While it is still a temperature record, I want to point out that +30C range temperatures were not unseen there before. There are hot summers in Siberia due to the extreme continental climate.
There has been unusual hot and cold spells of weather on the high latitudes in the past year or so due to the arctic polar vortex behaving in an unusual way.
My knowledge is limited, if there's a meteorologist reading this comment, please enlighten us on the topic.
Why is this comment being downvoted? I swear, the HN comments section is just gutter trash as insightful comments like this gets downvoted, whereas pointless comments gets upvoted to the top.
Is this true? That's hotter than most days here in tropical Singapore! Where are the photos and videos of the locals sunbathing? I’m really curious how they are reacting to the unusual (for them) warm weather.
People don't always sunbath when it's hot outside, quite the contrary, we're actively searching for the shade. At least in the parts of Europe from where I'm from (Eastern Europe, to be more precise).
If you live in a place like Australia or Brazil, the best place to be is on the beach!! It has a nice cool breeze, usually, and the water is very refreshing... But you really need shade, for sure, and very strong sunscreen :)
if Siberia is anything like Canada or Scandinavia during a warm summer then the very last thing people want to do is to be outside. Outside when the frost melts means the air is full of newly hatched hungry mosquitos looking to bite and drink blood.
Sure, the mosquitoes are bad. They're nothing compared to the blackflies that come earlier and the deerflies that come later. In a northern temperate climate there are two seasons: frostbite and bugbite.
What I saw on the local (Dutch) news is houses being severely damaged due to the melting permafrost.
And who in his right mind would sunbath at 38 Celcius, especially when you're not used to it. We went past 40 last here in the Netherlands, but I guess moving north for cooler weather is out of the question now.
Sydney routinely beats Singapore for daily maximum temperature during summer. This is because the variation in daily maximum temperature is much much higher in sub-tropical regions than near the Equator. So Sydney's average maximum temperature in January (27C) is lower than Singapore's (30C), but the variation is enough that the record high in Sydney is 10C hotter (45C vs 35C).
If you like stable warm weather, your sweetspot is probably Brisbane, where it never really gets too hot or cold (rare exceptions).
I find the summers in Brisbane disgusting, though I do come from a colder country. I thought Melbourne was the sweet spot, albeit rather temperamental, weather wise.
Not at all, the climate of Tasmania is excellent. The problem is probably the isolation (even in terms of Australia... Tasmania is relatively quite far south and separated from the mainland by a stretch of sea that takes a half day to cross on the ferry) and the terrain which is very mountainous... the fact that nearly half of the island is still wilderness has mostly to do with that, I think.
Sri Lanka is about the same size and equally mountainous, and about half as far from the Indian mainland as Tasmania from Victoria, but its population is forty times bigger at 20 million people. It's got to come down more to historical accident than the isolation or the topography.
There's lots of room for the population to grow on the mainland still, and Tasmania doesn't have much of a draw, except for wine, and isolation I guess. Not that there's a lack of isolation going around...
Historically, Aboriginal people didn't really expand their population much, not that the barrenness of most of the landmass helped, while white/ other people have only been on the island for ~240 years.
More like it's too remote. Most if not all immigrants prefer Melbourne and Sydney as they are the largest cities with the most things happening and a pleasant climate.
Maybe the humidity ruins Brisbane summer for you? I think Perth would be a good alternative, the variance is closer to Sydney, but the heat is dry, and so is a lot more comfortable.
That may well be the case - I have more problems with the air, I think, than the heat. I've experienced comparable heat before, but a breeze, or stepping into the shade would provide some respite. No such luck in Brisbane!
Also the seatbelts! Oh god the seatbelt buckles in summer
As mentioned in another comment, this is not very unusual (summer days are often above 30 degrees C). The town Verkhoyansk is in an extreme subarctic climate, and along with other famous places like Oymyakon and Yakutsk they're known to have the largest amplitudes of temperature in the world, the only places with "a temperature range higher than 100 °C " between coldest and warmest throughout the year.
> Verkhoyansk holds the record for both the hottest and the coldest temperatures ever recorded above the Arctic circle, with 38.0 °C (100.4 °F) and −67.8 °C (−90.0 °F) respectively.
> Verkhoyansk holds the record for both the hottest and the coldest temperatures ever recorded above the Arctic circle, with 38.0 °C (100.4 °F) and −67.8 °C (−90.0 °F) respectively.
I just checked and Verkhoyansk lowest temperature record is -67.8 deg C, and highest is 38.0 deg C. That is 105.8 deg temperature range. In Celsius. In Fahrenheit the range is almost 200 degrees!
AFAIC, somewhere around 25C / 80F is ideal sunbathing weather. 38C / 101F is brutal; well beyond the point at which finding air conditioning is my number one priority. When it's that hot out, I'd sooner sit in a tub of ice cubes than lounge around under the sun.
Re: "A small Russian town" lol, Do you propose that temperatures were different 50km away?
There is a massive heat wave rolling through NORTHERN Siberia right now, and it's not been confined to one town nor is this "record" the only broken heat record.
Southern Siberia, like the Altai region, hit's such temperatures regularly, but that's Novosibirsk and south.
What we are referring to here is unprecedented, so let's please stop acting as if ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE wasn't a factual reality threatening mammalian life on earth.
> I am a geologist passionate about sharing Earth's intricacies with you. I received my PhD from Duke University where I studied the geology and climate of the Amazon
I find it hard to believe someone with those credentials would be unfamiliar with mathematical concepts.
It's a shame because the article doesn't need to "hype" up the temperature. It would have gotten my interest regardless
Author of the article almost certainly did not write the headline. A sub-editor probably did that.
It's entirely reasonable to judge a publication on the basis of a headline not matching the article. It is not at all reasonable to judge the article's author concerning a headline they did not write, had no say in and probably did not even seen prior to publication.
Forbes is now a content host - when you see an article from forbes.com/sites/xxxx, that means that it's essentially a blog from a rando that Forbes selected as a 'contributor'.
> Contributors have access to the same publishing platform as Forbes's own journalists, a platform which was built by Forbes itself. And keeping the system simple is vital, Federle said, to allow them "to focus on the journalism", and not get distracted by technicalities.
> Second is the Most Popular section, which Federle explained is "algorithmically generated" and "driven by velocity engine" which looks at social shares and comments to rank stories.
> "We've taken our platform and will shrink wrap it down to a product they can plug into their platform. This is a new business for us."
I read the article. The author (a tropical geologist) mixes up weather (temporary) with climate (long-term), among other things.
The concern of arctic residents is if the weather is hot enough, for long enough, to melt the permafrost. That has numerous repercussions, including emissions, transportation and wildlife.
For example, any highways or pipelines on top of permafrost will dislocate if permafrost melts.
But overall, Canada is in favor of glabal warming. Most of our land mass is not arable with the current climate.
i think it'd be smarter to keep Canada's land the way it is until you figure out how to handle a few (dozen) million of immigrants per year whose land used to be arable...
My understanding is that the bulk of the US's arable land (i.e., the Midwest) won't be much affected by climate change. It might move sideways, but it won't turn into desert.
Conversely, Canada is not expected to be a great beneficiary of climate change (except for the Northwest Passage becoming passable), because most of what is not currently used isn't because of temperature, but because it is muskeg.
Not catastrophically though, and "largely underwater" seems incorrect, especially since the land around Hudson Bay is part of the Canadian shield, with only a thin layer of dirt over rock [1]. Even if all polar ice melted, and the sea rose 70m [2], it looks like Hudson Bay would only increase in area by ~20%: https://www.floodmap.net/?ll=62.144976,-87.451172&z=4&e=70
By contrast, practically all of Florida would be gone with that rise.
Canadians are throwing away farmland to build McMansions and freeways at a record pace, so I don't think there's anything sensible to the commenter's line about Canadians "wanting more farmland" (which makes no sense anyways).
Source: I live rural on farmland in greenbelt in Ontario.
> My understanding is that the bulk of the US's arable land (i.e., the Midwest) won't be much affected by climate change. It might move sideways, but it won't turn into desert.
From David Wallace-Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth":
In 1879 the naturalist John Wesley Powell [..] divined a natural boundary running due North along the 100th meridian. It separated the humid—and therefore cultivatable—natural farmland of what became the Midwest from the arid, spectacular, but less farmable land of the true West. The divide ran through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and stretches north into Manitoba, Canada, separating more densely populated communities full of large farms from sparser, open land that was never truly made valuable by agriculture. Since just 1980 that boundary has moved fully 140 miles east, almost to the 98th parallel, drying up hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland in the process.
Maybe it won't turn into desert exactly but it won't be productive for growing food.
> The Midwest is a major producer of a wide range of food and animal feed for national consumption and international trade. Increases in warm-season absolute humidity and precipitation have eroded soils, created favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, and degraded the quality of stored grain. Projected changes in precipitation, coupled with rising extreme temperatures before mid-century, will reduce Midwest agricultural productivity to levels of the 1980s without major technological advances.
I know you're responding to a comment talking about climate refugees ... the HN comments often jump quickly from realistic scenarios to Mad Max.
But even the projected impacts are significant. Other concerns are impacts to the Great Lakes and to extreme heat events. All covered in the link, which is really very good.
I don't know if you live there or keep in touch with people there. The changes in snow and rain patterns since my childhood in the 70s/80s seem noticeable to me -- although I'm open to correction since I haven't looked at the numbers and this kind of change is not covered in the above report. I don't remember rain in February in Kansas, for instance, but it happens now.
I grew up and currently live in Michigan, in around the same areas (within an hour or so of each other) - anecdotally, our winters of late have been odd. The last couple years before 2019-20 saw a great deal of icefall around March, as well as the arctic vortices where we got down to -20 degress F, which were a bit odd but not crazy, but this last winter was very strange in how unbelievably warm it was, and I've never seen it like that.
I realize that Global Warming != Warming Winters because climate is more complex than that, and odd weather has always been a staple of Michigan on account of the Great Lakes, but this just felt unprecedented, and a bit concerning if it continues in this direction.
If you swap out "overall" with "in isolation".. I sincerely and hopefully doubt that most Canadians would ruin a lot of the world, for a bit more arable land.
> The author (a tropical geologist) mixes up weather (temporary) with climate (long-term)
Right, sure, the guy with a "PhD from Duke University where I studied the geology and climate of the Amazon", understands less about climate and weather than you do.
Do you truly not understand that this is extremely basic stuff to everyone except the Climate Change "Sceptics"? They really do have this bizarre habit of quoting schoolkid level science as though it's some amazing insight they've just discovered.
I'm afraid you're not painting a correct picture here. There are climate sceptics (they call themselves realists) that used to work for the IPCC. There are established professors among them (no not psychologists, geologists).
Please do not act as if they are dumb fks. That is not the case.
I don't think you are sincere since you already mention blog and video, which are the usual mantra words of the politicizing discourse but I encourage everyone who is interested to look into https://judithcurry.com/ for an example.
You don't think I'm sincere, because I asked for a link to a blog, so you give me a link to Judith Curry's blog?
I'm familiar with Curry's "work". I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but then she went from warning about caution to outright lies. Frankly, I'd rather someone who was honestly stupid than Judith Curry who knows she's lying, but does it anyway.
Oh, FFS, I just read through her last few entries. She's got worse. Now it's the Anthony Watts technique of linking to articles with suggestive headlines without commentary. Example: "Misconceptions of global catastrophe [link]". Now, that article is about the real issues that will arise from Climate Change, and about people's misconceptions about them, but she knows very few people will actually read the article, and will instead take the wrong implication from the title.
Soils under boreal forests are not good farm land.
Thin soils over the Canadian shield are not good places to plant crops. Or Northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, wouldn't be mostly forests.
Mass forest fires don't make good ranch or farm land.
Climate is not the obstacle for agriculture moving further north in Canada -- the Canadian shield is.
And Canadians aren't making use of the farm land we have already. We used to be a net food exporter, now we are a net importer. Which hasn't been great during the COVID crisis.
Overall Canadians (but not the major opposition party, or most Albertans) are very concerned about climate change and not "in favour" (spell it right if you're Canadian, please). However they fear the economic reprocussions that result. Like most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield: "Glaciation has left the area only a thin layer of soil, through which the composition of igneous rock resulting from long volcanic history is frequently visible."
The town is Verhoyansk for those who don't want to click a forbes article.
I feel this is clickbait (at least the title). Continental climates fluctuate a lot. One day breaking a record could simple be a statistical outlier. A poke around the records does show that the entirety of June so far has been well above average, and that this is not normal. But I guess "global warming slowly driving more extreme high temperatures in artic siberia" doesn't get as many clicks.
> It is well known that the poles warm faster as a result of climate change. For example, the average increase in temperature on Earth over the past 40 years is 1.44°F. In comparison, the Arctic has warmed by more than 3.5°F during the same period, more than double the global average.
I wonder if there is some connection between variance in temperature extremes and average warming? I feel it could either be due to the same underlying cause or because larger variance will mean the average warming will appear larger. I suspect the former (i.e. it really is warming faster in the poles). I guess one could think of Siberia as a canary in the coal mine for global warming. Not that we should need one.
I wonder if there are some effects from the reduced pollution over the last few months of lockdown. We have had some unusual weather in the UK, like the sunniest spring on record.
Probably not. It's a very common mistake to confuse local phenomena (i.e. "weather") with global patterns (i.e. "climate").
My area saw the hottest and driest spring ever recorded last year, but this year we had some rain and temperatures were modest (despite still being above average overall).
Bottom line: records are extremely rare if events occur at random. If new records become far more common than the harmonic series predicts, then this is telling us that annual climatic events are no longer independent annual events but are beginning to form part of a systematic non-random trend.
2020: 100.4 degrees (unverified, as described in the article)
How significant is this newly reported record temperature?
Is it conceivable that the warm day in 1915 reached 100.4 degrees?
Maybe we've changed
- the amount of reporting of records
- the way we measure (thermometer and other equipment changes)
- the frequency of measurement (periodic to continuous)
- the immediate area (urbanization, equipment use)
- the number of measurements (every location gets a chance for a record update)
- the precision of reporting
Because it was written as a response to a statement that, individual records being broken on their own isn't significant, it's the number of records being broken over time. And so when your parent poster responded with "yeah well maybe this record isn't real", while they might be right, it really isn't all that relevant.
On the "precision of reporting" scale, one should also note that the 1915 was recorded in Fahrenheit (100F) in Alaska, and the 2020 record was recorded in Celsius (38C) in Siberia and then converted to Fahrenheit, adding the record-making decimal (100.4F).
Oh, and then rounded up to 101F apparently just for the headline.
Reading some of the comments in this thread, it's amazing that the scientific study of climate and the atmosphere has become a matter of political identity.
What do you think is the reason? Some of the arguments that I heard include the suggestion that some of the radical environmental plans may cause serious losses of jobs and tax revenue, and increase poverty, while other heavy polluters would get ahead and dominate the world's politics and economy.
Very small sample size and a different issue to be sure, but with people I've interacted with that dispute the validity/importance of the Coronavirus, they are being driven primarily by denial/dismissal.
To accept it and and work from there to adapt and mitigate is terrifying. I think you can probably say the same about climate change.
Additionally, I think you could draw a line that these denials are influenced by those protecting their "salaries"
Guess what- the coal industry is going out of business anyway. Those dinosaurs will die anyway - the problem is with “jobs will be lost” argument they are also dragging the future of rest of the humanity with them.
Not anytime soon. China, India and other countries are planning a huge number of new coal plants. Just as much capacity as currently installed in Europe in total.
Coal's life may be limited, but in the coming 50 years it's just going to grow significantly.
It is a shame - but it has always been a political issue, politicized by the global warming advocates.
1988 Canadian environment minister: No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.
It's a "bootleggers and baptists" combination of those who want to remake the world governance and true believers who want to save the world from the perceived danger.
Given the "quality" of the models established for the COVID pandemic, I think it's not outlandish to say that scientists should alarm less and study more.
If we can't model correctly a "simple" pandemic, how can we model something as complex as climate.
I'm tired of the faith in scientists. They're just human : they can make mistakes, they can be bought and more often than not they can delude themselves.
Climate models have a well-understood track record.
Judging the utility of models is useless if you don't prepend them with a range of certainty.
Anyone who knew about pandemic models knew from the start that there's a lot of unknown underlying variables, and thus initial models made too many assumptions.
Climate models have been running for decades of fine iteration, with fairly well understood limitations.
> Climate models have a well-understood track record.
Disease vectors and management are less well understood, or better? I would argue, they are better understood and the understanding is deeper (to the core of the physics). Climate modeling relies on large forces that vary a bit, but have not had to withstand any variability at the scales predicted by climate change alarmists (ie hocket stick off the charts) enough to understand how most aspects of the environment will resolve over time, imo.
Climate and medicine is not comparable at a predictive level.
Disease vectors are well understood from the theoretical point of view, but rely on variables that can only be explained by sociological and anthropological notions that are not only extremely difficult to quantify, but also that can change dynamically as societies react in response to pandemics.
Physical models may be extremely complex but physical constants do not change unpredictably over time.
You are saying Coronavirus with <500k deaths worldwide (0.007%) is a "greatests threat threats to human life".
Sure, we should take some precautions from now on, but this level of hyperbole is ridiculous.
If anything, this pandemic was a good wake up call to be a bit more careful in our modern super-connected world. We should prepare in case a truly dangerous bug comes along. The hyperbole actually goes against this, see Cry Wolf.
All who were not killed by covid are not happily jumping around.
You see the death stats and calculate a %. Once a medicine is invented the stats of injuries (both physical and financial) would trickle in. Several survivors have lost legs, lung and kidney function.
SARS and swine flu were the wake up calls. This is real deal. And yes, if we don’t learn next will be worse.
Some covid survivors sustained life-altering damage. But most did not.
Exaggerating the impact of covid is only going to throw more fuel on the fire for people inclined towards viewing the whole thing with a great deal of skepticism. All these white lies and misleading statements add up and the result won't be improved public discourse.
Why do you believe the next will be worse? Covid is already a global pandemic and will likely reach a majority of the global population before going away.
Well, interestingly enough, the factors are both what you would normally consider a "vulnerable" population, but also, folks with a high metabolic rate (athletes) as well.
The wet bulb temperature is when your body can no longer cool with sweat. This is the same for everyone and is a relation between humidity and temperature. This is basically a physical thing and is the same for everyone. It means your body temperature will just go up until it reaches a point where you can no longer survive.
Of course there's still differences on how much that matters. A healthy person can sustain a longer period of time with a slightly elevated temperature. A person with health problems may have issues much earlier. But in the end... with wet bulb temperature noone can survive without external cooling for longer periods of time.
It is hot & humid but likely not exceeding 35C. There are figures in [0] that show the 99.9% wet bulb typically is in the range 27-29C for the south eastern US. The "hot" spots are in the UAE, Iran, etc. Being close to very hot body of water does not help.
It might be >35C as read on a regular thermometer in August in the south of US.
However the wet-bulb temperature[1] is, as the name implies, the temperature a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth. If the water evaporates, it will cool the thermometer down, and as such will read less than a regular (dry-bulb) thermometer.
For example, if the dry-bulb temperature is 35C and the relative humidity is 75%, then the wet-bulb temperature would be about 31C[3]. This means the body can still evaporate sweat to cool down, albeit not by much.
If you got both a wet-bulb and a dry-bulb thermometer side by side, you can use it to calculate the relative humidity[2].
I can't find a link right now but I read somewhere that farmers in Costa Rica were starting to get liver damage because the wet bulb temperature had been reached there so we're starting to see the effects already
"This dramatic warming of the Arctic up to triple-digit temperatures was not expected to happen until 2100 from climate change."
It happened one time, I am not sure if this statement is warranted. In 1937, Montana recorded the hottest temperate it ever recorded when it reached 117 degrees in Medicine Lake.
Not saying this was a fluke, but it could have been. It happens all the time.
The average high is 68 so this recorded high is an offset of about 32 degrees which is huge. Imagine what that does to the ground that is normal filled with frozen moisture.
For some reason it has been consistently 8 to 15 degrees cooler than normal everyday this summer here in Kuwait. Not as extreme a difference but still strange weather. November 2018 Kuwait saw its largest flood event on record and then 10 days later there was a second flood that was 2 to 3 times greater than that record setter.
Either we accept record highs as an evidence for climate change, but also accept record lows as an evidence against, or we refuse both based on the statement that "weather is not climate".
125 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread(Source: was born in Siberia).
My knowledge is limited, if there's a meteorologist reading this comment, please enlighten us on the topic.
I'll grant you that Barnaul certainly knows of 35c+ temps, but arctic circle? Heat records have been broken. Source: broken heat records.
https://twitter.com/defis_eu/status/1275337834937884676
Slip on a shirt, Slop on the 50+ sunscreen, Slap on a hat[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip-Slop-Slap
And who in his right mind would sunbath at 38 Celcius, especially when you're not used to it. We went past 40 last here in the Netherlands, but I guess moving north for cooler weather is out of the question now.
Sorry couldn't resist :)
If you like stable warm weather, your sweetspot is probably Brisbane, where it never really gets too hot or cold (rare exceptions).
Historically, Aboriginal people didn't really expand their population much, not that the barrenness of most of the landmass helped, while white/ other people have only been on the island for ~240 years.
Sri Lanka doesn’t seem too isolated.
Also the seatbelts! Oh god the seatbelt buckles in summer
Singapore is always hot and humid, but places of all latitudes can be hotter for a short period, but usually with low humidity.
So San Jose (Silicon Valley) has a couple weeks of over 100 F weather each year. But almost no humidity.
Uh, you meant Fahrenheit, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkhoyansk
> Verkhoyansk holds the record for both the hottest and the coldest temperatures ever recorded above the Arctic circle, with 38.0 °C (100.4 °F) and −67.8 °C (−90.0 °F) respectively.
The record high is 38.4°C, and record low is −64.4°C, which is a historical range of 102.8°C (185F), although presumably not in the same year.
Actual details from the article: This past weekend, a small Russian town in the Arctic Circle hit ... 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit
How can Forbes justify using this headline?
Re: "A small Russian town" lol, Do you propose that temperatures were different 50km away?
There is a massive heat wave rolling through NORTHERN Siberia right now, and it's not been confined to one town nor is this "record" the only broken heat record.
Southern Siberia, like the Altai region, hit's such temperatures regularly, but that's Novosibirsk and south. What we are referring to here is unprecedented, so let's please stop acting as if ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE wasn't a factual reality threatening mammalian life on earth.
However, no one is communicating well here, and you're not a moderator on this thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I find it hard to believe someone with those credentials would be unfamiliar with mathematical concepts.
It's a shame because the article doesn't need to "hype" up the temperature. It would have gotten my interest regardless
It's entirely reasonable to judge a publication on the basis of a headline not matching the article. It is not at all reasonable to judge the article's author concerning a headline they did not write, had no say in and probably did not even seen prior to publication.
Forbes is now a content host - when you see an article from forbes.com/sites/xxxx, that means that it's essentially a blog from a rando that Forbes selected as a 'contributor'.
See https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/the-forbes-contributor-mod...
> Contributors have access to the same publishing platform as Forbes's own journalists, a platform which was built by Forbes itself. And keeping the system simple is vital, Federle said, to allow them "to focus on the journalism", and not get distracted by technicalities. > Second is the Most Popular section, which Federle explained is "algorithmically generated" and "driven by velocity engine" which looks at social shares and comments to rank stories. > "We've taken our platform and will shrink wrap it down to a product they can plug into their platform. This is a new business for us."
The concern of arctic residents is if the weather is hot enough, for long enough, to melt the permafrost. That has numerous repercussions, including emissions, transportation and wildlife.
For example, any highways or pipelines on top of permafrost will dislocate if permafrost melts.
But overall, Canada is in favor of glabal warming. Most of our land mass is not arable with the current climate.
Source: Canadian, eh.
Conversely, Canada is not expected to be a great beneficiary of climate change (except for the Northwest Passage becoming passable), because most of what is not currently used isn't because of temperature, but because it is muskeg.
By contrast, practically all of Florida would be gone with that rise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...
Source: I live rural on farmland in greenbelt in Ontario.
From David Wallace-Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth":
In 1879 the naturalist John Wesley Powell [..] divined a natural boundary running due North along the 100th meridian. It separated the humid—and therefore cultivatable—natural farmland of what became the Midwest from the arid, spectacular, but less farmable land of the true West. The divide ran through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and stretches north into Manitoba, Canada, separating more densely populated communities full of large farms from sparser, open land that was never truly made valuable by agriculture. Since just 1980 that boundary has moved fully 140 miles east, almost to the 98th parallel, drying up hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland in the process.
Maybe it won't turn into desert exactly but it won't be productive for growing food.
There are expected to be agricultural impacts:
> The Midwest is a major producer of a wide range of food and animal feed for national consumption and international trade. Increases in warm-season absolute humidity and precipitation have eroded soils, created favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, and degraded the quality of stored grain. Projected changes in precipitation, coupled with rising extreme temperatures before mid-century, will reduce Midwest agricultural productivity to levels of the 1980s without major technological advances.
I know you're responding to a comment talking about climate refugees ... the HN comments often jump quickly from realistic scenarios to Mad Max.
But even the projected impacts are significant. Other concerns are impacts to the Great Lakes and to extreme heat events. All covered in the link, which is really very good.
I don't know if you live there or keep in touch with people there. The changes in snow and rain patterns since my childhood in the 70s/80s seem noticeable to me -- although I'm open to correction since I haven't looked at the numbers and this kind of change is not covered in the above report. I don't remember rain in February in Kansas, for instance, but it happens now.
I realize that Global Warming != Warming Winters because climate is more complex than that, and odd weather has always been a staple of Michigan on account of the Great Lakes, but this just felt unprecedented, and a bit concerning if it continues in this direction.
Right, sure, the guy with a "PhD from Duke University where I studied the geology and climate of the Amazon", understands less about climate and weather than you do.
Do you truly not understand that this is extremely basic stuff to everyone except the Climate Change "Sceptics"? They really do have this bizarre habit of quoting schoolkid level science as though it's some amazing insight they've just discovered.
I have training in weather interpretation, you bozo.
Please do not act as if they are dumb fks. That is not the case.
I'm familiar with Curry's "work". I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but then she went from warning about caution to outright lies. Frankly, I'd rather someone who was honestly stupid than Judith Curry who knows she's lying, but does it anyway.
See: https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm
Oh, FFS, I just read through her last few entries. She's got worse. Now it's the Anthony Watts technique of linking to articles with suggestive headlines without commentary. Example: "Misconceptions of global catastrophe [link]". Now, that article is about the real issues that will arise from Climate Change, and about people's misconceptions about them, but she knows very few people will actually read the article, and will instead take the wrong implication from the title.
Soils under boreal forests are not good farm land.
Thin soils over the Canadian shield are not good places to plant crops. Or Northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, wouldn't be mostly forests.
Mass forest fires don't make good ranch or farm land.
Climate is not the obstacle for agriculture moving further north in Canada -- the Canadian shield is.
And Canadians aren't making use of the farm land we have already. We used to be a net food exporter, now we are a net importer. Which hasn't been great during the COVID crisis.
Overall Canadians (but not the major opposition party, or most Albertans) are very concerned about climate change and not "in favour" (spell it right if you're Canadian, please). However they fear the economic reprocussions that result. Like most people.
Source: Canadian, eh. Also Ipsos polling https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/new-survey-canadians-views-clima...
I feel this is clickbait (at least the title). Continental climates fluctuate a lot. One day breaking a record could simple be a statistical outlier. A poke around the records does show that the entirety of June so far has been well above average, and that this is not normal. But I guess "global warming slowly driving more extreme high temperatures in artic siberia" doesn't get as many clicks.
June 2020 weather records for Verhoyansk: http://www.pogodaiklimat.ru/monitor.php?id=24266&month=06&ye...
> It is well known that the poles warm faster as a result of climate change. For example, the average increase in temperature on Earth over the past 40 years is 1.44°F. In comparison, the Arctic has warmed by more than 3.5°F during the same period, more than double the global average.
My area saw the hottest and driest spring ever recorded last year, but this year we had some rain and temperatures were modest (despite still being above average overall).
https://books.google.com/books?id=N0FLSOmeFPsC&pg=PT59
Bottom line: records are extremely rare if events occur at random. If new records become far more common than the harmonic series predicts, then this is telling us that annual climatic events are no longer independent annual events but are beginning to form part of a systematic non-random trend.
2020: 100.4 degrees (unverified, as described in the article)
How significant is this newly reported record temperature?
Is it conceivable that the warm day in 1915 reached 100.4 degrees?
Maybe we've changed
etc.One reason why climate research is so hard is because of the variability of historic temperature data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's your interpretation, kbutler wrote nothing like that.
Oh, and then rounded up to 101F apparently just for the headline.
Honestly, who rounds 100.4 to 101?
But more charitably, I could also see people going past worrying to denial/dismissal
To accept it and and work from there to adapt and mitigate is terrifying. I think you can probably say the same about climate change.
Additionally, I think you could draw a line that these denials are influenced by those protecting their "salaries"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
Guess what- the coal industry is going out of business anyway. Those dinosaurs will die anyway - the problem is with “jobs will be lost” argument they are also dragging the future of rest of the humanity with them.
Coal's life may be limited, but in the coming 50 years it's just going to grow significantly.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants
1988 Canadian environment minister: No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.
Many more https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/02/05/in-their-o...
It's a "bootleggers and baptists" combination of those who want to remake the world governance and true believers who want to save the world from the perceived danger.
If we can't model correctly a "simple" pandemic, how can we model something as complex as climate.
I'm tired of the faith in scientists. They're just human : they can make mistakes, they can be bought and more often than not they can delude themselves.
Judging the utility of models is useless if you don't prepend them with a range of certainty.
Anyone who knew about pandemic models knew from the start that there's a lot of unknown underlying variables, and thus initial models made too many assumptions.
Climate models have been running for decades of fine iteration, with fairly well understood limitations.
Disease vectors and management are less well understood, or better? I would argue, they are better understood and the understanding is deeper (to the core of the physics). Climate modeling relies on large forces that vary a bit, but have not had to withstand any variability at the scales predicted by climate change alarmists (ie hocket stick off the charts) enough to understand how most aspects of the environment will resolve over time, imo.
Climate and medicine is not comparable at a predictive level.
Physical models may be extremely complex but physical constants do not change unpredictably over time.
Two of our current greatest threats threats to human life reduced to political wedge issues.
Sure, we should take some precautions from now on, but this level of hyperbole is ridiculous.
If anything, this pandemic was a good wake up call to be a bit more careful in our modern super-connected world. We should prepare in case a truly dangerous bug comes along. The hyperbole actually goes against this, see Cry Wolf.
You see the death stats and calculate a %. Once a medicine is invented the stats of injuries (both physical and financial) would trickle in. Several survivors have lost legs, lung and kidney function.
SARS and swine flu were the wake up calls. This is real deal. And yes, if we don’t learn next will be worse.
Exaggerating the impact of covid is only going to throw more fuel on the fire for people inclined towards viewing the whole thing with a great deal of skepticism. All these white lies and misleading statements add up and the result won't be improved public discourse.
Disease and climate were the issues being referenced. Taking it to mean, specifically, covid-19 is obviously not such an issue.
Or/and you forgot what happened in New York? Just imagine that in every bigger city at once.
Humans can't sweat fast enough to maintain homeostasis.
https://www.weather.gov/safety/heat-index
Hasn't happened yet for sufficient periods in any substantially populated impoverished area, but when it does, well, the horror will be incalculable.
https://ksi.uconn.edu/emergency-conditions/heat-illnesses/ex...
Low hydration is also a factor, and when you consider than millions of USA-ians may not be able to afford their water bill, well...
https://www.consumerreports.org/personal-finance/millions-of...
Of course there's still differences on how much that matters. A healthy person can sustain a longer period of time with a slightly elevated temperature. A person with health problems may have issues much earlier. But in the end... with wet bulb temperature noone can survive without external cooling for longer periods of time.
[0] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838
The summer almost feels milder here. Anecdotally of course.
However the wet-bulb temperature[1] is, as the name implies, the temperature a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth. If the water evaporates, it will cool the thermometer down, and as such will read less than a regular (dry-bulb) thermometer.
For example, if the dry-bulb temperature is 35C and the relative humidity is 75%, then the wet-bulb temperature would be about 31C[3]. This means the body can still evaporate sweat to cool down, albeit not by much.
If you got both a wet-bulb and a dry-bulb thermometer side by side, you can use it to calculate the relative humidity[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygrometer#Psychrometer_(wet-a...
[3]: https://www.psychrometric-calculator.com/HumidAirWeb.aspx
It happened one time, I am not sure if this statement is warranted. In 1937, Montana recorded the hottest temperate it ever recorded when it reached 117 degrees in Medicine Lake.
Not saying this was a fluke, but it could have been. It happens all the time.
[0]: https://www.ecowatch.com/wildfires-siberia-russia-2645912533...
For some reason it has been consistently 8 to 15 degrees cooler than normal everyday this summer here in Kuwait. Not as extreme a difference but still strange weather. November 2018 Kuwait saw its largest flood event on record and then 10 days later there was a second flood that was 2 to 3 times greater than that record setter.
Either we accept record highs as an evidence for climate change, but also accept record lows as an evidence against, or we refuse both based on the statement that "weather is not climate".
https://scijinks.gov/polar-vortex/#:~:text=A%20polar%20vorte....