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NL as well, one record after another is broken. Today I saw some very confused wasps and bees flying around, in 15 degree Celsius weather.
-20C in Thunder Bay if you’re ever thinking about coming back. And that’s the high!

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/weather/ontario/thunder...

Ah, Thunder Bay. That is one of the nicer spots that I've visited. Lake Superior is more like an inland sea and Thunder Bay is on of the best spots on the lake.

The chances of me coming back to Canada are very, very low. Another country in Europe however, especially one of the Nordics or the Baltics, that might just happen.

Same here in France. Chased a bumblebee out of my living room and any number of confused flies. The weather has gone from unusually deep and early snow to scenes resembling later spring. Similarly confused weather patterns in West Africa in the last few years - the regular weather pattern of my youth seems to be breaking down into something altogether less reliable and worrying.
It's pretty wild. People keep saying that 'climate change is happening too slow to be noticed over a human life span', but I actually think that isn't true, it is in fact very noticeable. The winters from my youth are gone and my parents thought that the ones in the 70's were mild (with one or two exceptions).

Here we now have essentially 6 months of autumn that switches straight into an early summer.

> People keep saying that 'climate change is happening too slow to be noticed over a human life span',

No one seriously says this, unless they're pushing their own anti-science narrative.

I think they mean this as in 'compared to a road accident' (or a pandemic, for that matter).
Here (in the UK) we went for a walk this afternoon, and I noticed primroses in flower... at least a couple months too early.

I guess they're hoping some confused bees will come along...

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That can be a problem because there's still a high chance of frost, not least because the coldest period of winter is still ahead of us: when it's too mild and plants start to bud early they run the risk of being burnt by frost later on...
Given the terrible problems we are having with energy prices, I will interpret this as God laying His hands upon us :P
To strangle us?
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Why? We seem to be doing a great job of punishing ourselves.
> We seem to be doing a great job of punishing ourselves.

We're not all Catholic

As far as I'm aware, the Bible does instruct the faithful Christian to look after god's creation. Considering the zeal of American Christianity, this has apparently been lost on many (i.e. the cold atheists in Europe are doing a better job).
Perhaps there is a knowledge that behind every politician claiming to want to care for the environment, it means more money taken out of their pockets, among many other shady ulterior “progressive” motives. They see through the BS, in other words.

Most people want to look after God’s creation. They just don’t want to get screwed over by politicians in the process, nor do they necessarily want to buy into the false prophet scientists who have been claiming the end is nigh regarding this subject for decades now (always pushing the new end further down the line, but this time it’s for real, they swear!)

> nor do they necessarily want to buy into the false prophet scientists who have been claiming the end is nigh regarding this subject for decades now (always pushing the new end further down the line, but this time it’s for real, they swear!)

I see your straw-man.

Maybe they should vote with their wallets, which as far as I'm aware isn't happening.

Also, Fossil Fuel subsidies? Did the progressives do that?

> nor do they necessarily want to buy into the false prophet scientists who have been claiming the end is nigh regarding this subject for decades now (always pushing the new end further down the line, but this time it’s for real, they swear!)

Meanwhile, what has actually happened: the scientists keep finding that their earlier predictions were too optimistic.

> Considering the zeal of American Christianity, this has apparently been lost on many

As an american atheist, an awful lot of American Christians don't seem to follow much of the teachings of the Bible.

Central Europe, 10°C - Bees and Wasps, shrubs and bushes are budding.
Which is a worry as a couple of months left of winter. Also a tendency these days for the colder/snow weather to be in the later part of winter/early spring.
There’s also stories flying around about hedgehogs coming out of hibernation early
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I'm starting to think these global warming chaps have a point you know....
I don't have a habit of checking temperature but felt like 15 degree here on Bulgaria. Spent most of the day outside and there were all kinds of insects flying around.

Guess the summer is going to suck. Either too hot or too cold.

My bet is this will be the next 2003, after western Canada last year, mainland Europe may well be due for the next roast.
Could also be like 2005 when it snowed heavily in May, then we had never ending rain and floods during the whole summer
This is good if you pay for energy in the UK. Prices have shot up recently, and there are fears that a lot of people will get surprised if the winter is chilly. Of course we've yet to see how it plays out.

Friends on mine in the energy business think it could get really really bad if it's cold.

Much in the same way that burning down your house is a comfort for those who cannot afford their gas bill?
No, in the same way that warm weather is a comfort for those who cannot afford their gas bill.
I think you are right, there is certainly a lot of people here hoping for a very mild winter. Hopefully the relief from rising energy prices this winter doesn’t distract from the bigger picture of climate change, but we must also not be dismissive of those in need.

There are so many people in the UK who have to make difficult choices each winter about heating their house or spending elsewhere. It’s estimated to be 1 in 10 households (3m people)[0]. So we can take a small amount of comfort that in the short term that this is help for them, but we must as a society address both these problems (income inequality and climate change)

0: https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/one-in-10-uk...

I see people talking about weather getting unpredictable.

This was predictable, and was predicted: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/. The technical summary is 160 pages and should be required reading for anyone over the age of 13: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6.... The Paris Agreement, for all its problems, tries to keep increase below 1.5 C over pre-industrial. We are locked in for 20-30 more years of increases like this if we stop emitting net CO2 in 5 years, best case. This is the beginning of global warming, it will be getting worse. I plan on retiring from software soon to devote the rest of my life to technical and political work to keep Earth habitable for subsequent generations while retaining the knowledge and technological progress made possible from the carbon age. Too many people in software - just my experience, and definitely not limited to software - have no concept of the orders of magnitude of energy involved and unreasonable expectations of other engineering fields to solve this problem. I hope more people will join me.

I'm interested. Have you found anyone/an area who needs software developers?
I do, I just don't see any pointles in fighting a hopeless war that is already lost.
Now, that's the spirit!
You're the kind of guy I'd follow into battle.

I will follow you, my liege!!!

Brutal attitude, also wrong. 2 degrees warming is probably inevitable at this point. Not great. But 3 degrees is much worse than 2, and 4 is much worse than 3, etc. There’s no concept of losing, just how bad it will get for future generations.
I suspect people tend to mean unstable when they say unpredictable. Not that they think science is unable to see what’s happening.
How do you 'retire on software'. I'm a software engineer and I have nowhere near enough savings for retirement, not even close.
You make enough money from working in software that however much you will make in your second act (note: not necessarily zero) plus what you've saved up and investment proceeds thereof is enough to sustain you.

The same as retiring in any other field.

If you only spend %50 of your paycheck, and invest the savings well it's basically 5-10 years to FIRE.

It's more complicated than I make it sound there but ultimately it's a matter of deciding it's important to you to do this and making it happen.

I think it is closer to investing 70% for a 10 year target, actually. And that is a pretty "great case" scenario.
Yea, there is often an unspoken assumption of moving to some ultra cheap location which is central to those ultra short time periods. If you can live on 10% of your income in retirement then you can save that up very quickly.
A lot can be written on the topic, but it all comes down to the difference between your income and your expenses over the span of a couple decades.

A median income with a median cost of living and a median lifestyle won’t do it, obviously. Otherwise everybody would be retiring early.

There’s a lot written about finding remote, high-paying jobs and then living like an ultra-frugal bachelor. That’s actually much harder to do than people like to admit and the lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

The more common approach is to get married, keep expenses reasonably low but don’t torture yourself, and one or both spouses should have a moderately high paying professional job. Consistently invest the difference between income and expenses for a few decades and you’ll get there.

Nobody is retiring at 30 and living like a king unless they’re extraordinarily lucky with a startup or some other gamble. However, it’s very reasonable to retire before the age of 50 or even 40 if you’re smart about it and willing to live a moderately priced lifestyle.

Yes, that's very nice and all, but what does it have to do with saving the planet? Even if you don't need to have a job to survive, how do you go about helping? I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm genuienly curious.
Spending your efforts on environmental work rather than building blockchain-powered juicing machines or tinder for sweatshop workers.
Yes but it's not one or the other - there's million different things to do in software before getting to the level of building blockchain crap.

Also I'm really curious what people consider valuable environmental work - like, if you didn't have to work for money tomorrow, what kind of environmental work exactly would you take on?

Realistically, I think unless you are going to work on some hugely disruptive product, your best bet is probably something like local politics, as unfortunate as that is.

For example, in my area I would probably push for the local mangrove coast line to be protected from development. Or perhaps for my county to ban or somehow restrict two-stroke engine use.

It was a typo, and I corrected it to read "retire from software". I expect it will impact my lifestyle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29691039

make half a million dollars per year total comp, duh.

Are you going to lobby or start an NGO or something? How can I help? I am currently in a major northern US city running my air conditioner, and tired of meaningless shit.
Are you replying to the wrong comment or something? I'm not the guy in that article. I was posting that link in jest.
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What do you plan to do, specifically? I hope to soft-retire soon, meaning switch to another lower-paying kob or volunteering, but I'm not exactly sure what I want to do.
From talking to my (degree-holding) colleagues, they seem to think that everything will be well, and no amount of evidence would convince them otherwise. Felt like I was talking to antivaxxers.

The IPCC report suggests first-world citizens reduce their energy footprint by 80% if we are to have even a remote chance of keeping things under control. Yet everybody is now making plans where to travel next when the pandemic becomes milder.

Meanwhile Germany closed half its nuclear reactors yesterday and people were cheering.

Are you sure you want to save this version of humanity?

> Are you sure you want to save this version of humanity?

This fatalistic, sneering attitude is the least effective way of discussing climate change with people who don’t yet understand the issue.

I think a lot of people don’t realize just how much of a turn-off these attitudes are to people who are on the fence or otherwise doubtful. It’s not helpful.

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Might not be helpful, but at least in some cases it is sincere.

Personally, I simply don't think we have the capacity as a species to overcome the challenges of climate change right now. I'd like to be proven wrong and think we should be trying anyway, but veer towards solutions which actually provide another benefit and help with CO2 emissions as a secondary effect - the most obvious example being renewables as a means of securing energy supply sovereignty.

This approach probably won't see us beat even 3 degrees of warming but let's be honest - most people in the western world will adapt to a less convenient life, and we don't care about the pending deaths in Bangladesh and similarly poor countries nearly as much as we like to pretend.

Bill Gate's book has a good summary of the technical challenges and the scientific and engineering needs. It's an easy read and I highly suggest it.
Climate change does make the weather less predictable, as in higher variance on things like storms. So... they're probably not disagreeing with you.
> I plan on retiring from software soon to devote the rest of my life to technical and political work to keep Earth habitable for subsequent generations

That is fantastic and inspiring. I'm shifting my life around in order to focus on similar priorities.

For people who think it is extreme, this is my perspective: Previous generations built 99% of what we have - the political system (freedom, democracy, peace, better justice), the economy, the knowledge, arts and culture, the endless social goods (school, healthcare, FOSS, etc.), the technology. How are we building on that for the next? Environmental catastrophe? Political chaos and social distrust? Online manipulation, cryptocurrency scams, and lulz? So far, IMHO we are mostly liquidating, as vulture capitalists, that largess by our predecessors - by their hard work, their forward thinking to build a 'More Perfect Union', and their sacrifices:

Many sacrificed everything. Some saw nothing more of life than high school, boot camp, and a bullet. Too grim? Too dramatic? Too serious? That's reality; it's too late in the day, in our myriad crises, to hold back so that it's not too challenging or upsetting. I'm not saying everyone should do what I do (certainly not - they should figure out what is right for them, as individuals), but I think we all have very serious obligations. We have the free choice to do good or bad; the good news is, the results are up to us.

Unfortunately, educating people is very hard and covid-19 clearly shows it.
I'm genuinely curious: does "technical and political work to keep Earth habitable for subsequent generations" include efforts to reduce the earth's population size? I ask this because sometimes such efforts fail to address the root cause, often deliberately.
Record high temps outnumber record lows by 2:1. The planet is hotter than its been in 100,000 years. Co2 levels are higher than they've been in 800,000 years. 4 Hiroshima bombs per second worth of extra heat energy are being trapped in the climate system by the co2 we've emitted. The oceans are 25% more acidic because of how much of our co2 has been absorbed by the oceans. Absolute humidity has increased 7% because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and warmer oceans evaporate more readily.
It was 15C NYE and the record was 18.0C at Abergwyngregyn, Gwynedd in 1972.

I am pretty happy to be honest, considering the fuel crisis, this is a blessing to some. I am not convinced that life everywhere will suddenly be terrible just because it is a little warmer. We had warm periods before and things got better. The Late Bronze Warm Period, The Roman Warm period, and the Middle Age Warm Period.

https://imgr.search.brave.com/v3hRyzU6Mm1ShpkX2Z4SEYasQRtDD-...

Also see global greening https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...

It could do with being a little warmer.
It is not going to be a little warmer: do you know about averages? Two degree higher average temperatures means many European forests will burn and not recuperate. With four, even Ireland desertifies. Climate change is only just getting started, by the time people like you realize action is needed, it will be much too much too late. The movie "don't look up" comes to mind.
Desertification was predicted but it didn't happen. The earth has greened instead. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...
But you won’t get funding saying this. You need to make your subject of study a crisis in order to secure the funding to study it further. And of course the politicians that unlock the funding would do well if your model could align with their re-election strategy.
This is so not true it's not even funny: do try and get funding for any kind of denialism in the 2000's or any kind of mitigation-study in the 2010's, you will get some kind ear from many on the conservative side (conservation of-self-destruction). The work of the IPCC has been a slow slog for lack of funding.
First, it’s going to be a bigger change than those periods. The “business as usual” scenario is warmer than today by the degree to which today is warmer than the ice ages. (And I think at least some of those were local climate changes, not global ones?)

Second, it’s not about life everywhere except for people who stop as soon as they finish the headlines. Some farmland will go from marginal to good, others from good to marginal. Unfortunately the latter is going to hurt more than the former will help, fortunately there are already solutions, unfortunately they are expensive. Probably more expensive than green subsidies, even if the tech never improves.

Thirdly, IIRC, we don’t yet know the conditions which would interfere with the thermohaline circulation, but we have observed the bit near the the U.K. — the Gulf Stream — moving north. Mess that up and the U.K. suddenly turns from a pleasant mild-ish climate all year round into something more like Newfoundland, which is at the same latitude.

Do you know of any maps showing the relative position of the guest team over the UK over time?

Curious to see if there’s a prediction that Scotland becomes a lot nicer weather wise as it is at the northern end of the UK.

It is well known that the Romans had many vineyards in Scotland making wine during the RWP.
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I added a greenland temperature chart overlayed with historical events. Yes, the previous warm periods mentioned where global, they where a lot warmer than today and things mostly got better. The last IPCC report fails to account for global greening, which is a giant effect. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...
I’ve worked with MODIS satellite data.

Quoting your own link: """The vegetation cooling effect is large from the energy dissipation perspective, but only about 10%-20% compared to the pace of global warming. The cooling effect from greening is less significant in tropical forests with high leaf areas."""

Regarding the previous warm periods, I was right, and I just now found the following reference to demonstrate this:

"""More recent research, including a 2019 analysis based on a much larger dataset of climate proxies, has found that the putative period [the Roman Warm Period], along with other warmer or colder pre-industrial periods such as the "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period," were regional phenomena, not globally-coherent episodes.[7] That analysis uses the temperature record of the last 2,000 years dataset compiled by the PAGES 2k Consortium 2017.[7]"""

[7] https://boris.unibe.ch/132301/7/333323_4_merged_1557735881.p...

Lüning et al. June 2019.

"Abstract The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) is a well-recognized climate perturbation in many parts of the world, with a core period of 1000–1200 CE. Here we are mapping the MCA across the Antarctic region based on the analysis of published palaeotemperature proxy data from 60 sites. In addition to the conventionally used ice core data, we are integrating temperature proxy records from marine and terrestrial sediment cores as well as radiocarbon ages of glacier moraines and elephant seal colonies. A generally warm MCA compared to the subsequent Little Ice Age (LIA) was found for the Subantarctic Islands south of the Antarctic Convergence, the Antarctic Peninsula, Victoria Land and central West Antarctica. A somewhat less clear MCA warm signal was detected for the majority of East Antarctica. MCA cooling occurred in the Ross Ice Shelf region, and probably in the Weddell Sea and on Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. Spatial distribution of MCA cooling and warming follows modern dipole patterns, as reflected by areas of opposing temperature trends. Main drivers of the multi-centennial scale climate variability appear to be the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which are linked to solar activity changes by nonlinear dynamics." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00310...

Edit: Bonus climate reconstruction from 1268 studies of the MWP https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1akI_yGSUlO_qEvrmrI...

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...

And what exactly is the point you think you're making with that? From the link:

> Stopping deforestation and ecologically sensible large-scale tree-planting could be one simple, but not sufficient, defense against climate change.

So "global greening" is an anthropogenic phenomenon to counter global climate change. It actually confirms that we humans have the means and the possibility to meaningfully impact the climate, and that some of those efforts are proven effective.

Is that what you were trying to say?

French Brittany, was sunbathing this morning at 10:00 at 15°C on the beach, with bees flying around. These are summer temperatures, and even in summer it's usually colder than that at this time of the day. Felt completely unreal.
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It was 16 Celcius in Ireland yesterday. I have my window wide open in the middle of winter to cool the apartment. I can appreciate climate != weather. However it is a very odd warming event.
I had my patio doors open at midnight last night in rural Perthshire and was just wearing a t-shirt (and jeans). I thought I had "the fever", but upon checking the met forecast I was gobsmacked to see the temperature at around 15C. Yet only two days before I was scraping ice off of the car.
tongue in cheek uk weather seasons (but close to the truth)

https://imgur.com/gallery/1Brt04C

I think there should be an extra winter in there after summer begins

In my childhood I remember (perhaps overly- optimistically) having distinct seasons and in particular crisp, snowy winters. The combination of climate change and moving west of the Pennines is really shit.
I had to live and work on the opposite sides of the pennines, the M62 whilst having lovely views over the hills, is seriously horrible to drive on in the rush hours (worse in winter) and the weather difference was very noticeable

Much dryer in the east, similar difference all the way up into Scotland

An alternate reading: this is the coldest winter for the next century.
A comment that stuck with me during the summer of 2021, when heat domes baked Sweden and Seattle and California and Greece were on fire, was that it was likely the coolest summer of the next decade.
Bart: “This is the hottest summer of my life…”

Homer: “The hottest summer of your life so far

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Alternative reading: this is the coldest winter in the next century.
That has a fairly high probability of being true. And it's very scary if true.
For those of us used to degrees F, keep this in mind:

  10 C ~= 50 F

  20 C ~= 68 F

  30 C ~= 86 F
So 15 C is about 59 degrees F.
This is very menacing, more than could seem at first glance. All sort of crops could bloom much too soon, and be destroyed at the next cold event. And every summer from now on, we'll be under the menace of an extreme hot event destroying major cereal crops around the world. Global food shortage could be around the corner every year, forever. Combine that with a looming fossil fuel supply crunch, and we're on the verge of civilisational collapse, just like that.
Don't worry, this is roughly the opposite of what has been observed. The growing seasons are getting longer, the earth is greening. [0]

And looking back at previous warm periods it looks like things mostly got better during warm ages and nose dived during the cold. https://imgr.search.brave.com/v3hRyzU6Mm1ShpkX2Z4SEYasQRtDD-...

[0] Global Greening

Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning). Ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilisation effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%)."

Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716 "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening” in dryland areas of the Mediterranean, the Sahel, the Middle East and Northern China, as well as greening trends in Mongolia and South America. More recently, a global synthesis from 1982-2007 showed an overall “greening-up” trend over the Sahel belt, Mediterranean basin, China-Mongolia region and the drylands of South America."

Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard 2014 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Global greening refers to global net increases in the area of green canopy, stocks of carbon, and the duration of the growing season. The growing seasons in general have prolonged while the stock of biomass carbon has increased and the rate of deforestation has decelerated. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data obtained through atmospheric CO2 observations, remote sensing, forest inventories and land use statistics."

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models)

That's not contradictory. The earth may be greening but become inhospitable to our staple crops at the same time. The world could become a lush jungle, that wouldn't make it a good place to live for 8 billion humans.