The first map is quite remarkable: even in this record-setting year, there is still a big swath of the US that is cooler than the historical average, or only very slightly warmer. This has been a pattern for a while.
It almost feels like a conspiracy: the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change is also the one that is (partly) avoiding it. And that part is the linchpin: other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
Obviously not, of course, and I don't really know if it really figures into it one way or the other. But it still strikes me as weird. How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
I honestly do not think it would matter much. Most folks in the South and Midwest are already accustomed to hot, humid temperatures. As such, it would be a matter of "hmm the AC is running more than normal" and then back to their normal day-to-day. Places where AC and other hot-weather mitigation tools are not common are the places where a suddenly-warmer environment would be immediately noticed.
Besides, getting folks to recognize the impacts of climate change is one thing, convincing them that the threat is such that any impactful fix would require fundamental and drastic changes to their comfortable lifestyle is a whole different conversation.
It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs considerable investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Instead the neocons running the White House spend our resources on yet another war and more munitions. The Dems will get serious about climate when they put RFKjr on the Presidential ticket. Until then, the warmongers are feeding happily at the government trough.
No it makes a difference. I get up in TX and compared to then so many more people just leave the state in the summer. It used to be that in the evening temps would come down to the mid 80s and now they might hit mid 90s even at midnight. It's fucking miserable to be trapped indoors for months on end. So much worse than cold.
I'm assuming it will be more than run AC longer. E.g With more extreme weather events tornadoes will be potentially more frequent and destructive. Or rain more heavy and out of normal patterns which can create serious issues with farming, especially staples like wheat or rice. Or fires which we seem to already see more of.
With recognising climate change, I feel the issue is many people, focus on the short term for what is a long term issue. In the way people say the climate change isn't happening, to them it's not. Individuals will see fairly limited change over a single lifespan, but what we do today will likely have a huge impact to people 100+ years from now. Often media/activists presents climate change as this imminent threat year after year, which isn't true as the climate is a slow ship, and while actions is absolutely needed for the future, I think many people see these endless imminent threat predictions not occuring, so to them this seems over dramatic and therefore untrue.
New Mexico and Arizona (Phoenix in particular) actually had a record-breaking heatwave this year, a full month of daily peak temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
I often have similar thoughts: if you expand the scope a bit and don't limit yourself to the metrics that are the topic du jour - this is not meant to diminish the severity of heatwaves, to the contrary -
it seems like a natural law that the people who do the most damage to common goods (such as humane shelter and food, clean water, clean air, healthy environment, bearable noise pollution, bearable working conditions if you want to go there) - they are the people who profit and stand exactly on the other side, experiencing the absolute minimum of the damage they cause.
This is a prisoners's dilemma or market failure that has infested all of our global society, to a point that we can't even start to imagine.
Every species tries to maximize its use of available resources. Humans are the only ones that even think about the consequences (emphasis on think, actually doing something is more rare).
I think we will continue to live as we do until we cannot. Then there will be a natural correction. It will probably be ugly for a while, then we will adapt. This is the history of the planet.
Of course the earth wants to keep warming; the current climate is rare. It doesn't fall to the personification of the earth enacting a conspiracy, but things can and will return to [planetary] normal at some point.
"A 'greenhouse Earth' is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
That's a weird use of "normal". The current ecosystems are fundamentally ice age ecosystems. Whether they count as "normal" to you personally isn't really material. They are the only ecosystems we have.
You don't warm the earth rapidly (which at this point we undeniably are) and then magically get back "normal" fern forests and dinosaurs or whatnot. What you get is a mass extinction.
Yes, but after mass extinction, stuff won't just stop.
Eventually, things will evolve to forests or the equivalent. You'll be unlikely to have the same kinds of dinosaurs as before, but as the old saying goes, nature like carcination. There will probably be new variants of crabs.
No, but the stuff that is here now won't be there anymore. Traditional conservative (small-c) ethics generally says things like "don't throw stuff out or destroy things if we don't know what we'll get instead".
You seem to be saying the equivalent of e.g. "It's OK to kill all the elephants because in a few million years something else will have filled the niche". That seems ridiculous to me.
Does your logic extend to all species? All ecosystems? Our species?
I had never before heard that description of 'traditional conservative ethics'. I thought free market conservatives think individual participants will make their own choices and increase the goods and services available, thus benefitting humanity.
FWIW: the reference to "small C conservatism" was specifically to make clear that I was using the word in its traditional sense ("change is presumed bad absent evidence") and NOT referring to modern political divisions.
In fact what you're describing is exactly the disconnect: libertarianism is very much not "conservative" by traditional standards. The fact that they live in the same party in the modern US is an accident; it doesn't follow from their philosophies at all.
> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
If the effect of global warming were felt equally in the US and that somehow caused the US to halt 100% of their emissions it would reduce global emissions by about 11% [1].
For the US to halt emissions there would be policy in place to make sure emissions made somewhere else get appropriately priced, hence the effects of emissions reductions in the developed world impact everywhere else.
The main problem with global emissions is with developing countries who are increasing their emissions while at the same time taking up a greater share of global emissions than developed countries.
I don't understand how people make that point in 2023 still
China is the world's factory, 20% of the US imports come from there, of course your own country doesn't pollute much when you gutted half of your industries and relocated them in foreign countries.
They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies. It's clear that China does not care about climate change in the slightest.
> They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies.
Of course India is nowhere close to China, they basically don't exist in term of exports. These countries have almost nothing in common besides having a large population
Again it's easy to pollute less when you literally shut down all your industries. You can't ask for more and more growth, cheaper and cheaper prices and 0 pollution.
> China does not care about climate change in the slightest.
Not more or less than 99% of countries on this earth, including the US and most of Europe. If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago, as well as most of their exports and massively reduced their energy usage (daily reminder than the average US household uses 4 times more energy than a German one)
> the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change
There is more nonsense in this statement than in the headline. Parts of the world don't have ideology and these highly judgmental and superficial analysis certainly don't help.
> other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
So, China's inability to manage pollution is somehow down to the imputed attitudes of a few areas of the US?
> It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
It's as if human beings exist and continue to multiply. It's as if third world countries don't care about our ideology if it means they never get a chance to develop themselves the way every other country had an opportunity to. It's as if a few rich people half way around the world expect the difference to be made up elsewhere.
> But it still strikes me as weird.
It's purely anecdotal.
> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
Texas had the hottest summer in recent history. California had one of the mildest. Minnesota had one of the hottest and they're getting Canadian wildfire smoke.
Perhaps we shouldn't view this through the lens of "how miserable do we have to make people to get change to happen" and instead through the lens of "how incompetent are our politicians that they can't find an honest solution to this problem?"
This _desire_ for self-inflicted austerity is what is _weird_.
What does an honest solution positions could come up with that would be accepted by a large majority of the voting public look like? In your opinion what should they be doing?
Edit: because another way to view the lens you dismiss is “how miserable do people need to get before they accept that something real is happening here?”
Keep in mind that climate change also means more extremes in many places. Quite a few of those US places that have only gotten a little average warming have been getting getting more extremes and longer heat and cold waves.
I'd guess that for most people in the US they are more likely to notice that than to notice a change in average temperature. Consider someone in a place that normally gets cold enough to require heat for much of the winter and hot enough to require air conditioning for most of the summer.
Someone could easily not notice a 3℃ increase in average temperature that manifests as winter being a little less cold, summer being a little warmer, and winter being a little shorter, and summer a little longer because their HVAC system keeps their would at a fixed temperature all year around.
Their energy bill would go up, but they might think that is just due to inflation.
But if they start getting afternoon brownouts because of everyone's AC dealing with extreme summer heat, and that happens more and more each year, that is something they might notice
I recently watched a really good IMax movie, "Dinosaurs of Antarctica". I thought it was fascinating because I always had misunderstood the reasons for lush forests in Antarctica - I thought it was just because of plate tectonics (Antarctica was just in a more northern latitude before), but that's not the case in this instance - it really was a lush forest at the south pole. Which to me is even a bit more nuts because even though it was a lush forest it was still dark ~6 months of the year.
Climate change is coming, and it's probably going to be coming faster than it ever has in Earth's history.
But note that this is only true for the part of Antarctica near the South Pole. As Antarctica is quite large, there are still parts that lie even today just north of the Arctic Circle.[1] Between the Antarctic Circle and the South Pole the length of the polar night gratually increases.[2]
Apologies for being pedantic: yes, change is coming, but certainly not faster than that brought on by a giant asteroid impact or major eruption. I only mention this as I feel exaggeration harms credibility.
If the change happens at a rate faster than most life on earth can adapt then the end effect is the same. Just will happen over a decade vs. over a month.
Even without tipping points, 3C is incredibly hazardous to human life. Large swathes of the planet, especially near the equator, go from "barely habitable" to "uninhabitable". Many millions will die; hundreds of millions (possibly billions) will be displaced.
Even in the temperate zones, agricultural zones will shift tens or hundreds of miles toward the poles, where the growing seasons will be shorter due to daylight. Centuries of infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from scratch, if it can be done at all.
The tipping points have the potential to be globe-spanning catastrophes. But even if we get lucky and none of them happen, there are disastrous effects that we are absolutely certain about.
"What happens next" is mentioned a lot, but in my personal pessimistic barely-informed opinion we've already passed that.
Pole ice has not grown back enough; pole ice reflects heat back into space, while naked sea will absorb it.
Permafrost has been melting in the northern regions, making thousands of years of sequestered and frozen biomass defrost and decompose, releasing huge amounts of methane.
Sea flow (whatever it was called) that pulls warm water north and cold water south, balancing out temperatures, is slowing down because of heating up + desalinization (from melting glaciers). When I read about it years ago, it said that that's what causes an ice age (as in, ice sheets going south).
OK so dumb guy here needs someone to explain this chart I keep seeing and not understanding. [1]
It shows average temperatures month by month, peaking in summer months, cooler in winter months. As expected.
Except that the graph says this is a global mean temperature, not just the northern hemisphere.
I would expect that the earth, on average, from north pole to equator to south pole, would, on average day, have about the same mean temperature, as it gets the same amount of total sunlight overall, regardless of the tilt of the earth. We're essentially on a sphere, and it gets the same sunlight coverage even though some points get more light than others.
I mean it's not like the earth gets less overall sun just because it's winter in the north.
So for whatever reason the entire earth is warmer when the northern hemisphere is experiencing summer? Am I interpreting that right? How is that possible, and what am I failing to take into account?
Does it have something to do with the elliptical orbit of the earth, and possibly that our closest yearly approach to the sun just happens to align with summer months in the northern hemisphere?
not necessary: a lot of heat (energy) radiates out into space or is blocked from doing so but greenhouse gasses... and a lot of energy is sequestered into solid matter... or not...
> How is that possible, and what am I failing to take into account?
There are factors like that most of the landmass is in the northern hemisphere, we are in a strong El Nino, ships have to burn fuel with less sulphur and so on. Right now the factors involved are unclear but there is an unsettling possibility: The Earths climate might drastically and quickly change at so called tipping points, after which a new balance becomes the norm. This new balance may or may not be hospitable or even habitable for us.
> Does it have something to do with the elliptical orbit of the earth, and possibly that our closest yearly approach to the sun just happens to align with summer months in the northern hemisphere?
Nope, our orbit is very round and if this was a major factor we'd see it in historic data.
OK the landmass thing a few people pointed out. I can buy into this, but it's still a bit confusing.
What does 'moderation' mean? The solar energy has to go somewhere, I'm assuming that's temperature. Are you saying it's not going into temperature, but instead being stored some otherway (like evaporation causing an increase in potential energy as the molecules rise?).
To me it's a question of energy input from sun - energy reflected and radiated out. Something like
temperature = constant * (energy from sun - energy reflected - energy radiated)
Maybe the earth reflects more energy due to more water / less land in the southern hemisphere?
It's more that every substance has a specific heat capacity. That is, how much energy it takes to raise 1 g of that substance one degree Celsius.
Water happens to have some of the highest specific heat capacities. Therefore, the south can "store" more energy in the hot months, and release that same energy in the cool months better than the north can
Aha thank you this was my eureka moment. I remember from high school chemistry the idea that temperature stays constant when energy input goes to phase change.
So in the southern hemisphere with that much water, some of the energy goes into the phase change between water/steam. Much less so in the northern hemisphere.
Thank god we have these big thermal sinks (ice/water) to hold a lot of this energy to keep temp a little more stable.
Follow up question: I'm assuming the exact same thing applies with ice->water. So some of the energy hitting the earth is going into melting the ice instead of increasing temperature. It would seem to follow that, once all the sea ice and glaciers have melted, that this phase-change effect is removed, and therefore the temperatures will increase faster as none of the excess energy is going into ice->water phase-change?
Do they predict the temperature rise to increase once all of the sea ice and glaciers have melted?
Or maybe once it's water it just means that there is that much more liquid water available to evaporate into humidity?
Also, anyone know how the Canadian wildfires impacting the equation? Is that a potential explanation for the several sigma deviation this year?
> It would seem to follow that, once all the sea ice and glaciers have melted,
> that this phase-change effect is removed, and therefore the temperatures
> will increase faster as none of the excess energy is going into ice->water
> phase-change?
Yes, and it's even worse than that. The ice also reflects and awful lot of energy back into space due to being highly reflective. When that the ice is gone, that exposes darker surface which is a lot less reflective. That will also result in lot more heating.
The more things warm up, the more things will warm up in a vicious cycle with many positive feedback loops. Sadly a lot of it seems irreversible at this point.
More desert dust being carried at higher altitudes - Himalayas, Alps - is also increasing the darkness aka heating of the glacier surfaces, thus speeding their melting...
This is more complicated than you can get into with a few comments but your basic assumptions are incorrect. To overly simply more land on northern hemisphere, but it’s also a question of ocean currents and the distribution of land etc.)
Also it seems like energy reflected/radiated should be a constant or even a direct function of temperature, this is also false. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo etc)
Undergraduate thermodynamics is complicated, but Earth is even more so because energy moves around quite a bit and the atmosphere is complex. Wind and ocean currents make a huge difference, as do cloud cover, and …
The whole picture is more complex, as others are pointing out, but sticking just to evaporation - the point is that more energy in can lead to more humidity at the same temperature. Phase changes like evaporation consume energy without increasing temperature. Land masses don't experience phase changes at regular temperatures reached on the earth, so more energy in just leads to higher temperatures.
Yes. Northern and Southern seasons are not the same length due to the orbit. Also the proportion of land to ocean is very different which I think makes a big difference.
From what I remember, this is because there is more land in the northern hemisphere and more ocean in the southern hemisphere, and water has better thermal capacity than soil.
Not a dumb question at all! The main reason is because there is much more land mass in the northern hemisphere than in the southern, and land tends to heat up more than ocean. You can actually see how this effect balances out on this site: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
If you look at the annual temperature range for the northern hemisphere (NH) it has a range >10C, while the southern hemisphere has a range ~5C.
The closest approach to the Sun is actually in January, the Northern Hemisphere winter. But that is when the axial tilt means that the north pole spends most time pointing away from the Sun, hence winter.
Technically when the Earth still had a molten crust it was the hottest. Does that matter right now? No, this is about our climate changing radically and us needing to do something before we make our planet less habitable. Nitpicking at phrasing will not help with this.
There's no evidence for this. England was slightly warmer in the Medieval period than in the Renaissance or Iron Age, but nowhere near as warm as today. There were more vineyards in the 11th century than the 19th century, but at this point there are vineyards all over England, and there are even a few in Scotland.
In short, although vineyards are an extremely bad proxy for the temperature record, even by the vineyard standard it is much warmer today in the UK than it ever was over recorded history.
"The global temperature dropped between one and three degrees Celsius. It was the coldest year in at least the last 250 years ... led to crop failure, the death of livestock and famine."
Uh………yeah that will happen when the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history happens and blasts 10 cubic miles of material into the atmosphere, which you conveniently forgot to mention. Your example has 0 relevance to climate change.
Or, according to indirect proxy measurements, since the first agricultural revolution when humans started relying on stable climates with the invention of farming, and relying on stable sea levels by building large fixed settlements on the coasts, about 12,000 years ago.
Note that the article does mention this: "July 2023 was the hottest month in recorded history", "the average global temperature was 1.54 °C above the preindustrial average for July", etc... (emphasis mine). It's just that nuance tends to be missed in headlines.
Not that that's a good thing, but it's not like it's unique to climate reporting. If you want to have a go at editors for clickbait/hyperbolic headlines, you can probably find better examples in the politics or media coverage sections of whatever publications you prefer.
I mean yeah, there were times in Earth's past where sea levels were so high that the American midwest was an ocean. Americans living in the midwest would like to avoid this scenario. Even more threatened are lowland states like Florida and Louisiana.
Sure in a technical sense the Earth will survive this change. It's a big ball of rock, a few degress of difference on the surface means nothing to it. For the plants and animals however we're talking about a mass extinction event.
My real question is that when looking at the map most of the large deviations are in extreme places. How long do we have temperature records for places like the middle of the ocean near Antarctica?
There was a recent article about record breaking temperatures in South America but it turns out the sensors they were monitoring had only been in place from 2008.
This sounds like copium sorry. Sea surface temperature satellites have been doing their thing for decades. We know this year is another extreme outlier with money to come.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadIt almost feels like a conspiracy: the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change is also the one that is (partly) avoiding it. And that part is the linchpin: other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
Obviously not, of course, and I don't really know if it really figures into it one way or the other. But it still strikes me as weird. How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
Besides, getting folks to recognize the impacts of climate change is one thing, convincing them that the threat is such that any impactful fix would require fundamental and drastic changes to their comfortable lifestyle is a whole different conversation.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
With recognising climate change, I feel the issue is many people, focus on the short term for what is a long term issue. In the way people say the climate change isn't happening, to them it's not. Individuals will see fairly limited change over a single lifespan, but what we do today will likely have a huge impact to people 100+ years from now. Often media/activists presents climate change as this imminent threat year after year, which isn't true as the climate is a slow ship, and while actions is absolutely needed for the future, I think many people see these endless imminent threat predictions not occuring, so to them this seems over dramatic and therefore untrue.
I often have similar thoughts: if you expand the scope a bit and don't limit yourself to the metrics that are the topic du jour - this is not meant to diminish the severity of heatwaves, to the contrary -
it seems like a natural law that the people who do the most damage to common goods (such as humane shelter and food, clean water, clean air, healthy environment, bearable noise pollution, bearable working conditions if you want to go there) - they are the people who profit and stand exactly on the other side, experiencing the absolute minimum of the damage they cause.
This is a prisoners's dilemma or market failure that has infested all of our global society, to a point that we can't even start to imagine.
I think we will continue to live as we do until we cannot. Then there will be a natural correction. It will probably be ugly for a while, then we will adapt. This is the history of the planet.
Do you think humans use oil, soil etc as efficiently as ants do?
Or do you mean "consumption" when you say "use"? The way you put it sounds like you mean
Claiming that our "bad conscience" does any good (speaking and writing, to be precise), increasingly proves wrong.There are just so many speakers and writers and thinkers with their own side of the prisoner's dilemma in mind
"A 'greenhouse Earth' is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth
You don't warm the earth rapidly (which at this point we undeniably are) and then magically get back "normal" fern forests and dinosaurs or whatnot. What you get is a mass extinction.
Eventually, things will evolve to forests or the equivalent. You'll be unlikely to have the same kinds of dinosaurs as before, but as the old saying goes, nature like carcination. There will probably be new variants of crabs.
You seem to be saying the equivalent of e.g. "It's OK to kill all the elephants because in a few million years something else will have filled the niche". That seems ridiculous to me.
Does your logic extend to all species? All ecosystems? Our species?
In fact what you're describing is exactly the disconnect: libertarianism is very much not "conservative" by traditional standards. The fact that they live in the same party in the modern US is an accident; it doesn't follow from their philosophies at all.
If the effect of global warming were felt equally in the US and that somehow caused the US to halt 100% of their emissions it would reduce global emissions by about 11% [1].
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/chinas-greenhouse-gas-emissi...
See: https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...
China is the world's factory, 20% of the US imports come from there, of course your own country doesn't pollute much when you gutted half of your industries and relocated them in foreign countries.
edit: don't forget per capita greenhouse emissions too, in that case Americans emit twice as much as Chinese https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Estimates are that only around 10% of Chinese carbon emissions are for foreign exports: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596....
And you can't deny that the US and EU has been moving in the right direction, while China is moving in the wrong direction.
US carbon emissions peaked in 2000 and have been moving down ever since. China's carbon emissions have grown by 500% during that time period. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies. It's clear that China does not care about climate change in the slightest.
Here it says 33%: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14412-33-of-chinas-ca...
> They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies.
Of course India is nowhere close to China, they basically don't exist in term of exports. These countries have almost nothing in common besides having a large population
https://statisticsanddata.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Top...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
> while China is moving in the wrong direction.
You sure about that ?
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/267233/renewable-energy-c...
Again it's easy to pollute less when you literally shut down all your industries. You can't ask for more and more growth, cheaper and cheaper prices and 0 pollution.
> China does not care about climate change in the slightest.
Not more or less than 99% of countries on this earth, including the US and most of Europe. If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago, as well as most of their exports and massively reduced their energy usage (daily reminder than the average US household uses 4 times more energy than a German one)
Yes, China built six times the number of coal plants of the entire rest of the world last year. Six times! It's inexcusable.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Meanwhile the US has mothballed half of it's coal plants in 10 years:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html
> Here it says 33%
You're clearly cherry picking very old data (2008) that is not published research to try and make a point here. The references aren't even comparable.
> If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago
Plenty of people would be delighted to embargo China due to their environmental record. If that's what you're proposing, we agree.
There is more nonsense in this statement than in the headline. Parts of the world don't have ideology and these highly judgmental and superficial analysis certainly don't help.
> other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
So, China's inability to manage pollution is somehow down to the imputed attitudes of a few areas of the US?
> It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
It's as if human beings exist and continue to multiply. It's as if third world countries don't care about our ideology if it means they never get a chance to develop themselves the way every other country had an opportunity to. It's as if a few rich people half way around the world expect the difference to be made up elsewhere.
> But it still strikes me as weird.
It's purely anecdotal.
> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
Texas had the hottest summer in recent history. California had one of the mildest. Minnesota had one of the hottest and they're getting Canadian wildfire smoke.
Perhaps we shouldn't view this through the lens of "how miserable do we have to make people to get change to happen" and instead through the lens of "how incompetent are our politicians that they can't find an honest solution to this problem?"
This _desire_ for self-inflicted austerity is what is _weird_.
Edit: because another way to view the lens you dismiss is “how miserable do people need to get before they accept that something real is happening here?”
The largest voting block could stop war emissions by replacing Biden with RFKjr or even Trump. Huge carbon savings there.
I'd guess that for most people in the US they are more likely to notice that than to notice a change in average temperature. Consider someone in a place that normally gets cold enough to require heat for much of the winter and hot enough to require air conditioning for most of the summer.
Someone could easily not notice a 3℃ increase in average temperature that manifests as winter being a little less cold, summer being a little warmer, and winter being a little shorter, and summer a little longer because their HVAC system keeps their would at a fixed temperature all year around.
Their energy bill would go up, but they might think that is just due to inflation.
But if they start getting afternoon brownouts because of everyone's AC dealing with extreme summer heat, and that happens more and more each year, that is something they might notice
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2023/08/two-tipping-points....
Climate change is coming, and it's probably going to be coming faster than it ever has in Earth's history.
But note that this is only true for the part of Antarctica near the South Pole. As Antarctica is quite large, there are still parts that lie even today just north of the Arctic Circle.[1] Between the Antarctic Circle and the South Pole the length of the polar night gratually increases.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circle#/media/File:A...
[2] Wikipedia has a nice graph showing the effect for each latitude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime#/media/File:Hours_of_d...
Even in the temperate zones, agricultural zones will shift tens or hundreds of miles toward the poles, where the growing seasons will be shorter due to daylight. Centuries of infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from scratch, if it can be done at all.
The tipping points have the potential to be globe-spanning catastrophes. But even if we get lucky and none of them happen, there are disastrous effects that we are absolutely certain about.
Or maybe we happen to be at tail end of Little Ice Age and gradual change will continue.
Pole ice has not grown back enough; pole ice reflects heat back into space, while naked sea will absorb it.
Permafrost has been melting in the northern regions, making thousands of years of sequestered and frozen biomass defrost and decompose, releasing huge amounts of methane.
Sea flow (whatever it was called) that pulls warm water north and cold water south, balancing out temperatures, is slowing down because of heating up + desalinization (from melting glaciers). When I read about it years ago, it said that that's what causes an ice age (as in, ice sheets going south).
It shows average temperatures month by month, peaking in summer months, cooler in winter months. As expected.
Except that the graph says this is a global mean temperature, not just the northern hemisphere.
I would expect that the earth, on average, from north pole to equator to south pole, would, on average day, have about the same mean temperature, as it gets the same amount of total sunlight overall, regardless of the tilt of the earth. We're essentially on a sphere, and it gets the same sunlight coverage even though some points get more light than others.
I mean it's not like the earth gets less overall sun just because it's winter in the north.
So for whatever reason the entire earth is warmer when the northern hemisphere is experiencing summer? Am I interpreting that right? How is that possible, and what am I failing to take into account?
Does it have something to do with the elliptical orbit of the earth, and possibly that our closest yearly approach to the sun just happens to align with summer months in the northern hemisphere?
[1] https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-023-02...
Yes.
> How is that possible, and what am I failing to take into account?
There are factors like that most of the landmass is in the northern hemisphere, we are in a strong El Nino, ships have to burn fuel with less sulphur and so on. Right now the factors involved are unclear but there is an unsettling possibility: The Earths climate might drastically and quickly change at so called tipping points, after which a new balance becomes the norm. This new balance may or may not be hospitable or even habitable for us.
> Does it have something to do with the elliptical orbit of the earth, and possibly that our closest yearly approach to the sun just happens to align with summer months in the northern hemisphere?
Nope, our orbit is very round and if this was a major factor we'd see it in historic data.
What does 'moderation' mean? The solar energy has to go somewhere, I'm assuming that's temperature. Are you saying it's not going into temperature, but instead being stored some otherway (like evaporation causing an increase in potential energy as the molecules rise?).
To me it's a question of energy input from sun - energy reflected and radiated out. Something like
Maybe the earth reflects more energy due to more water / less land in the southern hemisphere?Water happens to have some of the highest specific heat capacities. Therefore, the south can "store" more energy in the hot months, and release that same energy in the cool months better than the north can
Thank god we have these big wet heat sinks available to help keep climate stable.
So, this, as well as ocean mixing is how the surface temperature is "moderated", in addition to the heat capacity that others have brought up.
So in the southern hemisphere with that much water, some of the energy goes into the phase change between water/steam. Much less so in the northern hemisphere.
Thank god we have these big thermal sinks (ice/water) to hold a lot of this energy to keep temp a little more stable.
Follow up question: I'm assuming the exact same thing applies with ice->water. So some of the energy hitting the earth is going into melting the ice instead of increasing temperature. It would seem to follow that, once all the sea ice and glaciers have melted, that this phase-change effect is removed, and therefore the temperatures will increase faster as none of the excess energy is going into ice->water phase-change?
Do they predict the temperature rise to increase once all of the sea ice and glaciers have melted?
Or maybe once it's water it just means that there is that much more liquid water available to evaporate into humidity?
Also, anyone know how the Canadian wildfires impacting the equation? Is that a potential explanation for the several sigma deviation this year?
Yes, and it's even worse than that. The ice also reflects and awful lot of energy back into space due to being highly reflective. When that the ice is gone, that exposes darker surface which is a lot less reflective. That will also result in lot more heating.
The more things warm up, the more things will warm up in a vicious cycle with many positive feedback loops. Sadly a lot of it seems irreversible at this point.
The first assumption is there’s a linear relationship, this is false. Also, X energy always moves from X to Y temperature, this also false. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity etc)
Also it seems like energy reflected/radiated should be a constant or even a direct function of temperature, this is also false. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo etc)
Undergraduate thermodynamics is complicated, but Earth is even more so because energy moves around quite a bit and the atmosphere is complex. Wind and ocean currents make a huge difference, as do cloud cover, and …
Temperature is not 'the leftover energy'. The Earth is broadly in equilibrium.
It's more like
Any imbalance between energy in and energy out is what manifests as increase or decrease in global temperature.This Veritasium video gives a good idea of what we do get from the sun, if not 'net energy in': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA
If you look at the annual temperature range for the northern hemisphere (NH) it has a range >10C, while the southern hemisphere has a range ~5C.
You can read more about this here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-does-land-warm-up...
** Since 1850
Why do these articles always try to sensationalize things? You lose credibility when you create clickbait headlines.
My understanding is temperatures recorded before about 1880 are unreliable[1]. This article does not provide a source for where their data comes from.
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/21/why-does-the-temperature-rec....
In short, although vineyards are an extremely bad proxy for the temperature record, even by the vineyard standard it is much warmer today in the UK than it ever was over recorded history.
It's just that we're living right now and not before the last ice age. Sucks for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/17/world/tambora-eruption-year-w...
"The global temperature dropped between one and three degrees Celsius. It was the coldest year in at least the last 250 years ... led to crop failure, the death of livestock and famine."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambo...
Or, according to indirect proxy measurements, since the first agricultural revolution when humans started relying on stable climates with the invention of farming, and relying on stable sea levels by building large fixed settlements on the coasts, about 12,000 years ago.
Note that the article does mention this: "July 2023 was the hottest month in recorded history", "the average global temperature was 1.54 °C above the preindustrial average for July", etc... (emphasis mine). It's just that nuance tends to be missed in headlines.
Not that that's a good thing, but it's not like it's unique to climate reporting. If you want to have a go at editors for clickbait/hyperbolic headlines, you can probably find better examples in the politics or media coverage sections of whatever publications you prefer.
What's the point of this? Just to be "technically" right?
Sure in a technical sense the Earth will survive this change. It's a big ball of rock, a few degress of difference on the surface means nothing to it. For the plants and animals however we're talking about a mass extinction event.
Clearly the planet will be fine if temperatures keep rising, Earth has seen far greater catastrophes and temperature swings.
It remains to be seen whether humans will be fine if the climate keeps warming.
There was a recent article about record breaking temperatures in South America but it turns out the sensors they were monitoring had only been in place from 2008.