We know and have known the earth is warming. Since there is some natural variability, we don’t set a new record every year. But if there wasn’t, we would. And so it shouldn’t be a surprise to us when we do.
It's not concerning that we are setting a new record; we know that's bound to happen. It's the pace of increase that's pushing us towards uncharted territories. We didn't anticipate these rapid changes.
It is not uncharted. The Vikings were doing agriculture in Greenland, the Romans grew wine in England as far north as Lincolnshire, bison were roaming at altitudes that cannot be found at today.
There were periods in the past warmer than it is today. Climatologists once knew this, it was uncontroversial. But when they realized they could raise the importance of their field by predicting disaster, this history became problematic and was erased.
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.
The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."
Right - global warming as a function of climate change, it's not the climate that is collapsing, it's the ecology that ~8 billion people depend on to survive that is collapsing :)
Not trying to deny anything but with the length of records and a random distribution you’d still expect “hottest year” to happen pretty often. (Somebody please do the statistics)
With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often.
In other words… setting records means something, but less than one would expect by default.
The more valid statistic is something like n of the last 30 years have been the warmest on record, or something along those lines.
It must have been so nice to experience the climate in the 1890s, imagine summers which were just nice and short, winters with beautiful, high quality and consistent snow falls and more permanently snow capped mountains.
I'm not sure which random distribution you mean ... But if you assume a normal distribution with constant mean, and, say, 100 years of records, the chances of you still getting the hottest now are very very small
It's important to keep in mind that the sensationalism we see in this sort of reporting is generally far removed from the actual science.
Most of this stuff is built on models that are constantly being improved with more data, or in some cases being skewed to meet a predetermined desired outcome.
The earth is in the final stages at the end of an ice age.
It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact. We exited a major glacial period and have been, for 11000 years, ending an ice age (a period with glacial ice at both polar regions).
CURRENTLY, the period of time we are living in, is considered interglacial despite glaciers still covering significant portions of earth. The expectation is a return to major glaciation. This would be horrible. It is also the predominant condition throughout the history of earth.
> It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact.
Who is not recognizing that fact?
Where people are disagreeing with - and you've heard this before, don't act like this is new - is that us leaving an ice age doesn't explain the rapid rise in temperature we're experiencing. Previous ice ages haven't ended this abruptly. So what does your comment add here?
People keep throwing in things like this as if it was an actual insight instead of a distraction.
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.
> 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.
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]
> 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.
Rather than AC, which just deepens the problem by increasing our energy burn rate, we need more passive solar design. Plus more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
Also: Reduce upholstered furniture, books and similar, take trash out more regularly, remove all cardboard from groceries as soon as you get them home.
> Also: Reduce upholstered furniture, books and similar, take trash out more regularly, remove all cardboard from groceries as soon as you get them home.
What? I don't understand what any of these things accomplish, let alone a common element between them.
Perhaps. But if you don't want to be a statistic counted among the dead in the next heat wave, I recommend taking your trash out, getting rid of cardboard, etc to make the temp and humidity in your space more bearable.
I will do exactly as you say, and delete my account nd never come to this nasty site. Your wish is my command. But in all seriousness this site is very awful and mostly filled with like minded close minded intellectuals that are pushing the mainstream narrative and cannot stand any real diversity of opinion. So rhe joke is on you, funny guy. You should go join a circus.
There is one coal fired plant remaining in the UK (Ratcliffe-on-Soar), roughly 1.5GW total capacity. A substantial portion of UK electricity consumption is now domestic wind, clean hydro from Norway, and low carbon nuclear from France.
Roughly 61% of electricity used came from low carbon sources over the last 12 months. The coal plant in question will be retired next year (October 2024).
The angle the press went with is that solar doesn't work when it's too hot so we need to fire up the coal. Except that day solar produced a third of the UKs power, one of its best days of the year and we didn't actually use coal after all. The entire premise of that press push was a serious distortion of reality.
Readit News
There were periods in the past warmer than it is today. Climatologists once knew this, it was uncontroversial. But when they realized they could raise the importance of their field by predicting disaster, this history became problematic and was erased.
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?Id=BFE4...
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.
The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."
We've had a few consecutive years of la nina. This year is the revenge el nino. It was going to be hotter.
We need to not be talking about "climate change" anymore.
We are here at "climate collapse".
fiddles pedantically while the world burns
Dead Comment
With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often.
In other words… setting records means something, but less than one would expect by default.
The more valid statistic is something like n of the last 30 years have been the warmest on record, or something along those lines.
It must've been quite a beautiful time witness.
No you wouldn't, it would be increasingly rare as time went on.
> With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often.
Yes? The frequency it happens is based on how fast the planet is heating.
Most of this stuff is built on models that are constantly being improved with more data, or in some cases being skewed to meet a predetermined desired outcome.
It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact. We exited a major glacial period and have been, for 11000 years, ending an ice age (a period with glacial ice at both polar regions).
CURRENTLY, the period of time we are living in, is considered interglacial despite glaciers still covering significant portions of earth. The expectation is a return to major glaciation. This would be horrible. It is also the predominant condition throughout the history of earth.
Who is not recognizing that fact?
Where people are disagreeing with - and you've heard this before, don't act like this is new - is that us leaving an ice age doesn't explain the rapid rise in temperature we're experiencing. Previous ice ages haven't ended this abruptly. So what does your comment add here?
People keep throwing in things like this as if it was an actual insight instead of a distraction.
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
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-co...
Are they taking more measurements from the artificially warmer cities?
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.
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:
and [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth
It's the hottest it's ever been for human civilization, and it's going to keep getting hotter and hotter.
Also: Reduce upholstered furniture, books and similar, take trash out more regularly, remove all cardboard from groceries as soon as you get them home.
What? I don't understand what any of these things accomplish, let alone a common element between them.
Deleted Comment
Also get ready to start installing air conditioning in your home.
Roughly 61% of electricity used came from low carbon sources over the last 12 months. The coal plant in question will be retired next year (October 2024).
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/GB
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63976805
https://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy-uk-2022.html
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/end-to-coal-power-brought...
[1] https://temperature.global/
"debunking the climate change hysteria" by munchie and the bearman
Maybe challenge the methodology?
Or the data sources?
"NOAA Global METARs NOAA One-Minute Observations (OMOs) NBDC Global Buoy Reports MADIS Mesonet Data"
Or should I ignore your comment because your HN handle is "itsanaccount"?