The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.
I wasn't aware I had weaponised their personal faults, or indeed claimed that what they said was indicative of being a personal fault. I read his post, and then read some more of his writing, and simply felt it would be worth posting what I read in this thread. For me at least, it was a useful experience that changed some of what I was reading into the commentary surrounding the data. YMMV.
The El Niño reading there corresponds with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapsing.
The result of such a collapse is a complete upheaval of global climate patterns, destroying agricultural production on a civilization-ending scale.
Generally, the actual seriousness of these things is so out of proportions for normal people, they have great difficulty appreciating it properly. Taking their hunches from public postures and stances assumed by "authority" figures on the matter doesn't help.
That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.
the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
I'd push back.on blaming the populace for this: the widespread belief in general polls is that the climate situation is dire and that drastic measures need to be taken.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
You're right about the general sentiment acknowledging the seriousness only when you look at the center and left of society. The majority in the US however supports or tolerates the actual political decisions made, contradicting that level of importance.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
Throwing everything animal under the bus is not warranted. CAFOs and grain heavy operations certainly. Regenerative ag using animals on pasture is an amazing carbon sink. I agree that the factories using petroleum grown grains as feed are terrible.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.
There are strategic reasons for this, of course.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
"It's complicated"
* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.
* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).
* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are
-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.
-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.
-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.
-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).
* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.
( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)
There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have managed to stop growth in their carbon emissions and are on the cusp of reducing them.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
If we assume that governments aren't going to address climate change and coordination between private citizens is unlikely to be enough to stop it, has anyone written anything on what individuals should do to avoid its effects?
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.
It’s going to be very hard to avoid global phenomena. On top of that, predicting higher order effects on a system this complex is hard.
I live in the PNW on the Canadian side of the border (PSW?) where people have argued that we might be a climate change safe haven due to plentiful water and a temperate climate. That hasn’t stopped us from having extreme weather events. In the past five years we have seen a heat wave that killed hundreds, floods that cut us off from the rest of Canada for weeks, concerns about water supply since our summer water supply relies on snowmelt, and we are getting less snow and more rain in the winter. Fire and dangerous smoke over huge parts of the province is now a given from mid July onwards.
The list goes on, but the point is that there is no avoiding its effects.
I think that kind of breathless excited tone is justified by the subject matter. Unlike the usual LinkedIn posts this is actually about a pretty dire situation.
People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.
Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
The nations with the strongest militaries are also the largest emitters. Attempting to force these countries into compliance might not be the smartest move.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.
I posted a comment earlier about how 1982-1983 (the start of the data) had a historically severe El Nino, and the comment got shadowbanned. I don't understand why that happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for months, but when it does it's always on innocuous factual comments, it's weird.
Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November, with higher temperatures than the average in this period, but I would like a climatologist to explain this, draw correlations etc. The original post is a weird LLM-mediated mix of vague scaremongering with some easy piling on journalism "just because". So what am I supposed to with it? Nothing, because it's written by an LLM, I guess.
> Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November
That's what El Niño is about: instead of declining after a peak in June, temperature plateaus and then rise again later in the year.
So the fact that the Pacific is much hotter than it was in 2015 is particularly scary, because it leads us to believe that it will also be this hotter than 2015 in November.
I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
I think it is the other way around: SD is calculated from 1982-2020, while all measurement readings in the plot are 1982-2026. I believe this is meant to not introduce an unwanted shift but compare to sort of a 'stable process'. However, that should have been described and argued somewhere.
> Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present
my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.
It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.
This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.
Assuming the measurements are independent samples from a normal distribution. Which they of course aren't, as measurements of adjacent days are obviously correlated (if they were independent, a 1-in-7000 event could be expected to happen on about 2 days within a 44-year span). Now the question is what the nature of the deviation is.
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
Yes there are. Scientists compare the measurements from both methods in the time when there's data from both. For example ice cores formed last decade should match direct temperature measurements from last decade. It's the same way the oldest rings from living trees are matched against the newest rings from tree fossils, and radiocarbon dating is checked against all of that.
That does not look very reliable to me, because that implies certain things are only affected by ambient temperature.
Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
>Past precipitation can be used to reconstruct past palaeoclimatic temperatures. δD and δ18O is related to surface temperature at middle and high latitudes. The relationship is consistent and linear over Antarctica[9]...
I think this is also flawed, because this computation requires the ratio of the isotopes in the atmosphere at the period of interest, which we don't have. And the people making this measurement just seem to assume it would certain value derived from the present, which is also unreliable...
So yea, all things considered, pretty unreliable..
It seems like you're on the trajectory to refuting all historical measurements altogether. In that case, I can't help you. Good luck. I suggest the philosophy of Last Tuesdayism, it may interest you.
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
I'm not an ice core scientist. I suggest you ask them for detailed specifications. But the way you have posed the question strongly suggests that you will not be satisfied with any possible answer. Anything short of your eyes laying upon a thermometer will always be "not reliable enough", and thermometers only record the current temperature.
Within the 1982-2026 span there is an equally negative 3.5 sigmas deviation somewhere (no year labels on the graph). The article doesn't touch on it at all so I have no context as to what it could be. But it definitely suggests 3.5 sigmas is not really 1 in 7000 years.
Yes, it is worth looking at. My thinking was, how fast did that sequence revert back to the’mean’? It doesn’t take away from the author’s message though.
> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)
This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems.
And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.
Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.
"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Why does it have to be one or the other? 7+ billion small actions add up; power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
> power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
It’s a tough sell. The impact of you turning your AC a little bit colder or having a bigger car is almost unmeasurable on a global basis yet the benefits to you personally are probably pretty big.
The reality is that what is in our control is very, very little, and we’re squabbling like mad among ourselves because I had a piece of beef for lunch.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.
That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.
Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.
This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of
The large industry largely emits to help us build and maintain our too-large homes, and fill our large houses with junk. So it would help reduce those, too.
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.
Cool, so what have you personally done to reduce your co2 emissions? How do your co2 emissions compare to the global average? Or are you just pretending the problem is other people?
A collection of individuals, some of whose actions have a billion times more impact than others, and those powerful individuals hate human civilization.
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc.
Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers.
We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.
It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.
> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.
This website is making heavy use of IP range blocking. Here's an uncensored link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyreb...
Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533
The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-o...
It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.
It reads to me as a prediction, not a desire: if we don't prevent NTHE then NTHE will happen.
I wasn't aware I had weaponised their personal faults, or indeed claimed that what they said was indicative of being a personal fault. I read his post, and then read some more of his writing, and simply felt it would be worth posting what I read in this thread. For me at least, it was a useful experience that changed some of what I was reading into the commentary surrounding the data. YMMV.
Interestingly web.archive.org is blocked for me but TFA isn't.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble.
Lol
The El Niño reading there corresponds with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapsing.
The result of such a collapse is a complete upheaval of global climate patterns, destroying agricultural production on a civilization-ending scale.
Generally, the actual seriousness of these things is so out of proportions for normal people, they have great difficulty appreciating it properly. Taking their hunches from public postures and stances assumed by "authority" figures on the matter doesn't help.
If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?
Incredibly poor communication is the hallmark of climate activism
That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.
I thought it was quite effective. I read the whole thing in anticipation, and was still shocked by the graph.
Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/
Thanks. Those are much better than the graph trash in the original article.
Though the graph is ten years old. Why is it so hard to find recent data? :-(
This is the most recent version I have found:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/
this is incredible graph work (despite the bleak subject)
Polar coordinates are such a nice way to visualise periodic data.
These are nice if you are scientifically literate but I suspect not so great for the lay
the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
I'd push back.on blaming the populace for this: the widespread belief in general polls is that the climate situation is dire and that drastic measures need to be taken.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
You're right about the general sentiment acknowledging the seriousness only when you look at the center and left of society. The majority in the US however supports or tolerates the actual political decisions made, contradicting that level of importance.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
The culprit behind corporations is politicians who allow them to get away with what they do, and the culprit behind this nexus is game theory.
Throwing everything animal under the bus is not warranted. CAFOs and grain heavy operations certainly. Regenerative ag using animals on pasture is an amazing carbon sink. I agree that the factories using petroleum grown grains as feed are terrible.
90% of farmed animals globally are in factory farms: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
Does any country care? Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
> Does any country care?
China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.
There are strategic reasons for this, of course.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
"It's complicated"
* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.
* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).
* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are
-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.
-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.
-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.
-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).
* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.
( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)
There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
China has a far lower per capita carbon emissions rate than the US. Has a growing share of energy produced by green technology. Is the world leader in manufacturing electric cars and using electric cars. Is the global leader in low cost solar panels and batteries among other green technology. Oh yeah, and a huge portion of their emissions go to making things that Americans consume. On top of all that, they have managed to stop growth in their carbon emissions and are on the cusp of reducing them.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.
It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org
Only, while such work is necessary it's also insufficient.
You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.
The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.
They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.
They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.
If we assume that governments aren't going to address climate change and coordination between private citizens is unlikely to be enough to stop it, has anyone written anything on what individuals should do to avoid its effects?
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.
It’s going to be very hard to avoid global phenomena. On top of that, predicting higher order effects on a system this complex is hard.
I live in the PNW on the Canadian side of the border (PSW?) where people have argued that we might be a climate change safe haven due to plentiful water and a temperate climate. That hasn’t stopped us from having extreme weather events. In the past five years we have seen a heat wave that killed hundreds, floods that cut us off from the rest of Canada for weeks, concerns about water supply since our summer water supply relies on snowmelt, and we are getting less snow and more rain in the winter. Fire and dangerous smoke over huge parts of the province is now a given from mid July onwards.
The list goes on, but the point is that there is no avoiding its effects.
Lots of AI tells in this article. Ironic?
> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...
I think that kind of breathless excited tone is justified by the subject matter. Unlike the usual LinkedIn posts this is actually about a pretty dire situation.
The site is apparently one of those AI generated bait traps. The link to the original article is in the (current) top comment.
A lot of people mistake basic literacy for AI. Don't forget that LLMs are trained on human texts and replicate patterns within them.
People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.
The article is crap as well as the graph. And the author made the planet simmer even more to produce this crap.
Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.
Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.
"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
The nations with the strongest militaries are also the largest emitters. Attempting to force these countries into compliance might not be the smartest move.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
War is one of the biggest emitter of co2 though.
Ok then we should focus on eco-friendly ways to stop each other from pumping fossils.
Like state-sponsored sabotage? Like whoever blew up the Nordstream pipeline?
Technically, could be negated if enough people who are projected to consume above a certain amount over the course of their lifetimes are killed.
In that case you can just throw in a couple of nukes. If you choose the location and the yield just right, you can also buy a few years of cooling.
Is there a graph starting from the 1950s?
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...
This blog post is pure slop, stealing from this one: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real the submission should be updated to link to the original instead.
That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.
> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
I think this kind of writing is low quality.
Maybe, but it's refreshingly different from the industrialized junk prose we get to read more and more.
What about it reads to you as low quality? The intention seems to be to convey alarm through description of catastrophe, which was effective for me.
- When I read an article that goes like "it is not A, it is B" i know for a fact that someone used an trash LLM to generate it
The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.
But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.
Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.
Based on https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4, 1988 is the year from the dataset with the lowest temperature throughout June and July.
I posted a comment earlier about how 1982-1983 (the start of the data) had a historically severe El Nino, and the comment got shadowbanned. I don't understand why that happens sometimes. Hasn't happened for months, but when it does it's always on innocuous factual comments, it's weird.
Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.
You can go to the source website https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand
Thanks for posting that link.
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November, with higher temperatures than the average in this period, but I would like a climatologist to explain this, draw correlations etc. The original post is a weird LLM-mediated mix of vague scaremongering with some easy piling on journalism "just because". So what am I supposed to with it? Nothing, because it's written by an LLM, I guess.
> Check out 2015, it had way hotter temperatures in November
That's what El Niño is about: instead of declining after a peak in June, temperature plateaus and then rise again later in the year.
So the fact that the Pacific is much hotter than it was in 2015 is particularly scary, because it leads us to believe that it will also be this hotter than 2015 in November.
I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
I think it is the other way around: SD is calculated from 1982-2020, while all measurement readings in the plot are 1982-2026. I believe this is meant to not introduce an unwanted shift but compare to sort of a 'stable process'. However, that should have been described and argued somewhere.
> Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present
my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
Shouldn't the y-axis better be called "Standard DeviationS"?
According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.
I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.
I think you are right.
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
Here's the link that I read off the figure.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...
Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.
> No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.
3.5 what, according to you?
You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.
It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.
[1]: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Edit: note that the original article is 6 days old, and we've unfortunately crossed the 2°C threshold right after it was posted, so the situation of even direr than described: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.
That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
You’re welcome to go get the data and chart it the way you think it should be charted, and then we can have a conversation.
It's going to have to be like 20C hotter before some people will accept that it isn't "just summer".
At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.
I believe this post was written with some heavy help of an LLM. I hope the irony is not lost on the author, nor the readers here.
Their daily shower used more energy than generating the article, it doesn’t invalidate the article.
You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance
According to https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real, this is a 1 in 7000 years event (i.e. 3.5 sigmas).
Assuming the measurements are independent samples from a normal distribution. Which they of course aren't, as measurements of adjacent days are obviously correlated (if they were independent, a 1-in-7000 event could be expected to happen on about 2 days within a 44-year span). Now the question is what the nature of the deviation is.
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.
We have ways to determine the past climate without having access to direct measurements.
But there is no way to confirm that those methods are accurate...
Yes there are. Scientists compare the measurements from both methods in the time when there's data from both. For example ice cores formed last decade should match direct temperature measurements from last decade. It's the same way the oldest rings from living trees are matched against the newest rings from tree fossils, and radiocarbon dating is checked against all of that.
That does not look very reliable to me, because that implies certain things are only affected by ambient temperature.
Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
> Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores?
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-c...
>Past precipitation can be used to reconstruct past palaeoclimatic temperatures. δD and δ18O is related to surface temperature at middle and high latitudes. The relationship is consistent and linear over Antarctica[9]...
I think this is also flawed, because this computation requires the ratio of the isotopes in the atmosphere at the period of interest, which we don't have. And the people making this measurement just seem to assume it would certain value derived from the present, which is also unreliable...
So yea, all things considered, pretty unreliable..
Air bubbles from ancient atmosphere caught in ice -> historic CO2 levels -> historic average global temps.
This is fairly 1:1 linkage, and the Earth-heating effect of atmospheric CO2 was established in what, early 20th century or so?
>historic CO2 levels -> historic average global temps
But this seems to imply that global temperatures are only dependent on CO2 levels. That is a pretty flawed assumption...
It seems like you're on the trajectory to refuting all historical measurements altogether. In that case, I can't help you. Good luck. I suggest the philosophy of Last Tuesdayism, it may interest you.
Not really.
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
I'm not an ice core scientist. I suggest you ask them for detailed specifications. But the way you have posed the question strongly suggests that you will not be satisfied with any possible answer. Anything short of your eyes laying upon a thermometer will always be "not reliable enough", and thermometers only record the current temperature.
It is not really surprising that skeptics exist when the answers they get are of these sort...
This isn't climate, it's weather.
There are no proxies that record monthly water temperature. Only second order effects that are at best weakly correlated with water temperature.
Within the 1982-2026 span there is an equally negative 3.5 sigmas deviation somewhere (no year labels on the graph). The article doesn't touch on it at all so I have no context as to what it could be. But it definitely suggests 3.5 sigmas is not really 1 in 7000 years.
I see a negative outlier equal in magnitude to the positive outlier the author is drawing our attention to. What should we make of that data point?
Yes, it is worth looking at. My thinking was, how fast did that sequence revert back to the’mean’? It doesn’t take away from the author’s message though.
> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.
We know how to fix climate devastation.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)
LLM or not, I absolutely hate the "not X but Y" writing pattern
Blame the parrot feed.
Apparently El Nino reduces Gulf of Mexico hurricanes.
So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.
This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
It's quite possible that this one could worse.
In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?
What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
Note that anyone who suggested actions that would be both implementable by an individual and extremely effective would be rapidly banned from HN.
We could build out private solar farms though.
US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
Your post is the typical "it's not us, it's them".
- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
That’s tragic, I love Fontainebleau. But it’s industrial civilization as a whole, not American AC. Cement is a larger contributor, for example.
It is not "American AC" that is a serious contributing factor, much less the "main cause"(???).
AC?
Air Conditioning. Aka "La clim'" in France.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
Shit, I missed that my home town was burning
I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
This "signal" too will pass.
Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
The red line is not a prediction, it is a measurement.
You seem to be deep in denial.
These are not projections. These are measurements.
These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.
Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
Glacier park had 150 glaciers in the mid 1800s. Today it has 26. No crisis to see: we still have nearly 20% of what we once had /s
i have seen this couple of times here and there. with eu melting looks concerning. i guess build more data centers
Conspicuous that the X axis is missing numbers ... weeks, days, or months ....
I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.
Can you please define "equal"? (and exactly which pic you're referring to?)
-3.5 sigma in the middle of the year in the only graph the article has.
It's one year, from left to right. The termination of the red line is in the middle because it's the middle of the year.
The range is provided in the title. Presumably it's just regularly sampled over that range.
It is labelled "Day of Year".
There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.
"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Changing your own behavior is certainly not wrong but also not a solution.
Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
> eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc.
How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?
Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Why does it have to be one or the other? 7+ billion small actions add up; power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
> power plants and datacenters are still at least partly about fulfilling consumer demand.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
It’s a tough sell. The impact of you turning your AC a little bit colder or having a bigger car is almost unmeasurable on a global basis yet the benefits to you personally are probably pretty big.
The reality is that what is in our control is very, very little, and we’re squabbling like mad among ourselves because I had a piece of beef for lunch.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.
That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.
> less productive cars
How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?
Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.
Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.
This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of
How many people living in doghouses does it take to offset emissions from large industry?
The large industry largely emits to help us build and maintain our too-large homes, and fill our large houses with junk. So it would help reduce those, too.
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.
Cool, so what have you personally done to reduce your co2 emissions? How do your co2 emissions compare to the global average? Or are you just pretending the problem is other people?
If the factory is in China but the product is consumed in the US who should the CO2 emissions be attributed to?
Irrelevant anyway, because USA consumption is on the decline and China consumption is on the rise.
Individual action is not the solution
What is the collective if not a collection of individuals?
A collection of individuals, some of whose actions have a billion times more impact than others, and those powerful individuals hate human civilization.
A drop in the ocean vs an ocean.
It can be, but not in the usual way.
> eat less meat
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.
It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.
> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.