sure. more than half the data used in their models is fake made up numbers. Can't trust anything noaa has to say. using non made up temperature data shows we're actually very slightly cooling.
I suspect it is from Tony Heller (aka Stephen Goddard). Looks like he has a blog post about it here [1].
(note: Heller is nuts so it is hard to take what he says at face value, but it would appear he has a valid point on all the temperature adjustments going on).
The NOAA does adjust the data (and continues to do so) based on various factors like time of observation (TOBS), urban heat island effect (UHI). As well as infilling data when a station drops or they don't have the coverage.
As for the global temp dropping. That is most likely based on the satellite data showing a slight decrease (the hiatus).
I don't see why using inferred/model data is a bad thing. It is simply not feasible to measure the temperature at every location in the world. Satellite data, combined with in-situ and model calculations can very accurately fill in for missing data. The only other option here is to sit on our hands and say "oh well, I guess we can't predict the weather because we don't have perfect data", which is completely unreasonable.
There is another potential concern besides the inferred data (which, as you say, should be reasonable), though I don't know how much it would affect any of the larger conclusions (if they are affected at all).
[also, this reference is somewhat old now; I haven't checked if this problem has been addressed in more recent models]
There is evidence[1] that the climate model software doesn't handle floating point properly (which is, unfortunately, a very common problem).
"... there exist differences in the results for different ... parallel
libraries, and optimization levels, primarily a result of the treatment
of rounding errors ... the ensemble spread due to the differences in
software system is comparable to the ensemble spread due to the
differences in initial conditions ..."
Rounding errors on different hardware, operation ordering, and optimization level screams that the software isn't properly handling[2] IEEE 754 floating point. This could be a serious problem in an iterated model that is chaotically sensitive to initial conditions (hence the use of ensemble forecasting).
/* regardless, we need a lot thorium reactors ASAP */
Edit: I normally don't react to downvotes but this is a direct quote. Larger context: this was also the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880–2015 record, at 61.86°F (16.61°C), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.14°F (0.08°C)
It's pretty easy to understand why it's being downvoted. It doesn't contribute to the conversation--it's a pedantic tangent that isn't any more interesting than noting that (1) the surface of the Earth used to be molten and (2) all matter in the known Universe was a lot hotter during the big bang. Is that relevant?
The surface of the Earth was molten some 4.5 billion years ago. The big bang was about 14 billion years ago. The start of the relative record is a mere 135 years ago. It is absurd to conflate the two, and it's a critical foundation for the statement.
By simple random odds (which given that weather stations are few and far between, simple odds of micro-climates can shift temperature slightly), even with zero influence of global warming or any other effect, it's entirely possible to break records set over such a short period. I'm far too lazy to calculate random odds right now, but setting a new high at a 17 year interval doesn't seem remarkable. It is in the context of global warming, but in isolation it really doesn't mean much.
This isn't an anti AGW comment, and it's unfortunate that it's impossible to even state something so fundamental without it becoming religious, but the truth is that we've been recording our planet for a very short period of time, with growing accuracy and coverage every year.
Comments like these are not appreciated not because they're wrong, exactly, but because they're useless and irrelevant.
Imaging we have a coin that I claim is biased. (Just pretend that front-page story about how it's impossible to bias a coin didn't happen.) I've flipped it dozens or hundreds of times and nearly every time it comes up heads.
After I've done this for a while, I start saying, check this out, I'm pretty sure this coin is biased. I provide my data to support the claim. But it's an ongoing investigation, so I'm still flipping the coin, and it keeps coming up mostly heads. Every so often I publish a confirming tidbit, like, "I just flipped the coin 5 times and every time it came up heads. This is even more confirmation that it's biased."
What you're doing is basically taking that statement and saying, that doesn't mean anything, a fair coin would produce 5 heads in a row 1 out of every 32 attempts.
Then I do another experiment, flip the coin four times and each time it's heads. Your reply is that it's meaningless because a fair coin would reproduce this 1 out of every 16 attempts.
Another experiment. Six heads. You say it's meaningless, because a fair coin would do this 1 out of 64 times.
And we keep on going. With each announcement you point out, correctly, that this specific, individual result could pretty easily occur by random chance. And yet each of your responses is useless and misguided, because it ignores all the other results.
Setting a new high is not remarkable. Doing it repeatedly starts to get more interesting. Doing it while average temperatures have been rising steadily for over a century is more compelling. Put all the data together and, while each little piece can be said to mean little because it could have happened by random chance, the sum total is highly compelling.
Comments like this (and predictable moderation of my comment) are what makes this whole discussion a religion. You profoundly and completely missed the entire context of my comment in your zeal to, you think, denounce anti-warming. It is tiring, pedestrian, and ignorant.
This new record high for the month beat the previous record from 17 years ago, to begin.
Do you really think you want to understand? Again, the irrational histrionics of so many to this discussion (such as the conflation of billions of years with a period of time that is a tiny, tiny sliver of human history, much less periods of the Earth). It is impossible to discuss nuances without the predictable, boorish stomping of feet and announcing of positions. People must make everyone know how firmly and strongly they believe in global warming.
And the funny thing is that I fully and completely believe in and understand AGW. It isn't a religion, however, and I'm not waving a flag or announcing fealty, or angrily posting over the top responses to anything that is other than full-fledged Belief. It is the most toxic, bottom-feeding discussion going.
I don't understand what the fact that the previous record was 17 years prior has to do with my response, or your response to my response.
You're right, the discussion is mostly awful. Climate change has been turned into a political issue, and awful discussion is a predictable result of that.
On the other hand, I don't see how your comment improves that any.
Conflating six heads in a row with a periodic new record is unproductive. For any given area of the country we generally have several record highs per year, and record lows per year, and have every single year since 1880. That's the nature of having a very small period of records.
People acting outraged about a simple statement of fact like "since 1880", or the notional, obvious statement that a sporadic high or low is, by itself, not compelling, diminishes everyone.
Daily records at a point are completely irrelevant to this discussion. The fact that points set multiple daily records per year has no bearing whatsoever on the significance, or lack thereof, of a monthly, global record.
You're right of course, that a single record high is not compelling. Even when it's a global, monthly record high. My point in my original reply is that pointing this out is irrelevant and annoying.
Was your point merely that this data point, by itself, is not compelling? If so, my original comment, which you complained about missing the point, was exactly about that. Was it something else? If so, I'm having a seriously tough time figuring out what your point is supposed to be.
The fact that points set multiple daily records per year has no bearing whatsoever on the significance, or lack thereof, of a monthly, global record.
Exactly the same principle applies.
Look at the title of this submission. Stop and before you knee-jerk a response, contemplate that this isn't "it's hot, yo, and getting hotter". It is specifically that July was the hottest month "ever recorded", which someone quite rightfully noted was since 1880.
Stuff like this breaks the HN guidelines, and there is much of it in your comments. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all, even when others are wrong. In fact, especially when others are wrong.
The exact same principle applies, yes. But the quantities are way different.
Variation at a point is high. Variation for a period of a single day is high. Samples are taken frequently. Thus new records will be set regularly.
Variation for the entire globe is low. Variation for a period of an entire month is low. There are twelve samples per year. Thus new records would not be expected to be set frequently.
Thinking about this more, samples are actually taken at the same rate: yearly. The difference is how many different things you're tracking in each year.
For regional records, you're tracking 365 events per year. Each one is compared with that day on prior years.
For global records, you're tracking one event per year (since July will always be the warmest month).
Thus, if you'd expect to set a new record every 50 years, then you'd see on average one global record every 50 years, but you'd see about seven daily regional records every year.
Also consider that you should be seeing both record highs and record lows. Record lows continue at a good pace for regional daily records, but there hasn't been a global record low for well over a century.
Records don't occur linearly for a stationary variable. That is you don't expect "an average record every 50 years". The longer you observe the signal the more more extreme the expected outlier.
Sure, that's just a simplification to illustrate the principle. Whatever the expected recurrance for records is, you'll get a lot more of them when you're testing 365 (really 730, since you have both highs and lows) separate values each year than when you're just testing one (realy two).
You've choesn to insist on replacing the actual continuous data with a weaker derived parameter (period between record breaking events). Of course tests on weakend data have lower power. Should I be surprised that a test which relies on data extremes has less trend detection power?
But I'll also note that you haven't even bothered to go back and compute the probabilities in the first place.
It was one thing to make this argument in the 90's, but two decades of data later it's plainly ridiculous and it doesn't take nuanced data analysis.
Global warming is obvious from the data. End of story. The AGW debate is about the extent to which this very real warming is caused by human activity. At best, all those effectoids you prattle off are only interesting as confounds for the models that are used to tease out causes for the warming. The overall warming itself is indisputable.
Interesting comment having positively nothing to do with my comment. That you fail to understand that speaks volumes. Of course, you're the one who conflates 135 years with 14 billion years, so not unexpected.
If you observe a pattern that what you think is your point is not getting across to your readers, it could well be that your readers are dense. It could also be that what you're writing is unintelligible.
The pattern is that it is utterly impossible to discuss any nuance of AGW, the data, or its meaning, without zealots such as yourself acting as strongly as you can to make sure everyone knows how much of a Believer you are.
AGW is reality. The disciples of AGW are profoundly intolerable, however.
Well "recorded" already narrows it down to the history of thermometers (largely 17th century and later), then the very first bullet point in the article mentions that the dataset is 1880–2015, which really clears that matter up, I'd say.
So, "useful" in the sense of "let me summarize the article in two words so you can reach your own conclusions instead of clicking that link and reading NOAA's".
Semi apologies for the snark, but yes, the first comment really was an almost informationless attempt to derail. Success!
How exactly do they do a fair comparison between 1880 and today? I'm assuming the temperature readings today are very accurate, but how accurate were the measuring devices going back in history, and their standards for taking temperature? Most of the thermometers I have in my house are +- 2F, which would eliminate the differences entirely.
There are significant temperature records that go back much farther than 1880 even. Many navies and armies kept records from all over the world, so we actually have lots more data than people think. There are also bodies of science that deal with 'aftcasting', which is making a weather forecast for a date in the past. These techniques have been refined to the point where we can make 1-day aftcasts for ~1850 that are comparable to modern 2-3 day weather forecasts in terms of accuracy, even with the limited data available (things like barometric pressure readings from ships).
I'm not sure about the technology used at the time, but the basic answer to your question that that they had a lot more thermometers than you expect, distributed globally too. And as we're discussing global averages, the noise about +-2F in your house isn't really the same problem.
Edit: Here's a neat 100-year reanalysis paper if you're interested. Abstract link here, full pdf available on the page: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175. "Feasibility of a 100-Year Reanalysis Using Only Surface Pressure Data"
To be honest, and this is my opinion only, but 2-3 day forcasts, at least in my area, are horribly inaccurate. In my state, it's a common joke that being a meteorologist is the only job you can have where you can be wrong 95% of the time, and still keep your job.
Seriously, our forecasts are nearly always wrong. So.....saying we can make as accurate of forecasts for 200 years ago...that's not really saying much.
This is after moving to two cities in the same state, more than 100 miles apart, the forecasts still never get better.
By "horribly inaccurate" do you mean 3 degrees Celsius off or 20 degrees Celsius off? These aftcasts are accurate enough for us to plot the overall course of global climate change.
I mean turning on the "weather channel" and having it say it's sunny out, only to look outside to see pouring rain across the entire city. That's pretty inaccurate in my book.
It's all linked together, and while that statement had nothing to do with temperature, the same can be said in my area with regard to that.
Also, if a meteorologist can't get the current state of the weather correct, why on earth would I trust his statement of what the temperature is going to be like? At that point I'm just going to consider it a guess.
It seems like your anecdote is quite beside the point here... as the comparison to forecasts was only illustrative of the fact that these models are not perfect representations of reality...
In reality, the models are derived using different methods by different scientists.
No, it really isn't. My point is that you can't draw conclusions to an accuracy greater than what is afforded to you by your prediction model, whether it's fore or aft. That's pretty on the point.
I suspect you fall prey to a question of scope. I imagine you spend more time with statisticians than, say, paleoceanographers and geologists. They might say, and reasonably so, that my reference to the ten year "break" in alleged global warming is irrelevant (as you say it is) and that your reference to a purely centurial warming trend is just as irrelevant. They might then accuse you of failing to understand variance and of having failed high school mathematics.
Ironically I'd say the whole point is that you are failing to look at the scope.
I didn't reference centurial anything - I said that thinking it's a problem is not understanding variance. Climate scientists not only agree with me they say the same thing.
So at this point either put up some actual science or just stop JAQing off.
In fairness, he did say that the whole thing was his opinion, so I'm guessing he's just hoping we'll notice the sounds-like-facts nature of his opinions and go along with it.
Yes, weather forecasting is hard - that's why there's lots of research into 'aftcasts'. If we can learn to make better predictions while limiting the data we take in, we can make big improvements to the accuracy of modern forecasts.
You can make fun of meteorologists if you want, but they are not wrong 95% of the time. In fact, over the last 20 years the accuracy of predictions has gone WAY up on average. There are still many places where forecasting is difficult and it's going to be a long road to improve it to get people like you to trust the forecast. But we're improving and we're making the best forecasts we've ever made in the industry.
I'm not trying to make fun of meteorologists at all, I totally get that your job is hard. I actually wanted to take the same approach (My company provides lunch for employees, I wanted to train a neural net on past lunch menus, and trading/derivative market data for food type resources, to see if it could predict tomorrows menu), unfortunately that was shot down, so I never got the chance to do something like that.
If it came off as me trying to be down on meteorologists, that wasn't my intent, and I can't edit my original post to reflect that, so hopefully you'll see my comment here.
> So.....saying we can make as accurate of forecasts for 200 years ago...that's not really saying much.
It is saying quite a lot actually because the past has already happened. In the first case you are talking about the future, and yes, in some places weather is more unpredictable. You can of course move to the desert and enjoy clockwork predictable weather if it bothers you that much.
The OP was talking about "afcasting" though. In that case measurement have already been taken, but there are other records: ice cores, sea sediment, and many others. So it makes for a very interesting topic.
wait a second. The OP was comparing "aftcasting" TO "forecasting" 2-3 days in advance, and that's what my statement was based on.
If your 2-3 day forecasting is off by 5-6 degrees (celcius), why would your "aftcasting" forecast for 200 years ago be any more accurate if it is "just as good" as a 2-3 day forecast? That means I would expect an error of 5-6 degrees, same as a 2-3 day forecast
If everyone is nitpicking that part of my comment, it would be worth noting that I was paraphrasing from the paper I linked.
> For the beginning of the twentieth century, the errors of such upper-air circulation maps over the Northern Hemisphere in winter would be comparable to the 2–3-day errors of modern weather forecasts.
Might be worth reading the abstract / full paper if you're interested in the topic.
what's the actual error bound on both forecasts and aftcasts?
The article this discussion is linked to is claiming "1.46°F (0.81°C)" variance over recorded history. Recorded meaning they know what actually happened.
But I cannot believe that 2-3 day forecasts are accurate to within 2 degrees. Even the services linked by other commenters criticizing my original point claimed only 77% accuracy in the best case,
While I see your point, the forecasts for past weather are based on data very different from forecasts for tomorrow's weather. The former is for past occurred events and the latter is for future probabilities.
Well, you didn't answer it in your blog, either. You simply posted link to a video that many HNers will not even click on, given our well-known preference for text presentations and the fact that many of us browse from work locations where video playing is not appreciated (even if the presenter in the video happens to be a pretty cool guy in this case).
I'd recommend at least writing a brief summary to the video if you really want to maintain an effective FAQ.
>To be honest, and this is my opinion only, but 2-3 day forcasts, at least in my area, are horribly inaccurate. In my state, it's a common joke that being a meteorologist is the only job you can have where you can be wrong 95% of the time, and still keep your job.
Meteorologists lower the quality of the data they receive.
People don't want bad news. People don't want to hear that it's going to rain on their weekend. People won't tune in to hear constant bad news.
So meteorologists take the positive and optimistic side.
The reality of forecasting is that much of the data, models, the warnings, are all created by the NWS.
The further you get from real NWS data, the lower the quality tends to be. It's like a game of telephone, except with forecasting.
National forecasters like The Weather Channel utilize tons of NWS data and models, and present it in a more friendly way. Generally there is a loss of quality here (and, when you look at TWC's buzzfeed approach to weather, it's not hard to see why they might respect clicks above all else).
Then, further down the pipe, away from the NWS and the actual source, away from National broadcasters, we get to local broadcasters. Once again, these guys are largely relying on upstream info, just packaging for the local audience.
It's not surprising that local meteorologists provide the lowest quality forecasting, because that's not really their job to provide highly accurate forecasting. Their job is actually to keep you watching through a commercial break, so the show remains on-air. The NWS is the service whose job is it to accurately forecast.
Another big problem is that people don't understand uncertainty, and therefore forecasters don't express uncertainty.
For example, just look at whatever near-term forecast you have handy. What are the forecast high and low temperatures for the next few days? What are the error bars on those highs and lows?
> To be honest, and this is my opinion only, but 2-3 day forcasts, at least in my area, are horribly inaccurate.
It gets easier over longer periods of time. I may not be able to predict very well whether it's going to be 27 degrees C on July 17th 2016, but I can make a pretty good guess at the average temperature throughout the entire month, and I would be willing to put money down that it will lie within a relatively narrow band.
Prior to the satellite record historical temperature data is much less reliable, since each source is in a local area and may have different heat island effects, calibration, or quality of instruments. Additionally not as many stations were operating in 1880, which means more uncertainty about the data we do have.
Folks have tried to get around this by finding proxies for temperature (measurements that are theorized to track temperature, like the width of tree rings for example), and then calibrating that data by comparing it with the intervals for which we have reliable data (since 1970 for satellite data, or earlier for whatever thermometer data might be suitable). The long-term trends are identified and argued based on these proxies.
So to answer your question, they can calibrate a proxy using the satellite record, see what it suggests about 1880, and combine that with the available temperature data, but that's about it.
I do not know. I am ignorant of the means in which NASA gathers temperature from the middle of the ocean and presume it is satellite. If that is the case, how was the temperature in the middle of the ocean ascertained in 1880? I would presume they base it on datapoints collected using thermometers by those at sea.
In 1880 via ship measurements. They'd take out a bucket of sea water and measure the temperature. They still use buoys as part of the sea surface temperature measurement.
Is it possible to separate the warming that's caused by man-made pollution/CO2 from the earth's natural cycles?
Obviously, we're getting warmer because of pollution, but is that on-top of a natural warming cycle? Being partially counteracted by a natural cooling cycle? Could we all be saved by an ice-age?
It may be just the opposite; i.e, the Earth is actuallly in a cooling cycle so the current warming is even worse than indicated.
There was an article in Scientific American back 2005 where the author claims that human activity since the dawn of agriculture may have held off a return to an ice age:
There's a ton of information about the available science, from high-level overviews all the way down to nitty-gritty technical details, in the periodic reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They're published every several years, and the most recent one is from 2014.
A good place to start is the so-called synthesis report, which covers a mixture of physical science, human impact and public policy. Page 6 of the "summary for policymakers" includes a graph showing that although the error bars are still pretty big, the observed warming is consistent with estimates of human-caused effects, and vastly larger than can be explained by the "natural cycles" we know about.
That's a bit of a false comparison. Most of the "coldest ever" headlines that you'll see are talking about particular locations or regions, which have extremely high variance. If you look at enough different subsets of your data, you're bound to find both high and low extremes somewhere. But this article is talking about a global average, which is much less noisy.
When you look at global average temperatures over a comparable span of time (since ~1880), every year in the last couple of decades has been pretty close to a record high. The last record low was more than a century ago. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
I find it continually amazing how many people find NASA sending rockets into space all the time to be an expected and everyday part of modern life, but then don't trust them with a thermometer.
Temperature measurement is a hard problem, hard enough you could write a PhD on it. Asking questions about methods etc. is entirely acceptable.
The issue is when people refuse to recognize that thousands of scientists have made this their career, and thousands of PhDs actually have been written on temperatures past and present, and think that talking heads on Fox News reciting memos paid for by fossil fuel companies contain even the semblance of a real critique.
Not that I know of, unfortunately--most of what I know I've gleaned from conversations with a brother who works in the field, and from http://realclimate.org/ , which has some decent technical information for a blog (but unfortunately has declined a bit IMO).
"They're (the White House) actually kind of lucky that we don't cover climate change as much as we should," Perino said.
"Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it's all blowing up in their faces."
Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle interjected that it was "fraud science" and Perino said, "Yes, I agree."
The American GOP and their fossil fuel powered deep pocket backers have done a wonderful job making this an emotionally, and even religiously charged issue (as all good wedge issues should be).
Until 2006, understanding the Earth's climate was an explicit component of NASA's core mission statement. The exact phrasing that was removed in 2006 was: "to understand and protect the home planet".
So, yes, NOAA != NASA, but I think the parent comment was still spot on.
It's been a while since I've heard the mainstream climate deniers claim that the world isn't getting warmer. Most of them just claim that no matter what happens, it's not humanity's fault nor is it humanity's problem.
When confronted with an obviously broken weather station that was reading way too hot, they replaced the faulty sensor — but refused to adjust the bad readings it had already taken. And when dealing with "the pause" in global surface temperatures that is in its 19th year, the agency threw away satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures, substituting questionable data that showed no pause.
Climate change is the biggest problem of our time. I wish there were more startups focused on solving it - there are so many opportunities to make money here while improving the world at a global scale. Mitigating the effects of climate change for businesses could easily be worth $1T+. More VCs should pay attention to these opportunities, and more startup founders should enter this space.
Yes, governments will pay a lot. The US Department of Defense considers climate change to be an urgent national security issue. [1]
But also, agribusiness like Monsanto will pay - they just bought Climate Corp for $1B+ a couple years ago to improve weather and climate predictions for crop outputs. The primary customers are probably insurance companies I think. There's a lot of money to be saved by predicting and avoiding catastrophes through better planning. A catastrophe might be as simple as a 1deg C temperature difference over a farm during a month - or a hurricane, or a drought, etc.
> So let me get this straight ... selling climate control stuff to the government
No, you got it wrong. Please read my comment again and recognize that I think most profits would come from a variety of different private sectors, specifically agribusiness and insurance.
> nobody has thought of
On the contrary, there are many startups in this space. I even mentioned some by name. I am making a call for more to enter the space and join the efforts to reduce the effects of climate change, help large enterprises and governments adapt, and make lots of money while doing so.
Here is a proof of your concept. The Climate Corporation (https://www.climate.com) is a SF based company founded in 2006 by two ex-Googlers. Its purpose is to help agriculture adapt to climate change. It was acquired by Monsanto in 2013 for $1.1B.
[ETA: I had a feeling you knew this, and indeed while I was writing, you captured this info below as well. Hope your project is going well.]
Another proof of concept: Opower (http://opower.com/careers) is a DC- and SF-based company. It uses behavioral science to drive increases in energy efficiency among consumers, a competency it sells to utilities who use it to meet government EE regulations.
Make a startup that cuts human agricultural and industrial production and consumption by 50%, without hurting peoples consumption-insane lifestyle. Alternatively, make a startup that kills a sizeable fraction of people on earth-- which fraction is yours to pick, just make sure there's lower consumption of resources afterward.
Alternatively, make a startup that plans to relocate/revamp agriculture and industrial production into negative emissions processes while being cheaper than any of the current positive emissions processes. This isn't as far fetched as it seems on the longest term, but in the term that we need it, it's going to be tough. We're already living in a climate that is pushed past where it "should" be.
Has anyone else noticed that the conservative rhetoric has quietly switched from "global warming doesn't exist so we don't have to do anything" to "global warming isn't caused by people so there is nothing we can do"?
I think you'll find (and the comments on this story illustrate the point quite succinctly) that there are still many idiots who are willing to tow the "human driven climate change is a made up thing"
I think “toes the line” is an expression literally meaning, “To advance to the start of a race.” From there, we get the idea of participating in something, and from there we get conforming to rules or standards.
As in, “Raganwald has a potty mouth in person, but he toes the line and respects HN’s guidelines for civil discussion."
I'd be curious to understand why some people seem to be offended by the idea that people cause global warming. I flag all these articles though, because they always end up about politics, given that scientists are mostly in consensus, and very few people here are climate scientists.
Humans were a major cause of acid rain and the ozone hole. We more or less solved these problems, by "limiting human behavior", and most people didn't even notice.
I don't see why people should be so scared by more solar (or even nuclear) plants.
Even if you don't accept that humans are a major cause of climate change, but you do accept that it is happening, will have disastrous consequences for human survival, and can be mitigated through human action, the equation becomes simple. The "can be mitigated through human action" seems to get tied up in, "humans are a major cause", but they aren't actually the same thing. Instead of the backwards-looking "you did this" slap on the wrist, we should be selling the aspirational "you can help solve this" call to action.
The idea that limiting human behavior is a scary concept makes no sense to me. We limit human behavior all the time because resources are finite and because the immediate interests of the individual may be detrimental to wider society. It's called rule of law.
In living memory, "rule of law" has included the holocaust, gulags, forced sterilization of the handicapped, forced abortion, police brutality directed against minorities, and various other forms of tyranny and injustice. Many times those things are described by the government as "in the best interests of the people".
Those are the associations some people have with the line "limiting human behavior". Of course that's a rather one-sided presentation -- I've left out positive things like "ending slavery" -- but the point is to demonstrate where the fear comes from.
While I understand the impulse, IMO these people have learned the wrong lesson. The correct takeaway is not some anarchic version of "maximalist liberty above all else," but rather "correct" rule of law.
In many of the examples you list, there is either an absence of liberal constitutional authority, or corruption of it. The path to the holocaust was paved by the dismantlement of liberal democracy and democratic safeguards. Slavery and subsequent civil rights abuses in the US were made possible by either punching holes in the legal order (3/5 compromise, Jim Crow, etc), ignoring it entirely, or perpetrating the abuses in secret.
To me, then, tyranny and injustice can be forestalled not by tearing down the power of the state and creating chaotic power vacuums, but by vigorously defending transparency, an independent judiciary, an independent press, and all the other legs on which the liberal order stands.
However, the point still remains that "handing over more power to the government" is a thing people have legitimate reason to fear. Particularly in an era where there's so much concern over the judiciary (from Roe v Wade to Citizens United, everyone has something they think SCOTUS screwed up badly) and the independent press (not asking the tough questions pre-Iraq war, seemingly giving Obama a pass on various scandals) and government transparency (Snowden leaks, Guantanamo, Benghazi).
So the things that we need in order to trust the government with more power aren't as strong as many people feel they should be. Simultaneously, the government has a track record of trying to change peoples' behavior in both above-board and behind-the-scenes ways, through everything from tax policy (mortgage interest deduction to encourage home ownership) to astroturfing (infiltration of various dissident groups, including those devoted to non-violence) to draconian drug laws (leading to disproportionate imprisonment of black men) and requiring people to purchase certain forms of health insurance.
It's against this backdrop that "the government wants to limit our behavior" is often evaluated. Even in areas where it actually makes a lot of sense -- like pricing externalities into carbon emissions via taxes -- it's worth asking whether the government is reaching farther than they should in order to accomplish something more than what's been publicly stated.
You'll also find many conservatives who will allege that the NOAA has been manipulating their data and "changing the numbers" to make the case for a warming planet.
Nevermind that any European or Chinese or Russian climatology group would deliver the exact same data...
I've always found it incredibly frustrating that both sides focus so much on "is it caused by people". It makes things personal, it sounds to many people like an accusation – "you're ruining the world just by living your life" – which (understandably!) makes people defensive, and it's completely beside the point. There are only two relevant questions: 1. Is it happening? and 2. What can we do right now to fix it? The answer to (1) seems to be "yes", but while I do hear lots of discussion about different answers to (2), I hear even more about all this stuff that's happened in the past and can't be changed. Don't get me wrong, it is definitely important for scientists to understand how our behavior impacts the climate, in order to make intelligent proposals about how to fix things, but it's purely a distraction in the policy discussion. Even if we determine that humans have had nothing to do with the looming crisis, we still need to figure out how to fix it, if we want to survive. If lived in an era with an impending but completely naturally occurring ice age, we (or, at least, many of us) would still be trying to figure out how to stop it, or survive it.
The question I would like answered is "What is the optimal mean surface temperature of the Earth?"
It's hard for me to get all worked up over climate change when no one can tell me whether the observations indicate a trend towards or away from an overall improvement. It's easy to show that things are changing. It's slightly more difficult to show that such changes are resulting from human activity. But no one seems to know whether things are accidentally getting better or accidentally getting worse.
How would anyone know what to "fix" if they can't even identify what is broken? It's like everyone is engaged in an archery contest, and the location of the bulls-eye is revealed only after everyone shoots. You can't correct your aim if you don't know what you're shooting at.
> The question I would like answered is "What is the optimal mean surface temperature of the Earth?"
I think I can answer that: the way it always was. Adaptation is always a cost, regardless of the direction. Not only human cost, but also cost for the ecosystems. If the change is fast enough it may cause migrations or extinctions.
I think what you mean is: "What is the optimal mean surface temperature of the Earth" for human civilization as we know it? In which case that still seems like the wrong question to me. The right question is, in what ways will projected changes in the climate affect our civilization, are those changes unacceptably bad, and if so, what can we do to mitigate them? We should also absolutely be considering the affect on other species and thinking about how to protect them as well.
It's widely accepted in the scientific that specific occurrences such as the ozone hole above Antarctica are created as a result of human activity in the past 50 years.
My usual perusal through political talk hasn't shown that. I still see several references claiming that global warming isn't real. There still seems to be quite a few variations of talking points on both sides of the equation.
And don't forget "global warming is inevitable now, so there's nothing we can do".
In my experience a good Fox News segment can use all three of these, at the same time, and switch back and forth among them, with no cognitive dissonance apparent. I don't think any of them are really being phased out, it's just that if any particular one is defeated in conversation, the arguer switches to one of the other arguments.
EDIT: Indeed, there are several HN comments in this thread to that effect.
There are four dimensions there: happening/not, natural/anthropogenic, beneficial/harmful, and the relative economic impact of intentional terraforming efforts.
Of those four, only the last two are worth debating, and they're really almost the same thing. Everyone who screams about those first two dimensions are probably profiting more by perpetuating a meaningless conversation than by solving an identifiable problem.
Sounds like a lot of political issues, actually. Some people can make a curiously prosperous living just out of getting other people to shout at each other.
They all tie together, though. Yes, ultimately you just want to know what will happen if things go on as they are, and how that will change if we change our activity.
But the first two strongly feed into the last two. If climate change is not anthropogenic, then cutting emissions will not provide any benefit, while potentially causing economic harm. If climate change isn't happening at all then there is no need to do anything, and the entire framework for predicting the outcomes of changes to human activities is completely busted.
I don't think it's called global warming anymore, it's called climate change. Besides, I don't understand why it's ok for liberals to make fun of conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change but that liberals using exceptional heat during summer as an argument for climate change is ok. A few months of extra cold or heat is not enough to prove or disprove climate change. Last year we had an unusual cold summer, was that proof that climate change is not happening? We already have good scientific ways to measure climate change, let's stick to these (carbon emission etc).
I think we should start focusing on real solutions. Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies. Both liberals and conservatives tend to agree here but they diverge in methodology. Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation. Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.
> conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change but that liberals using exceptional heat during summer
The 'extreme snow' was limited to certain parts of the US - the west coast got very little on the whole. Whereas this high temperature data is a global average. So they're not really the same thing.
> I think we should start focusing on real solutions.
Sounds good to me. Taxes, it must be said, are also a way to spur innovation, because it can focus people's attention on using less of the taxed resource. Here's Greg Mankiw's take on that. He's a Republican economist.
The fossil fuel industry folks, and the politicians they fund, are the ones who politicize this issue. Please don't turn this into a "liberals said, conservatives said" thing. If there wasn't a ton of fossil fuel money on the line, there never would have been any public confusion or discussion about AGW--the science would simply have been acknowledged and we've have moved onto engineering solutions.
(As for the "conservatives prefer better environment for business.." you ought to look at how well the economy has done under liberal vs conservative leaders all throughout the 20th century to gain some insight into which political leanings are better for the economy, of which business is, of course, a major part.)
...which was still "0.5°F above the 20th century average" for the contiguous 48 US states[1]. From looking at the temperature graph[2], only about ten years between 1900-1980 was hotter than 2014.
The fact that this is perceived as an "unusual cold summer" should give you a pause.
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201413 : "In 2014, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average temperature was 52.6°F, 0.5°F above the 20th century average, and tied with 1977 as the 34th warmest year in the 120-year period of record."
> I don't think it's called global warming anymore, it's called climate change.
This is because warming is only one component of the problems we're facing as a result of pollution. See for example ocean acidification.
> Besides, I don't understand why it's ok for liberals to make fun of conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change but that liberals using exceptional heat during summer as an argument for climate change is ok.
The funny thing about snow is it actually can be a result of warming temperatures. At higher latitudes, warmer weather leads to more snow. So that's a starting point that higher temperatures don't necessarily mean less snow. But furthermore, if you have scientifically gathered data that says there's a trend towards warming, it's reasonable to look at heat waves and recognize them as part of a larger problem, since it's supported by data.
However, if you pull out anecdotes that contradict the data, you're trying to muddle the issue and make it look like the data is invalid, even though you have no basis for that conclusion.
> Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.
This is a non-opinion. A mix of taxing polluters and subsidizing non-polluting industries is the solution. Having a better environment for businesses boosts profits, not innovation.
Taxing pollution forces businesses to find ways to profit without polluting. That's innovation.
> Of course, but more profits encourages people to create more businesses which create more innovation. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.
It isn't obvious at all. In fact, there are some indications that the opposite is true. For example, there are some simple economic models in Blatt:Dynamic Economic Systems where rate of profit and rate of growth are inversely proportional. Also, data from Piketty aren't very optimistic in this sense either (it seems that economic states with lots of private capital correspond to low growth and vice versa).
"Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation"
Something to consider here is that taxing oil production or similar carbon emissions creating isn't really a tax. It's actually just reflecting the real cost of the activity. The problem with these industries is that they have externalities which are not reflected - some of their profits are created by a cost being put onto society. Nobody likes 'taxes', but I think everyone can agree that any activity should reflect it's true cost.
Plus, if you step away from climate change for a moment everyone can see that the demands for energy are only increasing. Some of the new technologies around energy generation will be extremely profitable - whole new sectors. The USA has a strong tradition of supporting innovation and then reaping the rewards in private enterprises. So you might consider the "subsidies" as just priming innovation.
To that point, if it is indeed true that fossil fuels are heating the planet (most likely), it would be nearly impossible to "tax" (i.e. collect the real external costs of the activity) enough.
What is the number you put on rising sea levels and altered weather patterns?
Economics is not zero-sum, so the nice thing is that if you change behavior the tax can avoid more damage than the cost of the tax. In the best case the tax is simply not collected and no damage occurs from the pollution.
> Last year we had an unusual cold summer, was that proof that climate change is not happening?
Who are "we" that had an unusual cold summer?
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June–August was the highest on record for this period, at 1.28°F (0.71°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C).
> I don't understand why it's ok for liberals to make fun of conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change
Because that argument betrays the most infantile misunderstanding of an issue that is extremely important; climate is not the same as weather, and extreme heat and cold and weather events are what climate models predict.
> Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies.
Are you describing cap-and-trade? That's actually a conservative solution from decades ago; this is the "middle ground" and was roundly rejected as some kind of socialist takeover by today's conservatives.
Anyway it's probably too late for all of that anyway. It's certainly too late for your impotent handwaving about "innovation in new source of renewable". What a joke.
> I don't think it's called global warming anymore, it's called climate change.
Global warming and climate change are one in the same. "Global warming" became the rallying cry for so many environmentalist quacks citing bunk science - people like Al Gore were universally skewered in the mainstream media - that it was toxic from a PR perspective. So they came up with a new term. "Climate change" has the exact same beliefs, political backers, scientists, corporate interests, and studies behind it as "global warming". It's just a new name.
> I think we should start focusing on real solutions.
The issue is that there is no scientific evidence that solutions are possible. The earth has gone through many dramatic "climate change/global warming" events, and these last occurred long before cars or other man-made pollutants existed. It will go through them again, regardless of how many carbon taxes are levied by liberals or Tesla's are sold. It's just a reality - mankind will eventually cease to exist on this planet regardless of what it does or does not do.
> So they came up with a new term. "Climate change" has the exact same beliefs, political backers, scientists, corporate interests, and studies behind it as "global warming". It's just a new name.
Strange then that "climate change" name predates "global warming"
The term may have been in use before, but it wasn't widely adopted by the global warming people until global warming became widely known as the near-exclusive domain of environmental extremists.
There must be a name for in-the-end-everybody-dies-so-why-bother logical fallacy...
(For some reason, these same people are often pretty worried about the state of the economy. Nations have fallen since the beginning of history, and in the end every business and every nation collapse, so why don't we just let them fail and see if the next one is better?)
It's quite a bit different. Economies were invented by people, are controlled by people, and therefore can be altered by people. The environment, however, has none of these characteristics. This is not a "logical fallacy" - it's simply a fact that the environmentalists of the world don't like very much and have spent billions of dollars (mostly of other people's money- i.e. your tax dollars) trying to get people to ignore.
There is indeed a logical fallacy playing out in all of this, and that of course is that environmentalists/liberals are attempting to control something that all of the credible scientific evidence says we can't control. Controlling the universe, as it turns out, is much harder than bribing legislators to use the government resources to pursue one's agenda.
Mankind has been altering environments since when they only had stone tools. Your argument is basically, "I don't believe modern humans (with its 7+ billion population and sustained alteration of the majority of land area) have any noticeable effect on the Earth's ecosystem, therefore scientists who say so are wrong."
So your argument is that the ice age did not occur....how could it have, since the T-Rex did not have fossil fuels to burn, and fossil fuels are the source of all climate change events? Got it.
There's so many logical and factual errors that my head hurts. But for a start: the K-T extinction event (which wiped out the dinosaurs) was caused by an asteroid impact. Ice age, if there ever was one at that time, only played a secondary role.
And yes, all scientists (at least sane ones) would agree that, if a several-kilometer-across ball of rock and iron falls from the sky, it will have such a disastrous consequence on the climate (among other things, including "staying alive" for most people) that our modern Global Warming will look like a summer picnic in comparison.
It's interesting to me that if you say "today was hotter than any day on record" The answer given always seems to be global warming. However if you say "today was colder than any day on record" (also happens very frequently) the answer given is "That's weather, not climate."
Edit: Apparently this is not interesting to HNers. Bring on the downvotes.
It's not interesting because if you are talking global temperatures (which is what the article is about) we haven't had a coldest month ever recorded in... decades.
It's not interesting to HNers because it has nothing to do with what the article says. The article is talking about the average temperature across the entire surface of the Earth, for the entire month of July. You are talking about when one very small bit of geography has a local minimum or maximum temp.
Firstly, this wasn't about one day, it was about one month. That already removes a lot of variability out of the data, particularly when you're talking about "global" temperature.
Secondly, "hottest months on record" are happening far more frequently than coldest months ever. Like orders of magnitude more frequently. So yeah, it's not that we're not interested, it's that you re factually wrong.
That's because politics has consumed climate change and made it its own.
I find it really disturbing that so much of (American) politics today is a debate over facts. Politics should be about debating priorities and principles and approaches based on commonly accepted facts.
When was the last "coldest month on record"? Let's look at some actual statements about an actual occurrence of it and see if your characterization is correct.
Edit: answering my own question with this data set:
It appears the coldest month on record for this time period is January 1893. I think that the answer to why that extreme wasn't blamed on climate change might be related to an inability to correlate worldwide temperature data at the time, and the fact that nobody knew about climate change at the time.
I'm not a professional in this field, but my understanding has always been that most climate models have predicted that while the general trend in global temperature will continue to go up - in most individual smaller climates the seasons will tend to be more extreme in both directions, i.e. colder winters and warmer summers - in most places averaging out to warmer years.
For those who believe that climate change is real, and a significant threat to our longevity on this planet, would you please view / read this and share your thoughts?
I don't believe defeatism is helpful, but I got a very Prince "Party Like It's 1999" feeling after consuming this. What should we do? If we pull all the fossil fuels out of our economy tomorrow, everything will crash. Not to mention that there is zero political will to even contemplate this. So what should we do?
What we should do is transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as is reasonably possible. Not simply pull them all at once, because that won't help anything as you say, but start moving smartly in that direction. Fortunately we already are, even if not as quickly as we'd like. I think in the next few years we'll see rapid change as solar panels and batteries become cheap enough to compete with traditional energy on their own terms.
I don't see the case for human extinction here. Your link mentions it, but doesn't appear to lay out the case at all, so I don't know what that statement is based on, but I don't see how it would occur. The potential disruption due to climate change is immense, but people will survive. The problem is not how to keep humanity alive, but how to keep civilization going without some sort of major backslide, and without getting a couple of billion people killed.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. As for this point:
>I think in the next few years we'll see rapid change as solar panels and batteries become cheap enough to compete with traditional energy on their own terms.
I'm unsure how the recent slide in oil prices is effecting the comparative competitiveness of fossils vs. renewables. Not helpful, I imagine.
When it comes to electricity generation, I don't think oil prices affect it much. Oil isn't cost competitive for electricity as it stands.
The fall in natural gas prices is affecting it, since natural gas is competitive for electrical generation. But coal still rules when it comes to cheap electricity, as long as you ignore the externalities of course.
I think what's going to happen is that pretty soon, solar plus storage will be price competitive even with coal. Then there will be a big shift. It's unlikely that the price of coal will drop much.
(a) Has the global mean temperature recently increased?
(b) Have human activities contributed to changes in climate?
(c) What are the likely effects (positive and negative) of a rise in global mean temperatures?
Only nutball cranks think (a) is false. This is our strawman: if you reject "climate change," you must be a crank. In addition, much debate centers on (b)—if climate change is "our fault," it should be up to us to fix it. But (b) is irrelevant except insofar as it affects our options if the answer to (c) turns out to be "We are facing a global catastrophe." If astronomers discovered an asteroid on collision course with Earth, no one would be persuaded to inaction by the argument that "the asteroid isn't our fault."
If you examine the political incentives producing the answers to (c), it's obvious that in the current climate (heh) negative consequences are favored over positive ones. In other words, an ambitious young climate scientist seeking to maximize her chances of tenure would be foolhardy to undertake a detailed investigation of the likely benefits of global warming.
What we're seeing in climate science is, I think, a close parallel of what happened in Russian biology under the Soviets—specifically, the work of Stalin's favorite biologist, Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko developed a theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics (complete with fabricated laboratory experiments), which had obvious adaptive value in a régime seeking to develop, via social engineering, the "new Soviet man." Similarly, predicting global catastrophe is adaptive in a régime where government-funded science must be solving Important Problems™, and where most members of the permanent government believe the majority of proposed anti–global warming measures (alternative energy, conservation, carbon taxes, etc.) are good ideas anyway.
So, do we really face global catastrophe as the result of climate change (human-induced or otherwise)? In an environment of Lysenkoist climate science, it's hard to say for sure. But you'll notice that the heritability of acquired characteristics didn't exactly pan out. And given that most climate simulations are currently "off model" [1]—i.e., their predictions don't match reality—we can reasonably guess the safe way to bet.
Dinosaurs weren't wiped out by an ice age. That ice age you refer to is probably "The ice age" of about 10000 years ago (the one humans think of when we say ice age, because we were there as a species), or maybe one of the other four that have occurred since the end of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago as a result of a massive meteor impact.
It's difficult even with that. The mean temperature is calculated via inference (obviously you can't have a thermometer everywhere). And there's occasional adjustments to how the global temp. is inferred. The NOAA recently did one [0].
They have a nice comparison list of the ten warmest years [1].
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadFurther, what's your source on your last statement, that global temperatures are dropping?
The NOAA does adjust the data (and continues to do so) based on various factors like time of observation (TOBS), urban heat island effect (UHI). As well as infilling data when a station drops or they don't have the coverage.
As for the global temp dropping. That is most likely based on the satellite data showing a slight decrease (the hiatus).
[1] https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/the-majority-...
[also, this reference is somewhat old now; I haven't checked if this problem has been addressed in more recent models]
There is evidence[1] that the climate model software doesn't handle floating point properly (which is, unfortunately, a very common problem).
Rounding errors on different hardware, operation ordering, and optimization level screams that the software isn't properly handling[2] IEEE 754 floating point. This could be a serious problem in an iterated model that is chaotically sensitive to initial conditions (hence the use of ensemble forecasting)./* regardless, we need a lot thorium reactors ASAP */
[1] http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-12-00352.1
[2] (pdf) https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/02Numer...
I guarantee you they'd be happy to prove America wrong on the world stage, so there's an incentive for them to be accurate.
Edit: I normally don't react to downvotes but this is a direct quote. Larger context: this was also the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880–2015 record, at 61.86°F (16.61°C), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.14°F (0.08°C)
By simple random odds (which given that weather stations are few and far between, simple odds of micro-climates can shift temperature slightly), even with zero influence of global warming or any other effect, it's entirely possible to break records set over such a short period. I'm far too lazy to calculate random odds right now, but setting a new high at a 17 year interval doesn't seem remarkable. It is in the context of global warming, but in isolation it really doesn't mean much.
This isn't an anti AGW comment, and it's unfortunate that it's impossible to even state something so fundamental without it becoming religious, but the truth is that we've been recording our planet for a very short period of time, with growing accuracy and coverage every year.
Imaging we have a coin that I claim is biased. (Just pretend that front-page story about how it's impossible to bias a coin didn't happen.) I've flipped it dozens or hundreds of times and nearly every time it comes up heads.
After I've done this for a while, I start saying, check this out, I'm pretty sure this coin is biased. I provide my data to support the claim. But it's an ongoing investigation, so I'm still flipping the coin, and it keeps coming up mostly heads. Every so often I publish a confirming tidbit, like, "I just flipped the coin 5 times and every time it came up heads. This is even more confirmation that it's biased."
What you're doing is basically taking that statement and saying, that doesn't mean anything, a fair coin would produce 5 heads in a row 1 out of every 32 attempts.
Then I do another experiment, flip the coin four times and each time it's heads. Your reply is that it's meaningless because a fair coin would reproduce this 1 out of every 16 attempts.
Another experiment. Six heads. You say it's meaningless, because a fair coin would do this 1 out of 64 times.
And we keep on going. With each announcement you point out, correctly, that this specific, individual result could pretty easily occur by random chance. And yet each of your responses is useless and misguided, because it ignores all the other results.
Setting a new high is not remarkable. Doing it repeatedly starts to get more interesting. Doing it while average temperatures have been rising steadily for over a century is more compelling. Put all the data together and, while each little piece can be said to mean little because it could have happened by random chance, the sum total is highly compelling.
Do you really think you want to understand? Again, the irrational histrionics of so many to this discussion (such as the conflation of billions of years with a period of time that is a tiny, tiny sliver of human history, much less periods of the Earth). It is impossible to discuss nuances without the predictable, boorish stomping of feet and announcing of positions. People must make everyone know how firmly and strongly they believe in global warming.
And the funny thing is that I fully and completely believe in and understand AGW. It isn't a religion, however, and I'm not waving a flag or announcing fealty, or angrily posting over the top responses to anything that is other than full-fledged Belief. It is the most toxic, bottom-feeding discussion going.
You're right, the discussion is mostly awful. Climate change has been turned into a political issue, and awful discussion is a predictable result of that.
On the other hand, I don't see how your comment improves that any.
People acting outraged about a simple statement of fact like "since 1880", or the notional, obvious statement that a sporadic high or low is, by itself, not compelling, diminishes everyone.
You're right of course, that a single record high is not compelling. Even when it's a global, monthly record high. My point in my original reply is that pointing this out is irrelevant and annoying.
Was your point merely that this data point, by itself, is not compelling? If so, my original comment, which you complained about missing the point, was exactly about that. Was it something else? If so, I'm having a seriously tough time figuring out what your point is supposed to be.
Exactly the same principle applies.
Look at the title of this submission. Stop and before you knee-jerk a response, contemplate that this isn't "it's hot, yo, and getting hotter". It is specifically that July was the hottest month "ever recorded", which someone quite rightfully noted was since 1880.
> zealots such as yourself
Stuff like this breaks the HN guidelines, and there is much of it in your comments. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all, even when others are wrong. In fact, especially when others are wrong.
Variation at a point is high. Variation for a period of a single day is high. Samples are taken frequently. Thus new records will be set regularly.
Variation for the entire globe is low. Variation for a period of an entire month is low. There are twelve samples per year. Thus new records would not be expected to be set frequently.
Again, what exactly is your point?
For regional records, you're tracking 365 events per year. Each one is compared with that day on prior years.
For global records, you're tracking one event per year (since July will always be the warmest month).
Thus, if you'd expect to set a new record every 50 years, then you'd see on average one global record every 50 years, but you'd see about seven daily regional records every year.
Also consider that you should be seeing both record highs and record lows. Record lows continue at a good pace for regional daily records, but there hasn't been a global record low for well over a century.
But I'll also note that you haven't even bothered to go back and compute the probabilities in the first place.
It was one thing to make this argument in the 90's, but two decades of data later it's plainly ridiculous and it doesn't take nuanced data analysis.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201506.gi...
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/lo-hem/201506....
AGW is reality. The disciples of AGW are profoundly intolerable, however.
So, "useful" in the sense of "let me summarize the article in two words so you can reach your own conclusions instead of clicking that link and reading NOAA's".
Semi apologies for the snark, but yes, the first comment really was an almost informationless attempt to derail. Success!
I don't think the clarification deserved down votes.
I'm not sure about the technology used at the time, but the basic answer to your question that that they had a lot more thermometers than you expect, distributed globally too. And as we're discussing global averages, the noise about +-2F in your house isn't really the same problem.
Edit: Here's a neat 100-year reanalysis paper if you're interested. Abstract link here, full pdf available on the page: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175. "Feasibility of a 100-Year Reanalysis Using Only Surface Pressure Data"
Seriously, our forecasts are nearly always wrong. So.....saying we can make as accurate of forecasts for 200 years ago...that's not really saying much.
This is after moving to two cities in the same state, more than 100 miles apart, the forecasts still never get better.
Also, if a meteorologist can't get the current state of the weather correct, why on earth would I trust his statement of what the temperature is going to be like? At that point I'm just going to consider it a guess.
In reality, the models are derived using different methods by different scientists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus
I didn't reference centurial anything - I said that thinking it's a problem is not understanding variance. Climate scientists not only agree with me they say the same thing.
So at this point either put up some actual science or just stop JAQing off.
There are some pretty accurate forecasting services
http://www.wunderground.com/most-accurate-weather
http://forecastadvisor.com/
You can make fun of meteorologists if you want, but they are not wrong 95% of the time. In fact, over the last 20 years the accuracy of predictions has gone WAY up on average. There are still many places where forecasting is difficult and it's going to be a long road to improve it to get people like you to trust the forecast. But we're improving and we're making the best forecasts we've ever made in the industry.
If it came off as me trying to be down on meteorologists, that wasn't my intent, and I can't edit my original post to reflect that, so hopefully you'll see my comment here.
It is saying quite a lot actually because the past has already happened. In the first case you are talking about the future, and yes, in some places weather is more unpredictable. You can of course move to the desert and enjoy clockwork predictable weather if it bothers you that much.
The OP was talking about "afcasting" though. In that case measurement have already been taken, but there are other records: ice cores, sea sediment, and many others. So it makes for a very interesting topic.
If your 2-3 day forecasting is off by 5-6 degrees (celcius), why would your "aftcasting" forecast for 200 years ago be any more accurate if it is "just as good" as a 2-3 day forecast? That means I would expect an error of 5-6 degrees, same as a 2-3 day forecast
edit: formatting
> For the beginning of the twentieth century, the errors of such upper-air circulation maps over the Northern Hemisphere in winter would be comparable to the 2–3-day errors of modern weather forecasts.
Might be worth reading the abstract / full paper if you're interested in the topic.
The article this discussion is linked to is claiming "1.46°F (0.81°C)" variance over recorded history. Recorded meaning they know what actually happened.
But I cannot believe that 2-3 day forecasts are accurate to within 2 degrees. Even the services linked by other commenters criticizing my original point claimed only 77% accuracy in the best case,
https://2cco2.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/the-difference-betwee...
I'd recommend at least writing a brief summary to the video if you really want to maintain an effective FAQ.
Meteorologists lower the quality of the data they receive.
People don't want bad news. People don't want to hear that it's going to rain on their weekend. People won't tune in to hear constant bad news.
So meteorologists take the positive and optimistic side.
The reality of forecasting is that much of the data, models, the warnings, are all created by the NWS.
The further you get from real NWS data, the lower the quality tends to be. It's like a game of telephone, except with forecasting.
National forecasters like The Weather Channel utilize tons of NWS data and models, and present it in a more friendly way. Generally there is a loss of quality here (and, when you look at TWC's buzzfeed approach to weather, it's not hard to see why they might respect clicks above all else).
Then, further down the pipe, away from the NWS and the actual source, away from National broadcasters, we get to local broadcasters. Once again, these guys are largely relying on upstream info, just packaging for the local audience.
It's not surprising that local meteorologists provide the lowest quality forecasting, because that's not really their job to provide highly accurate forecasting. Their job is actually to keep you watching through a commercial break, so the show remains on-air. The NWS is the service whose job is it to accurately forecast.
For example, just look at whatever near-term forecast you have handy. What are the forecast high and low temperatures for the next few days? What are the error bars on those highs and lows?
Oh, you couldn't find error bars? Yeah.
Where do you live? Every time I turn on the news its 90+% FUD.
It gets easier over longer periods of time. I may not be able to predict very well whether it's going to be 27 degrees C on July 17th 2016, but I can make a pretty good guess at the average temperature throughout the entire month, and I would be willing to put money down that it will lie within a relatively narrow band.
Folks have tried to get around this by finding proxies for temperature (measurements that are theorized to track temperature, like the width of tree rings for example), and then calibrating that data by comparing it with the intervals for which we have reliable data (since 1970 for satellite data, or earlier for whatever thermometer data might be suitable). The long-term trends are identified and argued based on these proxies.
So to answer your question, they can calibrate a proxy using the satellite record, see what it suggests about 1880, and combine that with the available temperature data, but that's about it.
[0] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/pag...
It is important to note that we've been recording since the industrial revolution so this could be the result of human influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
http://www.weather.com/news/news/top-five-coldest-february-m...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a14585/s...
Obviously, we're getting warmer because of pollution, but is that on-top of a natural warming cycle? Being partially counteracted by a natural cooling cycle? Could we all be saved by an ice-age?
There was an article in Scientific American back 2005 where the author claims that human activity since the dawn of agriculture may have held off a return to an ice age:
https://physics.ucf.edu/~britt/Climate/Reading5-Did%20humans...
This very much does not mean that the current warming is in any way a good thing.
A good place to start is the so-called synthesis report, which covers a mixture of physical science, human impact and public policy. Page 6 of the "summary for policymakers" includes a graph showing that although the error bars are still pretty big, the observed warming is consistent with estimates of human-caused effects, and vastly larger than can be explained by the "natural cycles" we know about.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI...
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wor...
When you look at global average temperatures over a comparable span of time (since ~1880), every year in the last couple of decades has been pretty close to a record high. The last record low was more than a century ago. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
The issue is when people refuse to recognize that thousands of scientists have made this their career, and thousands of PhDs actually have been written on temperatures past and present, and think that talking heads on Fox News reciting memos paid for by fossil fuel companies contain even the semblance of a real critique.
I am fascinated by the topic of temperature collection methods through the years. Is there an easily digestible source with explanations?
When did this happen?
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/feb/13/...
That took me less than 10 seconds to Google.More reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/201...
So, yes, NOAA != NASA, but I think the parent comment was still spot on.
REF: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/...
They do individual analyses, but by and large, NASA manages the kit.
--edit: jedberg beat me to it in another conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10092967
http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2015/08/20/the_latest_cl...
When confronted with an obviously broken weather station that was reading way too hot, they replaced the faulty sensor — but refused to adjust the bad readings it had already taken. And when dealing with "the pause" in global surface temperatures that is in its 19th year, the agency threw away satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures, substituting questionable data that showed no pause.
But also, agribusiness like Monsanto will pay - they just bought Climate Corp for $1B+ a couple years ago to improve weather and climate predictions for crop outputs. The primary customers are probably insurance companies I think. There's a lot of money to be saved by predicting and avoiding catastrophes through better planning. A catastrophe might be as simple as a 1deg C temperature difference over a farm during a month - or a hurricane, or a drought, etc.
[1]: http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint_wForeword_c.pdf
No, you got it wrong. Please read my comment again and recognize that I think most profits would come from a variety of different private sectors, specifically agribusiness and insurance.
> nobody has thought of
On the contrary, there are many startups in this space. I even mentioned some by name. I am making a call for more to enter the space and join the efforts to reduce the effects of climate change, help large enterprises and governments adapt, and make lots of money while doing so.
Think about your tone. Try to engage fruitfully with people.
There are other opportunities, like energy. Surely someone can take a bite out of a 100+ trillion dollar industry in a profitable and green way.
[ETA: I had a feeling you knew this, and indeed while I was writing, you captured this info below as well. Hope your project is going well.]
Alternatively, make a startup that plans to relocate/revamp agriculture and industrial production into negative emissions processes while being cheaper than any of the current positive emissions processes. This isn't as far fetched as it seems on the longest term, but in the term that we need it, it's going to be tough. We're already living in a climate that is pushed past where it "should" be.
Sad but true
As in, “Raganwald has a potty mouth in person, but he toes the line and respects HN’s guidelines for civil discussion."
http://www.seatalk.info/cgi-bin/nautical-marine-sailing-dict...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
Limit human behavior or limit the number of humans.
Both have scary ramifications.
I don't see why people should be so scared by more solar (or even nuclear) plants.
Those are the associations some people have with the line "limiting human behavior". Of course that's a rather one-sided presentation -- I've left out positive things like "ending slavery" -- but the point is to demonstrate where the fear comes from.
In many of the examples you list, there is either an absence of liberal constitutional authority, or corruption of it. The path to the holocaust was paved by the dismantlement of liberal democracy and democratic safeguards. Slavery and subsequent civil rights abuses in the US were made possible by either punching holes in the legal order (3/5 compromise, Jim Crow, etc), ignoring it entirely, or perpetrating the abuses in secret.
To me, then, tyranny and injustice can be forestalled not by tearing down the power of the state and creating chaotic power vacuums, but by vigorously defending transparency, an independent judiciary, an independent press, and all the other legs on which the liberal order stands.
However, the point still remains that "handing over more power to the government" is a thing people have legitimate reason to fear. Particularly in an era where there's so much concern over the judiciary (from Roe v Wade to Citizens United, everyone has something they think SCOTUS screwed up badly) and the independent press (not asking the tough questions pre-Iraq war, seemingly giving Obama a pass on various scandals) and government transparency (Snowden leaks, Guantanamo, Benghazi).
So the things that we need in order to trust the government with more power aren't as strong as many people feel they should be. Simultaneously, the government has a track record of trying to change peoples' behavior in both above-board and behind-the-scenes ways, through everything from tax policy (mortgage interest deduction to encourage home ownership) to astroturfing (infiltration of various dissident groups, including those devoted to non-violence) to draconian drug laws (leading to disproportionate imprisonment of black men) and requiring people to purchase certain forms of health insurance.
It's against this backdrop that "the government wants to limit our behavior" is often evaluated. Even in areas where it actually makes a lot of sense -- like pricing externalities into carbon emissions via taxes -- it's worth asking whether the government is reaching farther than they should in order to accomplish something more than what's been publicly stated.
Nevermind that any European or Chinese or Russian climatology group would deliver the exact same data...
It's hard for me to get all worked up over climate change when no one can tell me whether the observations indicate a trend towards or away from an overall improvement. It's easy to show that things are changing. It's slightly more difficult to show that such changes are resulting from human activity. But no one seems to know whether things are accidentally getting better or accidentally getting worse.
How would anyone know what to "fix" if they can't even identify what is broken? It's like everyone is engaged in an archery contest, and the location of the bulls-eye is revealed only after everyone shoots. You can't correct your aim if you don't know what you're shooting at.
I think I can answer that: the way it always was. Adaptation is always a cost, regardless of the direction. Not only human cost, but also cost for the ecosystems. If the change is fast enough it may cause migrations or extinctions.
In my experience a good Fox News segment can use all three of these, at the same time, and switch back and forth among them, with no cognitive dissonance apparent. I don't think any of them are really being phased out, it's just that if any particular one is defeated in conversation, the arguer switches to one of the other arguments.
EDIT: Indeed, there are several HN comments in this thread to that effect.
- It's not happening.
- It's happening but it's natural.
- It's happening and might be man-made, but it's beneficial.
- It's happening and might be man-made, and it's harmful, but it's not worth the cost to mitigate.
- It's happening and might be man-made, and it's harmful, and free-market solutions will solve it.
And yes, it often freely switches between them depending on the context.
Of those four, only the last two are worth debating, and they're really almost the same thing. Everyone who screams about those first two dimensions are probably profiting more by perpetuating a meaningless conversation than by solving an identifiable problem.
Sounds like a lot of political issues, actually. Some people can make a curiously prosperous living just out of getting other people to shout at each other.
But the first two strongly feed into the last two. If climate change is not anthropogenic, then cutting emissions will not provide any benefit, while potentially causing economic harm. If climate change isn't happening at all then there is no need to do anything, and the entire framework for predicting the outcomes of changes to human activities is completely busted.
I think we should start focusing on real solutions. Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies. Both liberals and conservatives tend to agree here but they diverge in methodology. Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation. Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.
The 'extreme snow' was limited to certain parts of the US - the west coast got very little on the whole. Whereas this high temperature data is a global average. So they're not really the same thing.
> I think we should start focusing on real solutions.
Sounds good to me. Taxes, it must be said, are also a way to spur innovation, because it can focus people's attention on using less of the taxed resource. Here's Greg Mankiw's take on that. He's a Republican economist.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto....
(As for the "conservatives prefer better environment for business.." you ought to look at how well the economy has done under liberal vs conservative leaders all throughout the 20th century to gain some insight into which political leanings are better for the economy, of which business is, of course, a major part.)
...which was still "0.5°F above the 20th century average" for the contiguous 48 US states[1]. From looking at the temperature graph[2], only about ten years between 1900-1980 was hotter than 2014.
The fact that this is perceived as an "unusual cold summer" should give you a pause.
As usual, there's a relevant xkcd for everyrthing: https://xkcd.com/1321/
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201413 : "In 2014, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average temperature was 52.6°F, 0.5°F above the 20th century average, and tied with 1977 as the 34th warmest year in the 120-year period of record."
[2] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather-...
(BTW, seriously, who uses Fahrenheit in scientific discourse?)
This is because warming is only one component of the problems we're facing as a result of pollution. See for example ocean acidification.
> Besides, I don't understand why it's ok for liberals to make fun of conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change but that liberals using exceptional heat during summer as an argument for climate change is ok.
The funny thing about snow is it actually can be a result of warming temperatures. At higher latitudes, warmer weather leads to more snow. So that's a starting point that higher temperatures don't necessarily mean less snow. But furthermore, if you have scientifically gathered data that says there's a trend towards warming, it's reasonable to look at heat waves and recognize them as part of a larger problem, since it's supported by data.
However, if you pull out anecdotes that contradict the data, you're trying to muddle the issue and make it look like the data is invalid, even though you have no basis for that conclusion.
> Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.
This is a non-opinion. A mix of taxing polluters and subsidizing non-polluting industries is the solution. Having a better environment for businesses boosts profits, not innovation.
Taxing pollution forces businesses to find ways to profit without polluting. That's innovation.
Of course, but more profits encourages people to create more businesses which create more innovation. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.
It isn't obvious at all. In fact, there are some indications that the opposite is true. For example, there are some simple economic models in Blatt:Dynamic Economic Systems where rate of profit and rate of growth are inversely proportional. Also, data from Piketty aren't very optimistic in this sense either (it seems that economic states with lots of private capital correspond to low growth and vice versa).
"Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation"
Something to consider here is that taxing oil production or similar carbon emissions creating isn't really a tax. It's actually just reflecting the real cost of the activity. The problem with these industries is that they have externalities which are not reflected - some of their profits are created by a cost being put onto society. Nobody likes 'taxes', but I think everyone can agree that any activity should reflect it's true cost.
Plus, if you step away from climate change for a moment everyone can see that the demands for energy are only increasing. Some of the new technologies around energy generation will be extremely profitable - whole new sectors. The USA has a strong tradition of supporting innovation and then reaping the rewards in private enterprises. So you might consider the "subsidies" as just priming innovation.
What is the number you put on rising sea levels and altered weather patterns?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...
Who are "we" that had an unusual cold summer?
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June–August was the highest on record for this period, at 1.28°F (0.71°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C).
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201408
Because that argument betrays the most infantile misunderstanding of an issue that is extremely important; climate is not the same as weather, and extreme heat and cold and weather events are what climate models predict.
> Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies.
Are you describing cap-and-trade? That's actually a conservative solution from decades ago; this is the "middle ground" and was roundly rejected as some kind of socialist takeover by today's conservatives.
Anyway it's probably too late for all of that anyway. It's certainly too late for your impotent handwaving about "innovation in new source of renewable". What a joke.
Global warming and climate change are one in the same. "Global warming" became the rallying cry for so many environmentalist quacks citing bunk science - people like Al Gore were universally skewered in the mainstream media - that it was toxic from a PR perspective. So they came up with a new term. "Climate change" has the exact same beliefs, political backers, scientists, corporate interests, and studies behind it as "global warming". It's just a new name.
> I think we should start focusing on real solutions.
The issue is that there is no scientific evidence that solutions are possible. The earth has gone through many dramatic "climate change/global warming" events, and these last occurred long before cars or other man-made pollutants existed. It will go through them again, regardless of how many carbon taxes are levied by liberals or Tesla's are sold. It's just a reality - mankind will eventually cease to exist on this planet regardless of what it does or does not do.
Strange then that "climate change" name predates "global warming"
(For some reason, these same people are often pretty worried about the state of the economy. Nations have fallen since the beginning of history, and in the end every business and every nation collapse, so why don't we just let them fail and see if the next one is better?)
There is indeed a logical fallacy playing out in all of this, and that of course is that environmentalists/liberals are attempting to control something that all of the credible scientific evidence says we can't control. Controlling the universe, as it turns out, is much harder than bribing legislators to use the government resources to pursue one's agenda.
Mankind has been altering environments since when they only had stone tools. Your argument is basically, "I don't believe modern humans (with its 7+ billion population and sustained alteration of the majority of land area) have any noticeable effect on the Earth's ecosystem, therefore scientists who say so are wrong."
Stop being so willfully ignorant.
And yes, all scientists (at least sane ones) would agree that, if a several-kilometer-across ball of rock and iron falls from the sky, it will have such a disastrous consequence on the climate (among other things, including "staying alive" for most people) that our modern Global Warming will look like a summer picnic in comparison.
...which is basically non sequitur.
I'm not even sure why you brought up dinosaurs.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1321/
Edit: Apparently this is not interesting to HNers. Bring on the downvotes.
Secondly, "hottest months on record" are happening far more frequently than coldest months ever. Like orders of magnitude more frequently. So yeah, it's not that we're not interested, it's that you re factually wrong.
It is a perversion of science when a scientific theory is no longer subject to healthy criticism and skepticism.
I find it really disturbing that so much of (American) politics today is a debate over facts. Politics should be about debating priorities and principles and approaches based on commonly accepted facts.
Edit: answering my own question with this data set:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_...
It appears the coldest month on record for this time period is January 1893. I think that the answer to why that extreme wasn't blamed on climate change might be related to an inability to correlate worldwide temperature data at the time, and the fact that nobody knew about climate change at the time.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=...
I don't believe defeatism is helpful, but I got a very Prince "Party Like It's 1999" feeling after consuming this. What should we do? If we pull all the fossil fuels out of our economy tomorrow, everything will crash. Not to mention that there is zero political will to even contemplate this. So what should we do?
I don't see the case for human extinction here. Your link mentions it, but doesn't appear to lay out the case at all, so I don't know what that statement is based on, but I don't see how it would occur. The potential disruption due to climate change is immense, but people will survive. The problem is not how to keep humanity alive, but how to keep civilization going without some sort of major backslide, and without getting a couple of billion people killed.
I'm unsure how the recent slide in oil prices is effecting the comparative competitiveness of fossils vs. renewables. Not helpful, I imagine.
The fall in natural gas prices is affecting it, since natural gas is competitive for electrical generation. But coal still rules when it comes to cheap electricity, as long as you ignore the externalities of course.
I think what's going to happen is that pretty soon, solar plus storage will be price competitive even with coal. Then there will be a big shift. It's unlikely that the price of coal will drop much.
(a) Has the global mean temperature recently increased?
(b) Have human activities contributed to changes in climate?
(c) What are the likely effects (positive and negative) of a rise in global mean temperatures?
Only nutball cranks think (a) is false. This is our strawman: if you reject "climate change," you must be a crank. In addition, much debate centers on (b)—if climate change is "our fault," it should be up to us to fix it. But (b) is irrelevant except insofar as it affects our options if the answer to (c) turns out to be "We are facing a global catastrophe." If astronomers discovered an asteroid on collision course with Earth, no one would be persuaded to inaction by the argument that "the asteroid isn't our fault."
If you examine the political incentives producing the answers to (c), it's obvious that in the current climate (heh) negative consequences are favored over positive ones. In other words, an ambitious young climate scientist seeking to maximize her chances of tenure would be foolhardy to undertake a detailed investigation of the likely benefits of global warming.
What we're seeing in climate science is, I think, a close parallel of what happened in Russian biology under the Soviets—specifically, the work of Stalin's favorite biologist, Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko developed a theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics (complete with fabricated laboratory experiments), which had obvious adaptive value in a régime seeking to develop, via social engineering, the "new Soviet man." Similarly, predicting global catastrophe is adaptive in a régime where government-funded science must be solving Important Problems™, and where most members of the permanent government believe the majority of proposed anti–global warming measures (alternative energy, conservation, carbon taxes, etc.) are good ideas anyway.
So, do we really face global catastrophe as the result of climate change (human-induced or otherwise)? In an environment of Lysenkoist climate science, it's hard to say for sure. But you'll notice that the heritability of acquired characteristics didn't exactly pan out. And given that most climate simulations are currently "off model" [1]—i.e., their predictions don't match reality—we can reasonably guess the safe way to bet.
[1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5747
They have a nice comparison list of the ten warmest years [1].
[0] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/pag...
[1] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/pag...
There's a couple for surface temperature at http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ & http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature.