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Average Global Temperatures since 1850

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Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#91

Post by realreality »

roenxi wrote: post #19
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. I agree with you though. I don’t think we’re willing to do what is necessary to avoid serious catastrophe. We’ve done a good job demonstrating that for 50+ years so far.

> People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem. 1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally. 2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear activist would have to admit that the ris…

1. Take a look at https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=map&solar=false&remote=... -- renewables are certainly not switching over fast enough.

2. Even if nuclear were not controversial, it cannot be deployed quick enough. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304100413.h... I recall seeing a calculation that it would require us to turn on a new nuclear power plant every day for the next several decades. That's obviously not going to happen, when countries are currently decommissioning nuclear plants.

> the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.

Frankly, this is a ridiculous and dangerous assumption. Globally, we have a limited carbon budget remaining in order to prevent catastrophic warming. That means we must be decreasing emissions on the order of at least 10% per year until we're at zero emissions, and then continue taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Such a scale requires massive transformation across all sectors of society.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#92

Post by empath75 »

lubonay wrote: post #21
wallace_f wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to implement a carbon tax. And it solves the problem. But what politicians want is more power grabs, not solutions. All of our wars on poverty, drugs, terror etc are intended this way. They are wars on people. This is the same. These people dont give a fuck about you. That's rarely ever been the case.

Implementing an unpopular measure (more tax) is almost equivalent to political suicide, and people in power tend to want to stay in power. So yeah, technically it may be easy, but politically (which is what really matters here) this is almost impossible.

You don’t need more taxes (on net) at all. You just do a carbon tax and distribute all the money equally. Rational people would reduce their spending on items that put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Ideally nobody pays the tax at all. That’s the whole point of it.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#93

Post by viraptor »

maxheadroom wrote: post #77
tomtomtom777 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop buying stuff without thought. I know that a lot of people feel helpless because it's the big corporations that are emitting, but companies only emit CO2 if consumers pay them to do so. Buying everything consciously, whether its food, appliances, housing, or a ticket to some performance, will make the world better.

I would also like to add that some countries could contribute more by offering public transit infrastructure (like, at all - looking at you "deep south of the United States", where cities don't have any transit systems, whatsoever) and encouraging/subsidising/what-have-you of far more rail use than plane use. Essentially, you're never going to drive car use down (and, thereby, fossil fuel use), if there are no viable…

> and we're not planting enough trees (anywhere) to counter-act that.

Globally it looks like we're not doing that bad. There are areas doing worse (Africa, Latin America), but the trend seems ok even for them.

Based on http://www.fao.org/state-of-forests/en/

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#95

Post by realreality »

helenakyso wrote: post #17

Any ideas of What, WE, the individuals can do to make politician and countries change?

Individuals can do very little, aside from reducing one's ecological footprint.

The key thing is to work with your neighbors, friends, and community to build on the movements that are already working to make politicians and countries change. This must be a collective effort.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#96

Post by viraptor »

southern_cross wrote: post #64
serpix wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so are you implying someone is methodically rigging up the data to show an anomaly for shits and giggles?

That's exactly what they've been doing! Or, perhaps more correctly, they've let their "algorithms" run amok without doing any quality control on the final results, thereby turning modest warming into "scary" warming. Whether this was intentional or not is debatable (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor ), but it certainly looked that way to me at the time. About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorr…

> Much of that data has since been hidden again

You mean the datasets here? https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/ with the data used to generate it available here? https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station-data/

What do you think has been hidden?

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#97

Post by londons_explore »

mathgeek wrote: post #73
alecmg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adapting to catastrophes has literally evolved for millions of years. Species that couldn't adapt to change - died. The ones that survived didn't survive because they successfully prevented a catastrophe.

Would you say there has been any other species we know of that was able to cause, perceive, predict, prevent, and react to catastrophes before? We seem to be unique in that we can prevent and react to catastrophes, even ignoring that we can also cause them.

A bird puts strong sticks at the base of its nest to prevent the nest falling out of a tree.

That sounds like preventing a catastrophe.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#98

Post by majewsky »

londons_explore wrote: post #97
mathgeek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say there has been any other species we know of that was able to cause, perceive, predict, prevent, and react to catastrophes before? We seem to be unique in that we can prevent and react to catastrophes, even ignoring that we can also cause them.

A bird puts strong sticks at the base of its nest to prevent the nest falling out of a tree. That sounds like preventing a catastrophe.

Sure, but that works through natural selection. All the birds that didn't use strong sticks eventually fell out of the trees and their offspring died.

But natural selection doesn't work for us. We don't have a large sample of earths where it doesn't matter when humans die out on some of them.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#99

Post by skrowl »

gameswithgo wrote: post #88
southern_cross wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that. This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that al…

I'm familiar with the blog posts you have been reading on this topic, but its really not so easy to dismiss the data. The hypothesis you would need to accept, to believe the surface temperature record is not accurate, would be the systematic error is consistently measuring things a little bit warmer over time. If you wanted to prove that point you could try to find some mechanism that would explain it. But the proble…

It's not so much that the surface temperature record isn't accurate, it's that it's been systematically tampered with / adjusted.

https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20...

Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to be warmer.

You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter is indisputable.

Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016 https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/...

1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with everything in between.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#100

Post by NeedMoreTea »

ForHackernews wrote: post #45
PhilWright wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is obviously not the case that 'humanity seems to do nothing'. The United Nations have the IPCC working on the issue and their reports influence national policy in many countries. There are the Kyoto and Paris agreements that are based on the details from the IPCC reports. Is the world doing enough? No, I don't think countries are doing enough, but to say humanity seems to do nothing is patently ridiculous.

We are doing nothing: https://climateactiontracker.org/ National responses range from "critically insufficient" all the way to merely "insufficient". You are tragically misinformed if you think some responsible people somewhere are taking action.

Shame that site treats all the EU as one bloc - individual countries within the EU diverge quite a bit.
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