34 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] thread
<on track to be either the second or third warmest since records began in the mid-1800s, behind only 2016 and possibly 2017>

Soo.. cooler than mid 1800's and getting cooler averall since 2016-17

Please try not to make comments like this, as I keep breaking keyboards with my forehead and this is starting to become rather expensive.
Only 3.6 rontgens, not great, not terrible.
This is basically how I see the climate change situation. Just like the chernobyl series depicted, it's scientific researchers that fully understand the matter at hand trying to convey how serious of a situation we are in and others just being all handwavy saying they're overreacting and such.
Great. Well, if we aren't going to restrict CO2 and methane emissions any, can we at least agree to legalise all drugs for the going away party.

edit - I am only half joking. The war on drugs is not noted for its logical underpinnings, but if it has any, they are largely predicated on worrying about future consequences. If our official political stance is going to be 'yolo, fuck the future consequences', we may as well be consistent.

> Ocean heat content (OHC) set a new record in early 2019

> In many ways, OHC represents a much better measure of climate change than global average surface temperatures. It is where most of the extra heat ends up and is much less variable on a year-to-year basis than surface temperatures. Most years set a new record for OHC and 2019 has been no exception so far, with the first three months showing the warmest OHC since records began.

> Changes in the amount or rate of warming are much easier to detect in the OHC record than on the surface. For example, OHC shows little evidence of the slowdown in warming in the mid-2000s, seen in surface temperature records.

Have you seen recent claims that scientists can detect temperature changes of as little as 1/1000th of a degree in the deep ocean, occurring over a period of several decades? Are you gullible enough to believe such claims? I'm not.
> Have you seen recent claims

No, I haven't.

Last weekend I overhead two older gentlemen talking about climate change. They were both agreeing with each other that it's all 'cyclical' and that clearly there are businesses that stand to benefit from climate change research. This is in Canada btw.

I don't know how you convince these people. Luckily, they're on their way out, but they still represent a large portion of the voting population for at least the next decade. Do we need more intense floods and forest fires every single year until they finally admit that maybe there's something to this climate thing?

Whether they believe it or not it's happening.

I think we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion or we're screwed. There's no room for error at this point.

>I think we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion

I don't like where that path leads. I mean, you're not wrong that it would be able to solve the problem faster but I don't think the end justifies the means.

>"I don't like where that path leads."

It led to not allowing the Californian public to vote both for tax cuts and increases in public spending, unless there is a budget surplus. It also led to the UK not having the death penalty.

not everything should be decided democratically. a balance with bureaucracy is good
Is there a place where I can find the list of things that should be decided democratically versus not?
I wish there was such a place :) Looking at things on a case by case basis is the only way. I would definitely say that things like harmonising regulations across different countries in a trading bloc is best left to bureaucrats as an example
Is the list of things that should be decided democratically on the list of things that should be decided democratically?
it's also a form of macho virtue signalling
Here's a snarky reply, because I've laughed out loud upon reading your "they're on their way out" and the "we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion" posted in one of responses.

>how you convince these people.

Four easy steps:

- show them the hockey stick graphs from models,

- show them the graphs from actual measurements,

- point out 2019 is colder than 2016, and probably than 2017, as per the article,

- point out the graph looks pretty close to a cluster of sine waves when watched at any scale

Congratulations, now they are convinced for life. You can celebrate that with them by watching the 2006 An Inconvenient Truth for all the beautiful animations.

Snark aside, the gist is: people who have been following news for some two decades or more don't generally get alarmed that easily.

> - point out the graph looks pretty close to a cluster of sine waves when watched at any scale

Is this some kind of backhanded admission that you will never admit global warming ever, whatever happens to the global temperature? Any graph can be arbitrarily closely approximated by a series of sine waves, that's the basic idea of Fourier Transformation.

(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
Unfortunately the problem seems to be a Prisoner's dilemma for countries - curbing CO2 emissions without all other countries doing so puts said country at an economic disadvantage. It also puts a large onus on developing countries that don't have the established industry to easily convert to "greener" technologies/industries. Top that with most Western countries being in relatively low threatened areas comparatively and you get a large populace happy to remain ignorant.

I'm convinced the only possible savior at this point would be a Superpower aggressively enforcing environmental regulations to the point of going to war over it, but that seems unlikely.

> I'm convinced the only possible savior at this point would be a Superpower aggressively enforcing environmental regulations to the point of going to war over it, but that seems unlikely.

It could feasibly handled economically. I've wondered if a stronger world govt a century or so down the line saying eco friendly or tariffs. I can't speak to liklihood, but it seems feasible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq6fDa9JrzQ

Every generation or so, new Chicken Littles flail their wings as they discover new "science" that proves the sky is falling, or imminently set to. We who have seen this same scenario play out over and over about every subject under the sun are naturally skeptical.

Indeed, it is lucky we're on our way out because Idiocracy is halfway here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

Cool story. Do you have any peer-reviewed research that shows that the earth isn't warming at an unprecedented rate or should I just trust your "common sense" on this one?
If you had any idea of what the "data" behind most of these warming claims generally consists of, and which is used to generate the relevant peer-reviewed research papers, then you would probably hang your head in shame.
I don't need peer review because I'm not asserting anything.

Perhaps more than halfway there.

I'm talking about all the sky-falling alarmism in all its forms, past and present.
Sure, doomsday prophecy is a permanent bizarre feature of human culture. It creates its own problem though - the boy who cried wolfs paradox. Not all alarms are falls. You must remember the ozone hole alarmism. We don't hear much about it anymore, but not because it was a false alarm, but because people actually did something about it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
Yup. Where there's an actual fire, a fire alarm is a good idea.

Putting toxins into the atmosphere is rather different than putting a natural and necessary-for-life substance into the air.

Of course CO2 is necessary for life. It would be ridiculous to argue otherwise. It's a matter of degree and balance however. It's hard to think of any substance more crucial for life than water. Yet, if you drink too much of it you die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication#Notable_cas...

Too much CO2 indoor is what we call poorly ventilated building.

Well, if they're old enough then they probably either experienced first-hand (or heard first-hand accounts from even older folks) the relative cold of the 1970s, which was preceded by the relative heat of the 1930s, which was of course itself preceded by a relatively cool period. So there is a definite down/up/down/up cyclical nature there.

And current flooding issues are generally nothing like what occurred before effective flood-control measures were put into place. And current forest fires are generally nothing like what occurred before effective fire-control methods were put into place. Being young, you've grown up in a fairly "controlled" world, so (much like anti-vax folks who don't understand what the world was like before vaccines came along), you have no life experience dealing with the world as it existed before those other controls were put into place.