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January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

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Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#61

Post by 1propionyl »

gus_massa wrote: post #51
1propionyl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true extent of the outcomes. And we'll likely all die reasonably content knowing it's not our problem. We're among the last generations that can expect to ride the current peak in human success before the hard bounds kick in and things either become much more difficult or more likely just completely collapse. We all love to rest easy on the fall…

> "Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!" > And what do they feed on? You are underestimating the diversity of metabolism in bacteria/archaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea#Metabolism As a weird example, there is an isolate cave in Romania, with a weird source of energy http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-l... . (If that's all life that all life that will survive…

Even if a handful of unusually adapted species survive, do you think they'll survive for any meaningful amount of time in the absence of any other meaningful biosphere?

And even if they do, why do you assume they (species adapted to environments entirely distinct from 99.99% of Earth) will somehow exist long enough to speciate into a robust planet's worth of species?

The species that exist today have largely survived because collectively they exist in homestasis and regulate their environment. If every tree suddenly disappeared the human race would be gone within hours. Similarly if every warm blooded animal suddenly disappeared plants would start dying in droves within a few days.

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#62

Post by kaybe »

1propionyl wrote: post #58
titzer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You honestly don't understand how naive you are. I don't hang around hackernews to get insulted. It's not what we do around here.

I don't hang around HN to have every other commenter confirm my existing opinions either. Being told by someone that they think you're wrong isn't an insult. If you buy the reassuring yet nonsensical idea that "the humans are fucked, the planet will be fine", you can be adequately classified as cherry-picking a minimally discomfiting worldview, against all evidence. That's not an insult.

No, but check your wording. Calling someone naive and unable to see it is insulting. Just to give you an additional perspective.

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#63

Post by toupeetape »

busymom0 wrote: post #53
toupeetape wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please let me know what the downvote is for It's for not knowing what the word "globally" means. That is a pretty big hole in your own data. Look at the equivalent data where it exists for South America, Europe, Africa or Asia. The majority have records set in the last 30 years. Of course, none of the Northern hemisphere countries set their all-time record temperature in January so all-time records in the US are pr…

My point is that a 30 year period is meaningless when majority of records we see were broken much before that and the number of records being broken has gone down significantly as per NOAA data.

The number of records being broken has not gone down if you include parts of the world that are not the USA (they exist!)

The record was broken in 20 of the 50 countries in Europe in the last 10 years alone. Only 12 still have records standing from more than 30 years ago.

About half of records in Africa were broken in the last 20 years.

The majority of records in Asia and South America were broken in the last 20 years.

Anyway, this article is about temperatures in January, which means that all-time high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are irrelevant. Would it be meaningless if California hit 130°F in January just because it was once slightly hotter in July?

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#64

Post by piva00 »

seizethecheese wrote: post #13

"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark". This is outlier journalism. The actual data is more informative (from December): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mn... On average the globe is warming. In a splotch of northeastern europe very much so. In other places, it's actually colder.

Even though this is still a weather variation event it is very strange to be living in Stockholm and feeling like it's spring since December, the cherry blossoms at Kungsträdsgården were blooming in early/mid-January. We had less than 5-6 days of snow in total so far and for two weekends in a row there were days over 8C. Even frost has been rare this winter so far...

It is pretty damn strange.

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#65

Post by jajag »

1propionyl wrote: post #44
jajag wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Widespread crop failure and fisheries collapse due to extreme weather and acidic oceans could be just around the corner. I can't say that with complete certainty (and I really hope it doesn't happen), but I can't dismiss it with any confidence either.

I work in mathematical biochemistry. I'm personally confident everything you've described is around the corner. That doesn't mean that a total collapse in our food supply is around the corner, but it does suggest a collapse in the availability of certain micronutrients to a large proportion of the population. What that means is that the outcomes of certain nutritional deficiencies will likely become commonplace disea…

Are you able to sketch out the reasons for your confidence?

[Edit: Just realized you wrote the comment I was replying to - so OK I see what you're saying]

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#66

Post by 1propionyl »

ramblerman wrote: post #60
1propionyl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time literally means nothing to the universe. This simply isn't true. I don't know where you absorbed such a dumb and naive idea, but the current theory pretty much completely rules out your completely unsuppported take. Gravity is to our best knowledge not symmetric in time, and neither is heat. (Every other fundamental force in QCD is though.) The likelihood of the emergence of life decreases as overall entropy i…

> This simply isn't true. I don't know where you absorbed such a dumb and naive idea Lol. The fermi paradox is not my idea, neither is the great filter as one the possible explanations. But the presumption in both is that we are not alone as intelligent life, not to mention simple life. You mention the goldilocks theory, which indeed states that life probably has an incredibly thin temperature band in which it surviv…

There is no actual evidence of an infinite universe.

If anything the most likely situation is finite but comtinuosly expanding.

> The fact life started once, makes it likely it has done so before us and will keep doing so. When I say time doesn't matter, I mean it could take billions of eons, and in the context of the universe that doesn't matter.

This is still entirely wrong, on the basis of basic thermodynamic principles that are relatively well empirically supported.

Even if life has emerged before us, the probability of it happening again only decrease over time.

And also: low probability in finite domain doesn't magically imply high probability in an infinite domain. That's not how math works.

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#67

Post by freetime2 »

busymom0 wrote: post #24

They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless. The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960. There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax Edit: I am getting quite a few downvotes even…

FYI the HN guidelines say:

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Possibly some of the downvotes are simply for not following the guidelines.

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#68

Post by piva00 »

busymom0 wrote: post #52
r_singh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless. > There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states If they were talking about maximum recorded temperatures, your argument would've made sense. However, they're talking about average temperatures, for which a 30 year range is certainly not meaningless.

Here’s the same data for the minimum temperature records broken: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmin Around 10 were broken in the last 3 decades which is more than the around 7 broken for the max temperatures. If more min records are broken, then I would expect the average to be going down not up.

Minimum records being broken can mean more variance causing outliers more frequently, wouldn't necessarily mean that they push the average down as they might be short events followed by a different weather pattern.

The disruption of the polar vortex drops temperature significantly across Northern Europe but it can be caused by the warming of the atmosphere so even though it can cause record lows it is a short lasted event and on average the temperature is still going up.

That is also a side-effect of climate change, more powerful bursts of extreme weather.

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#69

Post by ramblerman »

1propionyl wrote: post #66
ramblerman wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This simply isn't true. I don't know where you absorbed such a dumb and naive idea Lol. The fermi paradox is not my idea, neither is the great filter as one the possible explanations. But the presumption in both is that we are not alone as intelligent life, not to mention simple life. You mention the goldilocks theory, which indeed states that life probably has an incredibly thin temperature band in which it surviv…

There is no actual evidence of an infinite universe. If anything the most likely situation is finite but comtinuosly expanding. > The fact life started once, makes it likely it has done so before us and will keep doing so. When I say time doesn't matter, I mean it could take billions of eons, and in the context of the universe that doesn't matter. This is still entirely wrong, on the basis of basic thermodynamic prin…

> There is no actual evidence of an infinite universe.

The drake equation and fermi account for that, using something like "The universe has 10 million, million, million suns".

Most of these ideas are probabilistic based on sizes that are just immense beyond comprehension. But I still find them more grounded than the pre-Copernican hubris that we are somehow central to all this.

> And also: low probability in finite domain doesn't magically imply high probability in an infinite domain. That's not how math works

How do you figure that?

Re: January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service

#70

Post by scarejunba »

brozaman wrote: post #50
lapink wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Americans could start changing their way of life rather than waiting for « political will » or a never coming technological revolution. UE has started reducing CO2 emissions will keeping a very reasonable and increasing level of life.

USA is certainly a problem, but the elephants in the room are China and India.

Current emissions have the US at 2x India and current emissions are obviously irrelevant since it’s total cumulative emissions that matter, where the US runs away with it.
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