community networks, plant trees, prevent soil erosion, rebuild the humus layer, build water retention reservoirs. Incidentally, it's very rewarding to see living things grow and recover. If you have a garden or yard, start there maybe.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Absolute Sea Temperature trend is pretty shocking. Looks like we didn't even have a Winter, like we are starting the season out already as high as last mid summer. Right now in March, is already higher than last years peak high which was already a large increase..
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Any idea why off East Coast of US, the temperature seems to pulsate. Is this really Gulf Stream turbulent flow?
ciconia 3y ago
Oh there's nothing to worry about, AI is gonna make everything just great! /s
api 3y ago
When the full history is written, the abandonment of nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s will be credited as the major cause for severe climate change. We had an opportunity to blunt this and head it off and we didn't take it. Coal burning for electricity is the single largest source of man-made carbon emissions. If we'd kept going with nuclear the US probably would have phased out coal by the mid-2000s. We also would have built a huge nuclear supply chain, advanced reactor designs, and manufacturing abilities to scale them. The kicker is that if we'd gone down this path, China and India and other large developing economies would have copied us, taking a head start on nuclear technology by cloning our technology and deployment. Instead of being powered mostly by coal, the rise of China would have been largely powered by nuclear. Renewable energy wasn't there until very recently. We could probably replace a lot of fossil generation with solar and wind energy today, but this has come far too late to head off a significant degree of climate change. Oil, gas, and deforestation are also responsible for a lot of emissions, so phasing out coal in the late 20th century would not have stopped climate change. But it would have blunted it significantly. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel In that alternate timeline we would have emitted just a bit more than half the CO2 we've emitted to date, and would now today be looking at both the phasing out of oil for automobiles in favor of EVs and the maturation of solar, wind, and grid scale battery storage to further displace fossil generation. We'd be in the home stretch. Instead we are now looking at the inevitability of catastrophic climate change, and China is still building new coal plants. (I'm not saying it's China's fault, at least not 100%. I'm saying it's also our fault for poor leadership and for abandoning a key technology.) AI alarmists should take note. Let's say we ban AI over fear of job losses. How many jobs will be lost when the economy contracts due to demographic effects? How much harder will it be to cope with climate change with a contracting economy loaded with unserviceable debt? Let's not abandon another powerful tool over fear mongering that is significantly less grounded in reality than nuclear fear mongering.
frankbreetz 3y ago
Terrifying, the Sea temperature especially. I hear a lot of talk of this Year being extra hot due to El Nino. Hopefully that explains the extreme spike we, see last year running into this year, and it's not runaway temperature increases.
zug_zug 3y ago
So maybe a professional can speak to this, but it looks to me like the point of this website is to show that we are having two extremely suddenly outlier years in a row. Is this the case? Does this suggest that our models are wrong or that climate change could be accelerating?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

76 points by gscott 3y ago

It looks like anything to me.

The graphics displayed here are based on data from the ERA5 climate reanalysis, a global dataset produced for C3S by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF): About ERA5: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysi...

oceanplexian 3y ago

So, to cherry pick an example, the chart has data from 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik. How high is the confidence in the global surface air temperature data before the existence of satellites? Because, surely, ground based measurements are going to be less accurate if not completely missing from large chunks of the planet. Antarctica alone is 5.2 million square miles. What percentage of the continent did we have accurate measurements for in the 1950s? What about Asia? How many and how accurate were the air temperature measurements in the first half of the 20th century?

defrost 3y ago
Given ground based measurements were used to tune and "ground truth" satellite readings your concerns are exactly arse backwards. Given the spread of civilisation across the globe and relative nearness of cities to each other (with the obvious exception of Perth, Western Australia) and the "coarseness" of a global mean .. the law of averages and the heat equations provide a mean that has high confidence. How high? Truly an exercise for the reader .. and the numerate coder with modern GIS datasets who can work backwards from 2022 data for locations only present in 1940 to "guesstimate" a mean for 2022 and compare that with the modern result using high res infill. It's not like you're the first to raise this "objection".
kinow 3y ago
> What about Asia? e.g. "How Well Does the ERA5 Reanalysis Capture the Extreme Climate Events Over China? Part II: Extreme Temperature" https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000149226/149105484 https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000149226/14910548... >The conclusions are as follows: the original daily temperatures (mean temperature, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature) can be well reproduced by ERA5 reanalysis over China. ERA5 tends to exhibit more misdetection for the duration of extreme temperature events than extreme temperature intensity and frequency. In addition, ERA5 performed best in the summer and worst in the winter But even in Europe the dataset can have some issues, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/4/543 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/4/543 > Comparing ERA5 with the other two datasets, ERA5 temperature presents more extreme temperature and small outliers for regions southern of 40° latitude and less extreme temperatures in areas over the Black Sea. In Scandinavia, ERA5 temperatures are more frequently extreme than the observational ones There are more articles like these on how well ERA5 captures temperature/wind speed/etc, or certain global events, extremes, anomalies, etc., in different locations and time, but I couldn't find more for your other questions (on mobile).

kinow 3y ago

Pinatubo erupted in 1991 and affected global temperature in the next years [1]. Adding 1991 and -3 to +3 years to the plot should show the trend change. > Huge quantities of particles from Pinatubo's tall ash cloud injected into the global wind system in the stratosphere. These particles affected the weather in two ways. Tiny aerosol droplets reflected sunlight away from Earth causing cooling at the surface. Scientists observed a maximum global cooling of about 1.5°C. Sunsets and sunrises were more brilliant because of the fine ash and gases high in the air. I wonder if artists painting pleinair before/after the eruption would show the intensity change of sunset/sunrises in their work too. [1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazard/stratoguide/pinfeat.html https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazard/stratoguide/pinfeat.html

itishappy 3y ago
Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9963082/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9963082/

drsopp 3y ago

So I guess we will need to seed the sky with dust soon. Lets just hope that we can do that in the best way possible.

gscott 3y ago
Yellowstone just needs one well placed nuke.
- telesilla 3y ago
  Please, don't be giving Hollywood ideas.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Movie 2012 already kind of did it. Showed Yellowstone erupting. But, not by a nuke. Guess that would be new plot.

roughly 3y ago

Click on over to the Sea Temperature graph on that page if you’re looking for a good time.

stavros 3y ago
Oh yeah, comparing 2024 to 1981 was a hoot.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  Seems like an extreme jump this year.
api 3y ago
There's a hypothesis going around that we recently cleaned up ship fuels, and that this has had the side effect of massively increasing ocean temperatures. Turned out we may have been doing some unintentional geoengineering via sulfur emissions from shipping for years, and just stopped doing this. Should we put the sulfur back? Or maybe something else.
- raziel2p 3y ago
  That's a very convenient explanation. Are there any good studies or research on the subject? Considering there's tons of research on the topic of global warming and climate change in general, and I don't remember hearing this hypothesis anywhere before...
  - api 3y ago
    I called it a hypothesis because I do not believe it's proven. I have heard it a few places. It would explain how sudden this shift has been.
jijijijij 3y ago
Holy shit. This looks bad. I mean the gradual increase is one thing, but a totally unprecedented jump in water temperatur within a year like that? Oh boy. I guess weather is gonna be wild this year... Is it related to El Nino?

xenator 3y ago

[flagged]

drsopp 3y ago
Why do you think it is nonsense? What would it take to convince you it's not?
- briandear 3y ago
  Assuming Nature is correct that climate change costs just under 1% of GDP[1] in terms of extreme weather event costs. As an exercise, let’s double it to 2% of GDP. Now, given that climate mitigation is projected to cost 1-7% of GDP [2]. Economically, trying to “solve” the climate costs as much or more than it saves. It also results in a lower quality of life. For example, people not using their air conditioners because of high energy costs, or people spending 10 hours on a train rather than 2 hours on an airplane, or people being coaxed to eat insects rather than steak. Not to mention high energy costs which impact the poorest people disproportionally more than they do for the Al Gores of the world. It would seem that in terms of worldwide health, that reducing actual pollution (particulates, poisons in water, chemicals in food, carcinogens, etc.) would have a far greater positive impact on the world than trying to fight temperatures. I wholehearted support reducing environmental toxins and improving our seemingly poisoned food supply. All of this is assuming that human-derived CO2 is having a material effect on temperature, which is extremely hard to prove to a strong enough degree to warrant literally changing the entire world’s economy. During the lockdowns, California roads were almost empty. Air travel was significantly reduced worldwide, Industrial output was severely curtailed. This was true in many places across the world and yet, was there even a single degree of temperature difference? Was there even a tenth of degree effect? If shutting down the economy didn’t affect temperatures, then covering the landscape with windmills and solar panels is going to do even less. Driving up energy and transportation costs when even a near shutdown of the world economy didn’t change anything seems to be foolish. Taxing “carbon” is ridiculous. Literally everything is carbon. A tax on carbon is a tax on life itself. We might as well tax breathing. Which probably is the goal. Make breathing more expensive so fewer people choose to do it. It’s dystopian and this whole discussion in not dissimilar to the “settled science” of eugenics 100 years ago. “Science,” celebrities, and popular politicians of the day were all convinced that Eugenics would save humanity. Hitler took that idea to its natural extreme which made people realize that Eugenics wasn’t all that great when it meant that you were next in the gas chamber. “Science” was convinced on their Covid theories. The six foot social distancing was made up [4], natural immunity was ignored [5], and masks didn’t do anything, and school closures were a disaster. The “vaccine” was a joke (the first vaccine in history that made you more likely to get the disease it was supposed to prevent.) Remember when the lab leak theory wasn’t just criticized, but even sharing the theory would get you banned on social media? Yet a virus that started in a town where they had a lab doing gain of function research on viruses just like the Covid virus — it was apparently completely ridiculous to conclude that the virus came from that lab? Two weeks to flatten the curve? Really? If we got Covid so wrong despite “Science” and politicians being so sure and the pundits being so convinced that closing beaches and telling people to stay inside to day drink was safer than people going outside in the fresh air.. then is it too crazy to suspect that these same “experts” are probably wrong about other “Science” as well? Fool me once.. I’m convinced that climate policy isn’t about climate. But about an attempt to redistribute wealth and control society. [3] So yes, for many of us, this is nonsense. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1#:~:text=Climate%20change%2Dattributed%20economic%20costs%20from%20extreme%20weather%20events%20vary,annually%20over%20the%20study%20period https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1#:~:text=C.... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-023-00041-w#:~:text=Total%20costs%20of%20global%20climate,1a https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-023-00041-w#:~:text=T...). 3. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/05/thomas-piketty-it-is-impossible-to-seriously-fight-climate-change-without-a-profound-redistribution-of-wealth_6003038_23.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/05/thomas-... 4. https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottlieb-nobody-knows-where-six-foot-distancing-recommendation/amp/ https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottli... 5. https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/nih-scientist-testifies-government https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/nih-scientist...

isodev 3y ago

We’re a bit like the dinosaurs only when the asteroid is approaching, we put all our energy and resources into making NFT photos of it and train AI models to generate photos of asteroids based on a text prompt.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mchaver 3y ago
For extra morbidity, you can even use those AI models to pretend to talk the asteroid before it hits you!
roenxi 3y ago
What threat are you foreseeing that is comparable to an asteroid? The linked article suggests we just had a year at about +1 degree over average and we seem to have sailed through unscathed. Unless we can link climate change to the Russia invasion of Ukraine, there seem to be bigger problems right now. Mostly linked to incompetent diplomacy rather than, say, China's industrial successes.
- 0xdde 3y ago
  Unscathed? We just had the warmest summer on record in North America and a record-breaking wildfire season that blanketed huge swaths of the US and Canada in smoke, just to name two effects that come to mind. Clearly we'll just sail through the coming years, as well.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >a record-breaking wildfire season that blanketed huge swaths of the US and Canada in smoke, just to name two effects that come to mind I'm no climate change denier, but it seems weird to attribute this on climate change when it's arguably also caused by poor forestry management practices (ie. suppressing forest fires for decades leading to a buildup of flammable material), if not more so.

Alifatisk 3y ago

Looks like we are about to achieve a new record this summer. It sucks to see the climate slowly deteriorate while knowing there is little I can do to prevent it.

jijijijij 3y ago
It's a collective issue, not an impossible one. Collective issues need leaders and role models for action. You can normalize the optics of change, get involved, educate people. Additionally, you can help make your community resilient for crisis and hardship. For example, reforestation doesn't just help sequester carbon dioxide, it's also stabilizing the local weather and water cycle. Build local community networks, plant trees, prevent soil erosion, rebuild the humus layer, build water retention reservoirs. Incidentally, it's very rewarding to see living things grow and recover. If you have a garden or yard, start there maybe.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Absolute Sea Temperature trend is pretty shocking. Looks like we didn't even have a Winter, like we are starting the season out already as high as last mid summer. Right now in March, is already higher than last years peak high which was already a large increase..

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Any idea why off East Coast of US, the temperature seems to pulsate. Is this really Gulf Stream turbulent flow?

ciconia 3y ago

Oh there's nothing to worry about, AI is gonna make everything just great! /s

api 3y ago

When the full history is written, the abandonment of nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s will be credited as the major cause for severe climate change. We had an opportunity to blunt this and head it off and we didn't take it. Coal burning for electricity is the single largest source of man-made carbon emissions. If we'd kept going with nuclear the US probably would have phased out coal by the mid-2000s. We also would have built a huge nuclear supply chain, advanced reactor designs, and manufacturing abilities to scale them. The kicker is that if we'd gone down this path, China and India and other large developing economies would have copied us, taking a head start on nuclear technology by cloning our technology and deployment. Instead of being powered mostly by coal, the rise of China would have been largely powered by nuclear. Renewable energy wasn't there until very recently. We could probably replace a lot of fossil generation with solar and wind energy today, but this has come far too late to head off a significant degree of climate change. Oil, gas, and deforestation are also responsible for a lot of emissions, so phasing out coal in the late 20th century would not have stopped climate change. But it would have blunted it significantly. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel In that alternate timeline we would have emitted just a bit more than half the CO2 we've emitted to date, and would now today be looking at both the phasing out of oil for automobiles in favor of EVs and the maturation of solar, wind, and grid scale battery storage to further displace fossil generation. We'd be in the home stretch. Instead we are now looking at the inevitability of catastrophic climate change, and China is still building new coal plants. (I'm not saying it's China's fault, at least not 100%. I'm saying it's also our fault for poor leadership and for abandoning a key technology.) AI alarmists should take note. Let's say we ban AI over fear of job losses. How many jobs will be lost when the economy contracts due to demographic effects? How much harder will it be to cope with climate change with a contracting economy loaded with unserviceable debt? Let's not abandon another powerful tool over fear mongering that is significantly less grounded in reality than nuclear fear mongering.

frankbreetz 3y ago

Terrifying, the Sea temperature especially. I hear a lot of talk of this Year being extra hot due to El Nino. Hopefully that explains the extreme spike we, see last year running into this year, and it's not runaway temperature increases.

zug_zug 3y ago

So maybe a professional can speak to this, but it looks to me like the point of this website is to show that we are having two extremely suddenly outlier years in a row. Is this the case? Does this suggest that our models are wrong or that climate change could be accelerating?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]