15 ms·

Map: These are the cities that climate change will hit first

53 points by stevekinney 13y ago

vanderZwan 13y ago
This title is very misleading, in a way. It's not like there will be some magical treshold after which a city is magically "hit" by climate change. All the date indicates is the following: > A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. It's a gradual change that is already happening, and there's plenty of other side-effects of climate change that will be notable long before this artificially defined tipping point is reached.
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  All true, but the image of being hit by something is oh-so much more arresting than that of gradual, inevitable change ending life as we know it. Decades of dire warnings have done nothing to capture the public's mind on this important issue. If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not?
  - 300bps 13y ago
    If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not? Because you turn away people. I'm a conservationist that just happens to think regardless of climate change that it just makes sense to preserve finite resources like fossil fuels and clean air. When you start to use bullshit to further our similar cause, then you hurt our cause when the bullshit is exposed. I actually saw the headline and excitedly clicked on it. I was excited because with all the talk of climate change I feel like I never see anything other than abstract predictions of "x degree C raise in global temperature". I thought FINALLY tell me when coastal regions of New Jersey are going to be permanently underwater. No such luck - more abstract bullshit masquerading as something it's not. You have no idea how much this hurts people's belief in climate issues.
    - hyperbovine 13y ago
      Well, "abstract bullshit" is a bit strong; real scientific effort went into the paper and those models certainly have some predictive power. (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) If anything they are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible, but hey, welcome to science in the 21st century. Plus, something tells me that this episode has not truly shaken your belief in climate change :-) If this paper leads a few thousand skeptics to finally embrace science, I view that as a win.
      - aaronem 13y ago
        > (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome" [1], published in Nature (they published in Science too but I don't have the cite handy) -- masterfully demolished [2] by Graur et al. You might say that the ENCODE paper's authors "are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible". You might also say, inflammatory as it would probably be, that their results are "bullshit"; Graur et al. certainly seem to have taken that view, if not in such earthy fashion, and they did an excellent job of demonstrating in exhaustive detail exactly why that's so. (If you're at all familiar with the ENCODE work, but haven't read "On the Immortality of Television Sets", I strongly recommend you do so -- and that goes double if you've seen the reams of garbage in the popular science press about "the death of junk DNA".) Climate science, of course, is a much more generally contentious field than bioinformatics, and much political power attaches to it; one does not, after all, often find governments writing policy on the basis of a bioinformatics consortium's latest recommendations, while such behavior is the status quo in climate science. Were that otherwise, one wonders whether Graur and his co-authors would've found themselves unable to publish in GB&E or any recognized journal, and had to resort to doing so on a website of their own. Perhaps they could name it "Genomics Audit". As for laymen such as myself, a mere software engineer without a day's worth of tertiary education to his name, well -- all I can say is that, while evaluating the evidence for and against AGW (climate change, whatever) and developing an informed opinion of any sort requires enormous intelligence and domain knowledge, spotting propaganda does not, and neither does mistrusting propaganda once spotted. Your comment here verges upon an argument that propaganda is only evil when unvirtuously engaged in; that is, that the ends justify the means. I suggest that fallacy inheres within this line of reasoning, and that even a superficial review of the history of the 20th century suffices as demonstration. Perhaps you disagree. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11247.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature1... [2] http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.short http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.e...
colanderman 13y ago
A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. [...] Put another way, every single year after 2047 will be hotter than D.C.'s hottest year on record from 1860 to 2005. It's the moment when the old "normal" is really gone. Well, which is it, 1960-2005 or 1860-2005?
- GeneralMayhem 13y ago
  It doesn't excuse the author's inconsistency, but the reality is that it doesn't matter - the difference between 1860 and 1960 is trivial compared to the difference after that. The hottest year on record between 1860 and 2005 is probably after 1990 in most cities.
- rtpg 13y ago
  I'm guessing it's 1860 (around the beginning of most good record keeping).
SeanDav 13y ago
It used to be "Global Warming", but when that label didn't fit very well with the observed results, the label somehow became "Climate Change". This is a clever bit of public manipulation because who can argue against the fact that climate is changing....
- bjelkeman-again 13y ago
  Global warming gives the impression that you will have warming everywhere all the time. In humanly understandable terms it is better to talk about climate change, as global warming give a number of other effects. Such as wider variability of weather (stronger storms, longer dry spells, more precipitation etc). So climate change is a better description of what people can expect to see around them.
  - SeanDav 13y ago
    Throughout the entire history of our planet the climate has been changing. It was changing before Man and will be changing long afterwards. To call it "Climate Change" is utterly useless and serves only to put up a convenient label that is completely impossible to disprove, because everyone agrees - the climate is changing. What is not agreed, is the degree of change, its manifestation and the effect, if any, that Man is having on said climate change.
    - gwright 13y ago
      I'd add to that is that there is certainly no agreement on what to do about the effects of climate change. In particular I rarely if ever see a comparison between the costs of adjusting to a warmer climate (e.g. relocating low-lying communities if you think the sea level will rise) vs. the costs of radically changing our energy systems (production & usage).
  - graycat 13y ago
    You might be correct, but you are missing the bigger picture: First, the whole thing, climate change and/or global warming is a guilt trip, another morality play about sinful humans, the old trilogy of transgression, retribution, and redemption, a flim-flam, fraud scam by a few people to get power and money. So, the trasgression is, in short, the Industrial Revolution. The retribution is climate change. The redemption will, right, involve the usual -- sacrifice, in this case, send your money. The reason for talking about climate change is not the technical one but just the sales pitch: For the past 15 years or so, the predicted warming did not occur, so a memo went out to talk about climate change. Heck temperature, or average global temperature, should be easy to report, just degrees F, C, or K. Still, the usual evidence was in terms of the snows of Kilimanjaro, icebergs crashing into the sea at the ends of glaciers, and pictures of polar bears, pictures of ice in the Arctic during the summers, exploitation of the fact that due to winds and currents where the Arctic ice collects varies from year to year. BTW all those people talking about the warming of the Arctic didn't report from first hand data during the winters, right, with maybe -80 F and 80 MPH winds. A reason for that? I know: Lots of reporters tried but just didn't come back! If can pull off the warming scam using mostly just pictures of polar bears, etc. without talking about temperature, then for climate change, where the evidence is much more difficult to analyze for significant changes or trends, can be talking about absolutely nothing for centuries until finally the scam shuts down the first world economies, which is one of the goals. Or as one global warming scientist admitted, a major benefit is the collection of beneficial social changes. He had in mind that from the cooling from shutting down the Industrial Revolution teenagers on dates would have to wear lots of extra clothing and, thus, make it more likely the girl would still be a virgin when she got married??? It's a scam, guys. The science is just window dressing. Don't be gullible. It's essentially the same as the threat of a pool table in town in the movie The Music Man where the real goal was to get money and take the next train out of town. Did I mention, it's a scam? You believe that Al Guru is interested in the science? What about Tom Friedman: On a late night TV show he said that the threat of CO2 is that it absorbed sunlight. Wrong, Tom. If CO2 absorbed visible light, then we could see the CO2 as we exhaled. Instead, the issue of CO2 is that it absorbs in three narrow frequency bands, one for each of twisting, bending, and stretching of the molecule, out in the infrared, and the main source of the infrared in question is not directly from the sun but just the black (gray) body radiation of the surface of the earth warmed by absorbing the visible and UV radiation from the sun. I know, Tom, in freshman physics you were out on the quad arguing that the earth was flat. Why do the NYT and WaPo keep flogging this old horse? To have stories easy to write, for years, and get ad revenue. They have heavily just created the story so that they can write about it. Other fellow travelers in this scam include business people who want Federal Government money and politicians who, then, want kick backs, excuse me, campaign donations. Did I mention, it's a scam?
jliechti1 13y ago
Didn't see this in the article - the paper is entitled "The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability". Direct link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/pdf/nature12540.pdf http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/pdf/nature12... From the methods summary section: They used the projections of seven climate variables: near-surface air temperature, sea surface temperature, precipitation, evaporation, transpiration, surface sensible heat flux, and ocean surface pH. "For each model and variable, we used the period 1860-2005 from the historical experiment (the longest time span common to all models), to establish the historical bounds of climate variability. The projections...[were used] to simulate the period 2006-2100...to identify the year at which mean annual values of a given variable would exceed historical bounds." "In total, for all variables and experiments, we processed 89,712 years of data comprising 1,076,544 monthly global maps, interpolated to an equal-area grid with a resolution of 100 km." I think the 9 in 1960-2005 must be a typo. Everything is 1860 in the study.
joshuahedlund 13y ago
We can't even accurately project the lower bounds of average global temperature variation more than a couple decades out[0], but we can determine the lower bounds of individual cities several decades out? [0]http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...
- zalew 13y ago
  Yes, there is this special method of determining future ecological catastrophes, it's called: bullshit propaganda.
  - kenrikm 13y ago
    We can't forecast the weather two weeks out yet we claim to be able to do it 30 years out? Clearly the models are wrong however which direction they are wrong in is the crapshoot that gets people fighting on "global warming is fake/real" I don't know why they can't present it like hey guys it's not a good idea to screwup the environment lets work on fixing it instead of scare tactics and denial that both sides end up fighting over.
    - roberto 13y ago
      Weather != climate. I can't predict a coin toss, but I can say that odds will be 50:50 on the long run. If we load the coin we still won't be able to predict individual tosses, but we might estimate that the odds changed to 40:60, eg.
    - marknutter 13y ago
      Because "screw[ing] up the environment" is a pretty ambiguous expression. What does it mean, exactly, and what's the fix?
    - zalew 13y ago
      > I don't know why they can't present it like hey guys it's not a good idea Because there is a huge-ass economy hidden under 'green' politics and without the drama nobody would vote for governments that impose penalties on people using old equipment. Haven't you noticed that most 'fixes' on climate rely on buying new shit (German automotive market as the easiest example) and favor developped economies over the troubled ones?
mipapage 13y ago
"The projected timing of climate departure": http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Data.html http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Data.... Found via the Nature article. More data, less hype.
jasonkester 13y ago
The nice thing about computer models is that you get to keep changing them to move out the point where the world is definitely going to end this time for real. Surely at least one of those cities was scheduled for "climate departure" before 2013, back in the 90s when we decided to start panicking about this. Somebody bookmark this so that we can refer back to it in 2025, when the same model predicts the same thing to start happening in 2040.
nmeofthestate 13y ago
The interesting thing here is how 'if the world can substantially bring down carbon dioxide emissions', the result will be a quite minor change in outcomes (at least using this unusual departure 'milestone'). For example, highlighted in the article: Washington DC's 2069 climate if we do nothing will be the same as Washington DC's 2071 climate if we 'substantially bring down carbon dioxide emissions'. According to the article this result is "significantly mitigat[ing] the effects of climate change". The expenditure that moves that date 2 years is going to be astronomical. I WANT to be convinced that these measures make sense, but so far it all seems very flaky (not climate change - what we're doing about it).
graycat 13y ago
Yes, yes, yes, the solution is from the Mayans -- kill people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the planet from getting too hot. Right: WaPo is continuing to flog this old horse, trying to keep it going as a long list of stories easy to write for nearly automatic eyeballs and easy ad revenue.
rayiner 13y ago
I love how a discussion of climate change brings out all the armchair scientists. Who knew HN had so many lurking PhD's?
- _ak 13y ago
  Hey, when a Nobel prize winner like Ivar Giaever can understand the science behind climate change by surfing the internet for a day, then of course everyone HN can do so, too. /s (For those who don't get it: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist...)
- IanDrake 13y ago
  The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP. This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm not going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they have a PhD and a model that proclaims doom.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP. Neither is say high-speed aerodynamics. We can't predict where a particular air molecule will go in a turbulent flow. We have only approximate closed-form models, and do most work in simulation and by fitting empirical data to simplified approximate equations and tweeking constants until things come out right. Yet airplanes still fly and people don't get on the internet armchair talking about how Boeing's aerodynamicists are wrong. > This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm not going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they have a PhD and a model that proclaims doom. Deniers live in a world where people can tell them what they can and cannot do.[1] Deniers know this, so they attack the scientific conclusions because they know that the public will, quite rationally,[2] tell them what you can and cannot do if they believe there is even a substantial chance that the climate scientists are correct. [1] That's the quid pro quo isn't it? The public tells big strong guys that they can't go around killing and eating people, and consequently reserves the right to tell other people what they can and cannot do. [2] It is of course eminently rational to take even very expensive corrective action in the face of a low probability but extremely high cost negative scenario.
swamp40 13y ago
The spot where I am sitting (near Chicago) has been under 100+ feet of glacial ice at least four times in the past - most recently less than 20,000 years ago. As a reasonable thinking person, I see no reason not to expect that to happen again some day. The possibility of another ice age scares me much more than any effects from AGW. Here's what the US and Canada looked like 20,000 years ago: http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagogeo/imagesCG/glacxt.gif http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagoge...
mikeash 13y ago
It's quite amazing and sad to see the deniers come out in droves in these comments. The political forces against climate science have done such a good job at spreading disinformation, it really is impressive. I wonder if this is what it was like in the mid-1900s when the science for the dangers of tobacco was starting to really solidify and the tobacco companies were running full-bore to discredit it.
- rubidium 13y ago
  On the other side of the coin, one could wonder what it was like for those advocating craniometry to realize their pseudo-science racism was doing more harm than good. (No flame war intended: I say this only to counter your analogy.) Those who have reasonable, scientific grounds for being skeptical of anthropomorphic climate change (and there are people smarter than you or I in that boat) don't like the shrill, political-based "deniers" much. They do, however, think it's good to scientifically examine the assumptions of papers such as the one that came out in Nature today. Climate modeling is quite hard, and the conclusions climate scientists come to are open to skeptical investigation. It's certainly become a weirder field of study since politics became its main audience.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    It's great to have smart people discussing the science. As you say, it's interesting and tricky. This thread isn't full of those people - it's full of shrill deniers.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    The problem is that there are very few people with "reasonable, scientific grounds for being skeptical of anthropomorphic climate change". There certainly aren't any represented in these comments. I welcome skepticism. But what people call "skepticism" in the climate debate is nearly always blind contrarianism.
  - martythemaniak 13y ago
    The problem isn't that there's no room for disagreement. It's that the quality of the disagreements and critiques are so low, it's impossible to believe there's no alternative motive at work. Your post is a great example of this type of trash. You start off comparing one of the most researched fields, involving decades of effort spread amongst thousands of researchers around the world with a small number of people who did not even have an understanding of the mechanisms (genetics, embryology, etc) with which they were dealing. The GP's analogy works quite well, our certainty of cigarettes causing lunch cancer is about the same as the IPCC's certainty of anthropomorphic climate change. Second, apart from the normal peer-review of specific papers, there have been several large-scale attempts to "review" all of climate change. A great example is the "Climategate" fiasco, which after a review by a sceptic funded the oil industry, turned out to have been nothing but an attempted hit job on the scientists involved. Third, there is actual review and revision going on within the IPCC. One of the major differences between the 2007 and 2014 IPCC reports is the narrowing of the predicted temperature ranges. Deniers however don't seem to have the evidence to work within the normal scientific process, so instead they must engage of various types of deception and PR work to get their points across. So no, it certainly has not become a weirder field of study. It's just that people threatened by facts are trying to apply political tactics to a non-political field, much like creationist attempts to revise or silence evolution.

53 points by stevekinney 13y ago

This title is very misleading, in a way. It's not like there will be some magical treshold after which a city is magically "hit" by climate change. All the date indicates is the following: > A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. It's a gradual change that is already happening, and there's plenty of other side-effects of climate change that will be notable long before this artificially defined tipping point is reached.

hyperbovine 13y ago
All true, but the image of being hit by something is oh-so much more arresting than that of gradual, inevitable change ending life as we know it. Decades of dire warnings have done nothing to capture the public's mind on this important issue. If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not?
- 300bps 13y ago
  If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not? Because you turn away people. I'm a conservationist that just happens to think regardless of climate change that it just makes sense to preserve finite resources like fossil fuels and clean air. When you start to use bullshit to further our similar cause, then you hurt our cause when the bullshit is exposed. I actually saw the headline and excitedly clicked on it. I was excited because with all the talk of climate change I feel like I never see anything other than abstract predictions of "x degree C raise in global temperature". I thought FINALLY tell me when coastal regions of New Jersey are going to be permanently underwater. No such luck - more abstract bullshit masquerading as something it's not. You have no idea how much this hurts people's belief in climate issues.
  - hyperbovine 13y ago
    Well, "abstract bullshit" is a bit strong; real scientific effort went into the paper and those models certainly have some predictive power. (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) If anything they are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible, but hey, welcome to science in the 21st century. Plus, something tells me that this episode has not truly shaken your belief in climate change :-) If this paper leads a few thousand skeptics to finally embrace science, I view that as a win.
    - aaronem 13y ago
      > (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome" [1], published in Nature (they published in Science too but I don't have the cite handy) -- masterfully demolished [2] by Graur et al. You might say that the ENCODE paper's authors "are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible". You might also say, inflammatory as it would probably be, that their results are "bullshit"; Graur et al. certainly seem to have taken that view, if not in such earthy fashion, and they did an excellent job of demonstrating in exhaustive detail exactly why that's so. (If you're at all familiar with the ENCODE work, but haven't read "On the Immortality of Television Sets", I strongly recommend you do so -- and that goes double if you've seen the reams of garbage in the popular science press about "the death of junk DNA".) Climate science, of course, is a much more generally contentious field than bioinformatics, and much political power attaches to it; one does not, after all, often find governments writing policy on the basis of a bioinformatics consortium's latest recommendations, while such behavior is the status quo in climate science. Were that otherwise, one wonders whether Graur and his co-authors would've found themselves unable to publish in GB&E or any recognized journal, and had to resort to doing so on a website of their own. Perhaps they could name it "Genomics Audit". As for laymen such as myself, a mere software engineer without a day's worth of tertiary education to his name, well -- all I can say is that, while evaluating the evidence for and against AGW (climate change, whatever) and developing an informed opinion of any sort requires enormous intelligence and domain knowledge, spotting propaganda does not, and neither does mistrusting propaganda once spotted. Your comment here verges upon an argument that propaganda is only evil when unvirtuously engaged in; that is, that the ends justify the means. I suggest that fallacy inheres within this line of reasoning, and that even a superficial review of the history of the 20th century suffices as demonstration. Perhaps you disagree. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11247.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature1... [2] http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.short http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.e...

colanderman 13y ago

A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. [...] Put another way, every single year after 2047 will be hotter than D.C.'s hottest year on record from 1860 to 2005. It's the moment when the old "normal" is really gone. Well, which is it, 1960-2005 or 1860-2005?

GeneralMayhem 13y ago
It doesn't excuse the author's inconsistency, but the reality is that it doesn't matter - the difference between 1860 and 1960 is trivial compared to the difference after that. The hottest year on record between 1860 and 2005 is probably after 1990 in most cities.
rtpg 13y ago
I'm guessing it's 1860 (around the beginning of most good record keeping).

SeanDav 13y ago

It used to be "Global Warming", but when that label didn't fit very well with the observed results, the label somehow became "Climate Change". This is a clever bit of public manipulation because who can argue against the fact that climate is changing....

bjelkeman-again 13y ago
Global warming gives the impression that you will have warming everywhere all the time. In humanly understandable terms it is better to talk about climate change, as global warming give a number of other effects. Such as wider variability of weather (stronger storms, longer dry spells, more precipitation etc). So climate change is a better description of what people can expect to see around them.
- SeanDav 13y ago
  Throughout the entire history of our planet the climate has been changing. It was changing before Man and will be changing long afterwards. To call it "Climate Change" is utterly useless and serves only to put up a convenient label that is completely impossible to disprove, because everyone agrees - the climate is changing. What is not agreed, is the degree of change, its manifestation and the effect, if any, that Man is having on said climate change.
  - gwright 13y ago
    I'd add to that is that there is certainly no agreement on what to do about the effects of climate change. In particular I rarely if ever see a comparison between the costs of adjusting to a warmer climate (e.g. relocating low-lying communities if you think the sea level will rise) vs. the costs of radically changing our energy systems (production & usage).
- graycat 13y ago
  You might be correct, but you are missing the bigger picture: First, the whole thing, climate change and/or global warming is a guilt trip, another morality play about sinful humans, the old trilogy of transgression, retribution, and redemption, a flim-flam, fraud scam by a few people to get power and money. So, the trasgression is, in short, the Industrial Revolution. The retribution is climate change. The redemption will, right, involve the usual -- sacrifice, in this case, send your money. The reason for talking about climate change is not the technical one but just the sales pitch: For the past 15 years or so, the predicted warming did not occur, so a memo went out to talk about climate change. Heck temperature, or average global temperature, should be easy to report, just degrees F, C, or K. Still, the usual evidence was in terms of the snows of Kilimanjaro, icebergs crashing into the sea at the ends of glaciers, and pictures of polar bears, pictures of ice in the Arctic during the summers, exploitation of the fact that due to winds and currents where the Arctic ice collects varies from year to year. BTW all those people talking about the warming of the Arctic didn't report from first hand data during the winters, right, with maybe -80 F and 80 MPH winds. A reason for that? I know: Lots of reporters tried but just didn't come back! If can pull off the warming scam using mostly just pictures of polar bears, etc. without talking about temperature, then for climate change, where the evidence is much more difficult to analyze for significant changes or trends, can be talking about absolutely nothing for centuries until finally the scam shuts down the first world economies, which is one of the goals. Or as one global warming scientist admitted, a major benefit is the collection of beneficial social changes. He had in mind that from the cooling from shutting down the Industrial Revolution teenagers on dates would have to wear lots of extra clothing and, thus, make it more likely the girl would still be a virgin when she got married??? It's a scam, guys. The science is just window dressing. Don't be gullible. It's essentially the same as the threat of a pool table in town in the movie The Music Man where the real goal was to get money and take the next train out of town. Did I mention, it's a scam? You believe that Al Guru is interested in the science? What about Tom Friedman: On a late night TV show he said that the threat of CO2 is that it absorbed sunlight. Wrong, Tom. If CO2 absorbed visible light, then we could see the CO2 as we exhaled. Instead, the issue of CO2 is that it absorbs in three narrow frequency bands, one for each of twisting, bending, and stretching of the molecule, out in the infrared, and the main source of the infrared in question is not directly from the sun but just the black (gray) body radiation of the surface of the earth warmed by absorbing the visible and UV radiation from the sun. I know, Tom, in freshman physics you were out on the quad arguing that the earth was flat. Why do the NYT and WaPo keep flogging this old horse? To have stories easy to write, for years, and get ad revenue. They have heavily just created the story so that they can write about it. Other fellow travelers in this scam include business people who want Federal Government money and politicians who, then, want kick backs, excuse me, campaign donations. Did I mention, it's a scam?

jliechti1 13y ago

Didn't see this in the article - the paper is entitled "The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability". Direct link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/pdf/nature12540.pdf http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/pdf/nature12... From the methods summary section: They used the projections of seven climate variables: near-surface air temperature, sea surface temperature, precipitation, evaporation, transpiration, surface sensible heat flux, and ocean surface pH. "For each model and variable, we used the period 1860-2005 from the historical experiment (the longest time span common to all models), to establish the historical bounds of climate variability. The projections...[were used] to simulate the period 2006-2100...to identify the year at which mean annual values of a given variable would exceed historical bounds." "In total, for all variables and experiments, we processed 89,712 years of data comprising 1,076,544 monthly global maps, interpolated to an equal-area grid with a resolution of 100 km." I think the 9 in 1960-2005 must be a typo. Everything is 1860 in the study.

joshuahedlund 13y ago

We can't even accurately project the lower bounds of average global temperature variation more than a couple decades out[0], but we can determine the lower bounds of individual cities several decades out? [0]http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...

zalew 13y ago
Yes, there is this special method of determining future ecological catastrophes, it's called: bullshit propaganda.
- kenrikm 13y ago
  We can't forecast the weather two weeks out yet we claim to be able to do it 30 years out? Clearly the models are wrong however which direction they are wrong in is the crapshoot that gets people fighting on "global warming is fake/real" I don't know why they can't present it like hey guys it's not a good idea to screwup the environment lets work on fixing it instead of scare tactics and denial that both sides end up fighting over.
  - roberto 13y ago
    Weather != climate. I can't predict a coin toss, but I can say that odds will be 50:50 on the long run. If we load the coin we still won't be able to predict individual tosses, but we might estimate that the odds changed to 40:60, eg.
  - marknutter 13y ago
    Because "screw[ing] up the environment" is a pretty ambiguous expression. What does it mean, exactly, and what's the fix?
  - zalew 13y ago
    > I don't know why they can't present it like hey guys it's not a good idea Because there is a huge-ass economy hidden under 'green' politics and without the drama nobody would vote for governments that impose penalties on people using old equipment. Haven't you noticed that most 'fixes' on climate rely on buying new shit (German automotive market as the easiest example) and favor developped economies over the troubled ones?

mipapage 13y ago

"The projected timing of climate departure": http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Data.html http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Data.... Found via the Nature article. More data, less hype.

jasonkester 13y ago

The nice thing about computer models is that you get to keep changing them to move out the point where the world is definitely going to end this time for real. Surely at least one of those cities was scheduled for "climate departure" before 2013, back in the 90s when we decided to start panicking about this. Somebody bookmark this so that we can refer back to it in 2025, when the same model predicts the same thing to start happening in 2040.

nmeofthestate 13y ago

The interesting thing here is how 'if the world can substantially bring down carbon dioxide emissions', the result will be a quite minor change in outcomes (at least using this unusual departure 'milestone'). For example, highlighted in the article: Washington DC's 2069 climate if we do nothing will be the same as Washington DC's 2071 climate if we 'substantially bring down carbon dioxide emissions'. According to the article this result is "significantly mitigat[ing] the effects of climate change". The expenditure that moves that date 2 years is going to be astronomical. I WANT to be convinced that these measures make sense, but so far it all seems very flaky (not climate change - what we're doing about it).

graycat 13y ago

Yes, yes, yes, the solution is from the Mayans -- kill people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the planet from getting too hot. Right: WaPo is continuing to flog this old horse, trying to keep it going as a long list of stories easy to write for nearly automatic eyeballs and easy ad revenue.

rayiner 13y ago

I love how a discussion of climate change brings out all the armchair scientists. Who knew HN had so many lurking PhD's?

_ak 13y ago
Hey, when a Nobel prize winner like Ivar Giaever can understand the science behind climate change by surfing the internet for a day, then of course everyone HN can do so, too. /s (For those who don't get it: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist...)
IanDrake 13y ago
The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP. This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm not going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they have a PhD and a model that proclaims doom.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP. Neither is say high-speed aerodynamics. We can't predict where a particular air molecule will go in a turbulent flow. We have only approximate closed-form models, and do most work in simulation and by fitting empirical data to simplified approximate equations and tweeking constants until things come out right. Yet airplanes still fly and people don't get on the internet armchair talking about how Boeing's aerodynamicists are wrong. > This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm not going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they have a PhD and a model that proclaims doom. Deniers live in a world where people can tell them what they can and cannot do.[1] Deniers know this, so they attack the scientific conclusions because they know that the public will, quite rationally,[2] tell them what you can and cannot do if they believe there is even a substantial chance that the climate scientists are correct. [1] That's the quid pro quo isn't it? The public tells big strong guys that they can't go around killing and eating people, and consequently reserves the right to tell other people what they can and cannot do. [2] It is of course eminently rational to take even very expensive corrective action in the face of a low probability but extremely high cost negative scenario.

swamp40 13y ago

The spot where I am sitting (near Chicago) has been under 100+ feet of glacial ice at least four times in the past - most recently less than 20,000 years ago. As a reasonable thinking person, I see no reason not to expect that to happen again some day. The possibility of another ice age scares me much more than any effects from AGW. Here's what the US and Canada looked like 20,000 years ago: http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagogeo/imagesCG/glacxt.gif http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagoge...

mikeash 13y ago

It's quite amazing and sad to see the deniers come out in droves in these comments. The political forces against climate science have done such a good job at spreading disinformation, it really is impressive. I wonder if this is what it was like in the mid-1900s when the science for the dangers of tobacco was starting to really solidify and the tobacco companies were running full-bore to discredit it.

rubidium 13y ago
On the other side of the coin, one could wonder what it was like for those advocating craniometry to realize their pseudo-science racism was doing more harm than good. (No flame war intended: I say this only to counter your analogy.) Those who have reasonable, scientific grounds for being skeptical of anthropomorphic climate change (and there are people smarter than you or I in that boat) don't like the shrill, political-based "deniers" much. They do, however, think it's good to scientifically examine the assumptions of papers such as the one that came out in Nature today. Climate modeling is quite hard, and the conclusions climate scientists come to are open to skeptical investigation. It's certainly become a weirder field of study since politics became its main audience.
- DanBC 13y ago
  It's great to have smart people discussing the science. As you say, it's interesting and tricky. This thread isn't full of those people - it's full of shrill deniers.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The problem is that there are very few people with "reasonable, scientific grounds for being skeptical of anthropomorphic climate change". There certainly aren't any represented in these comments. I welcome skepticism. But what people call "skepticism" in the climate debate is nearly always blind contrarianism.
- martythemaniak 13y ago
  The problem isn't that there's no room for disagreement. It's that the quality of the disagreements and critiques are so low, it's impossible to believe there's no alternative motive at work. Your post is a great example of this type of trash. You start off comparing one of the most researched fields, involving decades of effort spread amongst thousands of researchers around the world with a small number of people who did not even have an understanding of the mechanisms (genetics, embryology, etc) with which they were dealing. The GP's analogy works quite well, our certainty of cigarettes causing lunch cancer is about the same as the IPCC's certainty of anthropomorphic climate change. Second, apart from the normal peer-review of specific papers, there have been several large-scale attempts to "review" all of climate change. A great example is the "Climategate" fiasco, which after a review by a sceptic funded the oil industry, turned out to have been nothing but an attempted hit job on the scientists involved. Third, there is actual review and revision going on within the IPCC. One of the major differences between the 2007 and 2014 IPCC reports is the narrowing of the predicted temperature ranges. Deniers however don't seem to have the evidence to work within the normal scientific process, so instead they must engage of various types of deception and PR work to get their points across. So no, it certainly has not become a weirder field of study. It's just that people threatened by facts are trying to apply political tactics to a non-political field, much like creationist attempts to revise or silence evolution.