68 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
(comment deleted)
I couldn't find the reference that shows where "U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction" released this record measurement.

I found another article[0] that says the measurement is from Climate Reanalyzer[1] that uses the data from CFS/CFSR systems.

The Climate Reanalyzer website also says "The increase in mean global temperature since the start of July, estimated from the Climate Forecast System, should not be taken as an "official" observational record."

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/world-swelters-unoffici...

[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/

The 1930's are triggered.
Pretty sure all of these "ever recorded" records for global temps are only since 1979.
Pretty sure you're dead wrong.
Unfortunately their statement is too vague to be wrong, obviously there are numerous different ways to define global temperature, and different ways to measure it at the time, and different ways to infer it after the fact. amongst all that, probably one of them does only go back to the 70's. Does it make incomparable to any of the methods that go back centuries or millennia? Probably not.
The recent headlines are all based on NCEP, a model which isn't exactly super reliable.

https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1676391692461547522

In fact, if you read past the headlines in the articles, they also include the same caveat:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/0...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/climate/climate-change-re...

The NYT article buries the fact by making it seem like they were only presenting data that far back, but it is literally in the first sentence of the WP article... directly contradicting the very same article's headline.

(also, just wanted to let you know this comes off as a bit unnecessarily rude -- you might want to phrase it more gently / give some reasons why you believe so next time)
> Our planet’s seas have been warming for decades. The most recent decade has been the sea surface’s hottest since at least the 1800s.
Over the last 500M years, the world has been hotter than it is today for ~400M of those years: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

And for the majority of that time, it has been MUCH hotter.

Yeah and for the majority of time of the planet humans didn’t exist
> And for the majority of that time, it has been MUCH hotter.

Good thing humans only evolved after the climate became more hospitable.

Exactly. People keep saying that we need to stop climate change to save the planet. The planet does not care and will be just fine. We need to stop climate change to save ourselves.
My god, I hate this line. Obviously people aren't referring to the ball of molten rock getting a case of the sniffles and achoo-ing all over the solar system. People are referring to - you know - ALL THE LIFE ON THAT PLANET. Wow, amazing, an amoeba will survive us fucking the planet up! Since life and the planet will survive, go nuts! Blow up your nukes, why should the rock care? That's all that matters, we will not literally destroy the planet!
Well that's kinda the reason _for_ the line. Climate change kills people. "Save the planet" is too vague, it's disempowering.
No. "Save the ecosystem on our planet on which we rely on" is too long, and only incredibly pedantic people would come in and say "well, akshually, the planet will not care either way". People who say this are not people worth talking to.

And akshually, climate change doesn't kill people. Higher temperatures and catastrophes kill people.

In the meanwhile, Pangea formed and split, and trees came into existence.
And we are still building fires in the wood burning stove to keep warm in Northern California. Mid-July.
So we'll just all become #VanLife nomads and everything will be fine.
There is a hotel in Death Valley. People stay there when it's 125. If your home town gets 3 degrees hotter, I think you'll figure it out.
looking forward to all of the crops and livestock i need to stay alive figuring it out!
Your area might no longer be ideal. The area that was a little too cool will become ideal. Technically more people die per year from cold than heat. Why do you want more people to die?? /Slight sarc
The article is talking about averages so there can be local outliers.
[flagged]
They get down-voted because they're worse than useless.
[flagged]
I don't think an anecdote against an average makes sense.

For example, lets say a study finds Tylenol reduces fevers, an anecdote of 'it never did for me or my friends and family' is somewhat of a relevant anectode because that would be very unlikely if the study was true.

Now lets say a study finds 'the average height in 5th grade is 5ft 4in'. And someone responds 'I am in 5th grade and I am only 5ft, the study is a screed and maliciously motivated'. That isn't a relevant anecdote because of how averages work. Just like your anecdote here.

So because some studies don't replicate or are corrupt, they all are, and we should rely blindly on gut instinct?

The whole point is that science isn't a religion. Science is just forming a hypothesis, testing it, and then analyzing your results (often mathematically) to determine whether your hypothesis was supported, rejected, or if the results were inconclusive. It's a best-effort thing using the tools and methods available. It's not infallible, but it doesn't ever ask you to "believe" anything.

>blindly trust the study

No, nobody here has ever told you to blindly trust anything, I can assure you. You can always look at the study yourself and look to identify why you might not agree with their conclusions, and that's how peer review works! You can review their evidence, and analyze their logic for how they drew conclusions based on the evidence, and if you find a flaw in their reasoning or how they collected their data, then you're free to criticize it and hopefully whoever carries on that research will repeat the experiment but take your feedback into account.

Ok there’s some confusion here.

Some studies being wrong does not make all of them wrong.

It certainly doesn’t give anecdotes any special credibility.

Furthermore the well established body of knowledge about of human induced climate change is made up of countless studies, predictions, observations and general scientific and engineering knowledge going back almost 200 years.

To reject or throw that into doubt because there are a handful of swindlers in science just as in any other human endeavour is like saying all modern medical equipment is probably a fraud because of Theranos.

I'm downvoting you for two reasons: a) preemptively complaining about downvotes, b) calling an existentially threatening development with endless significant evidence and broad scientific consensus a "creed".

If you know an anecdote says nothing about a large scale development, why mention it at all?

I'm not complaining.
[flagged]
It's funny how the ones saying this are always the ones who disagree.
We get it, you're rich and in a developed country. You will be the last person to be affected by climate change.
On the contrary, people in poor countries with unstable governance will be the most affected by the centralization of power required for the climate undertaking.

I posit that long term, more people globally will be harmed by politicians short-circuiting the democratic process to combat the climate "emergency" than by the changing climate itself. The latter is showcased by the fact that in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019, climate-related deaths went to a third, even as the world population more than doubled[0]. That's one-third in absolute number, not per capita!

[0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989

Spoiler: El Niño and climate change.

Don't feed the clickbait titles.

New headline suggestion: El Niño and climate change caused last week to be the hottest week ever recorded.
I mean, I knew that without clicking the link. To the article or to the comment section.
> On July 3, the planet sweltered as the average global temperature reached 17.01° Celsius (62.62° Fahrenheit), the highest ever recorded, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. That surpassed the previous record of 16.92° C (62.46° F) from August 2016.

I am extremely curious about the error bars on these numbers. Are we really measuring the temperature in enough places around the globe with 0.01 degree resolution to make this a meaningful statement?

The raw data includes satellite measurements, which cover the entire globe. It's calibrated against ground-based weather stations.

The raw data is available at:

https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/

Putting all that together into a single temperature requires a model. The error analysis of the model is on their web site. There's certainly more than enough data to justify four significant figures.

(The weird part: the authors of the report are both prominent climate change deniers. One says that the problems are real but not man-made; the other says that the problems are real and man-made but not actually a problem. They are the guys who run the satellite and integrate the data.)

https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/2023/June/GTR_202306JUN_1....

No. Error bars on satellite measurements are OK (not sure what they are exactly but not too bad), but for anything before the 1970s the error bars are wide. 0.5 degrees at best but more realistically 1-5 degrees depending on weather station. That's government's own CI estimates btw.

And that's before you get to the way they rewrite the past in the temperature databases. It leads to problems like this:

Jeff Berardelli, WFLA-TV (Tampa Bay) Chief Meteorologist and Climate Specialist: “In case you missed it. The temperature soared as high as 100 degrees in the Northwest Territories on Saturday, the hottest temperature ever measured north of 65 degrees latitude in the Western Hemisphere”. Tough keeping up with all this climate chaos.”

https://twitter.com/WeatherProf/status/1678635894021005312

100 degrees, hottest ever measured in north of 65 degrees latitude. A factual statement?

No, because it's not true. It reached 100F at Fort Yukon (66.6 degrees latitude) in 1915, according to government logbooks since erased from their websites:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170209162324/https://www.ncdc....

This happens because climatologists engage in data fraud. They not only constantly change how they combine individual readings into global aggregates, but also rewrite the temperature history of every single weather station too. It leads to constant 1984-esque dystopian events, like trusted news sources claiming a new record has been broken when you can find records of that "record" having been previously already been reached or exceeded in newspaper archives and old documents.

I'd like to say politics could be avoided on this but not knowing anything about the science, historical stats, etc I've always had a simple nagging question on this issue that hopefully someone can help me understand. Elementary school science classes teach basic cause and effect.

My question is: How is it possible the planet can be billions of years old, then all of a sudden we discover fossil fuels in the past few hundreds years and start extracting and burning them at incredible rates, releasing them into the atmosphere.

Isn't it safe to assume there would be a basic cause-effect relationship here with /some/ kind of consequence? It just strikes me as a "no free lunch" scenario - I don't fundamentally understand how you could all of a sudden start burning all of this stuff and argue against there being negative effects for the overall atmosphere, ecosystem, etc.

Can someone help me understand how/why this wouldn't be the case?

(comment deleted)
No one can because it's clearly not true.

The only people arguing it isn't true are the various think tanks, foundations, coalitions, online PR bots, and the rest funded by the fossil fuel industry - working to persuade those who don't understand the issue, but are sure their opinion is very important.

Atmospheric CO2 science has been researched since the 19th century.

In the 70s Exxon/Mobil had its own climate scientists making shockingly accurate predictions of what would happen.

The IPCC climate change models - produced from 1990 onwards - have usually been conservative.

That is the objective reality. Everything else is spin, FUD, and noise.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

those think tanks really did a number. the climate denialists, have made moving goal of going from denial to climate change is not man made.

The amount of americans who can't stand that fact that they were wrong on the matter is incredible.

[dead]
Why are weather stations even still a meme in these discussions?

I used satellite surface temperature data nearly 20 years ago, it wasn't novel even then.

Because governments announce new "records" based on single thermometers that are located on the tarmac of airports, at the moment that jet fighters are landing.
Guess which bit of the planet the aforementioned satellite temperature data I used was? Not many airports in the oceans. Satellites covered everything, of course, but I was working with marine biologists at the time.

Now, do you want to try again, this time with an argument that isn't so trivial to dismiss with the stuff I did 20 years ago in the middle of my degree?

But we're not talking about what you, random HN poster, did twenty years ago. You asked, "Why are weather stations even still a meme in these discussions?" and the answer is "because governments keep announcing records based on them". Why would they not be a "meme" in this discussion, given that fact? If governments didn't use data from weather stations anymore for climatological purposes, indeed, discussion of them would eventually disappear. They will never do that because satellite data only goes back to the early 1970s and they want to talk about trends longer than that, therefore, weather stations will remain a meme.

So there's nothing to try again here. Your question was answered correctly the first time.

> Why would they not be a "meme" in this discussion, given that fact?

"Given" assumes a falsehood to be true.

> Because governments announce new "records" based on single thermometers that are located on the tarmac of airports, at the moment that jet fighters are landing.

Give a link to one occasion where all of those things happened together.

Not each bit separate, all at the same time.

One government that's genuinely so incompetent that they literally announce something from one number literally during a landing.

And not just an intern on Twitter, an official announcement.

You don't get to mix different events. Nothing pre-satellite is:

> new "records"

Given the meaning of the word "new". Also:

> located on the tarmac of airports, at the moment that jet fighters are landing.

is fundamentally incompatible with

> They will never do that because satellite data only goes back to the early 1970s and they want to talk about trends longer than that

Given the actual trends people are interested in go back well before jet fighters, and indeed aircraft.

What we actually do is the exact opposite causation: observe what else correlates with satellite data so we can model the past. More satellite data makes such models stronger — and of course they also do publish the error bars, even if you didn't bother to look for them.

(The governments of the world also hate that scientists keep giving them these models, because it gives the politicians yet another problem to take the blame for no matter what; people keep demanding solutions that cost nothing and involve no changes to lifestyles, employment, products or services, which somehow also actually make a difference).

Everyone is so sensational about climate change but never looks at Earth's history.

Were at the tail end of an ice age.

For most of Earth's history, there were no polar ice caps.

For 400 out of 500 million years the earth was warmer than it is now.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt...

The earth is 4.5 billion years old so I don't understand what you mean with "400 out of 500 million years".

Also for a lot of that time earth was a hellishly hot place with little life.

The past 500 million years have been rich with life.
That's disingenuous misdirection. The current change is a threat to humanity of our own making.
> threat to humanity of our own making.

How? Do you have concrete examples or just fear based conjecture?

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

This book goes into good detail in human population growth, growth in energy use, and growth in use of coal, oil and other energy sources.

Highly recommended. Lots of stats, charts and math.

It’s not about climate change, the book is about understanding human growth and energy (across its various forms) and their implications.

A global temperature average is utterly meaningless.

https://off-guardian.org/2023/07/12/reality-check-no-we-didn...

That reads like a rant by someone with an axe to grind, and not just because they put scare quotes around the word "pandemic" in a list of other things they don't believe.

Hint: when you're confidently a degree above the temperature range for 100 to 0.05 kya, you don't need to establish two decimal points in that period to say you're exceeding it, only in the recent period where you're closer (which in this case is entirely in the period with global satellite-based temperature data).

I shouldn't have even bothered skim-reading given the starting point of trying to argue that "average temperature" is meaningless, given that temperature is literally only a thing at the scale of averages.

But then, I have actually used satellite records of global surface temperature, so of course I'd be annoyed at a random blogger who thinks this is done today with a bunch of weather stations.

>Overall, we rate OffGuardian a Strong Conspiracy and Strong Pseudoscience website that frequently promotes unproven conspiracy theories and false information regarding the Coronavirus.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/offguardian/