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US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

theguardian.com

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Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#61

Post by polotics »

canal-crab wrote: post #47
Barrin92 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you gotta explain the logic to me that should make anyone less concerned about climate crises just because people also used to die of them 200 years ago. We're not reinventing any phenomena because we're emitting CO2, we're just putting the foot on the gas pedal, both literally and metaphorically. Same argument occasionally crops up during the pandemic. Yes, we've had them before, but that doesn't make this one any l…

Well, if the current events tell us we're in a crisis, were we also in a crisis a century ago? Two centuries ago? Three centuries ago? We can look in history books and see the same kinds of events happening back then. If they indicate a crisis now, don't they also indicate the crisis was happening back then?

How is it that green user names always are climate-drift negationists? Should they not be red instead?

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#62

Post by fulafel »

fy20 wrote: post #46

Where did the 'heat dome' term come from? Is it actually a new kind of weather phenomenon (the Wikipedia page is from this year) or just a new term the media has been (ab)using instead of calling it a heat wave as they would before?

There are mentions in papers from the 1980s, eg https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02507142

(edit: changed link, fixed from earlier where the context was minerals instead of climate and dates were in 70s)

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#63

Post by eyelovewe »

canal-crab wrote: post #47
Barrin92 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you gotta explain the logic to me that should make anyone less concerned about climate crises just because people also used to die of them 200 years ago. We're not reinventing any phenomena because we're emitting CO2, we're just putting the foot on the gas pedal, both literally and metaphorically. Same argument occasionally crops up during the pandemic. Yes, we've had them before, but that doesn't make this one any l…

Well, if the current events tell us we're in a crisis, were we also in a crisis a century ago? Two centuries ago? Three centuries ago? We can look in history books and see the same kinds of events happening back then. If they indicate a crisis now, don't they also indicate the crisis was happening back then?

There is no historical precedent for the CO2 levels since well before mammalian life surged to the fore. Burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of 150 years turns out to have consequences. The carbon cycle has been known about for roughly the same time period that we’ve been in accelerated burning mode. Oil companies also extensively researched the likely impact of continued fossil fueled economic activity and the results confirmed what we know today. The oil companies decided to bury these findings and instead paid for the dissemination of rhetoric such as you are emitting here. It’s based on deceptive data and a tactic to always deny the link between human burning of fossil fuels and drastic climate change such as humans have never seen before.

Here, I see your untrue statement and raise you an info graphic https://xkcd.com/1732/

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#64

Post by eyelovewe »

admissionsguy wrote: post #60
wiz21c wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that time, if things don't improve by a huge margin (like in : never before in human history; except maybe at WW2 levels), hundreds of millions of people will have moved away from their birthplace (taking the place of other who may or may not be happy with it, which may lead to "tension" between populations; see what happens today when a few refugees (yes, a few) reach the borders of Europe...) My understanding is…

Then I would kindly suggest governments stop encouraging people to continue reproducing at an unsustainable rate. Reversing overpopulation would make both mitigation and adaptation much more feasible.

Not requiring ones next generation to be precisely from local genetic stock is a good start. Being able to absorb refugees into ones culture vs crying on and on about low domestic birth rates, that’s a pet peeve of mine

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#65

Post by tpmx »

fulafel wrote: post #62
fy20 wrote: post #46

Where did the 'heat dome' term come from? Is it actually a new kind of weather phenomenon (the Wikipedia page is from this year) or just a new term the media has been (ab)using instead of calling it a heat wave as they would before?

There are mentions in papers from the 1980s, eg https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02507142 (edit: changed link, fixed from earlier where the context was minerals instead of climate and dates were in 70s)

Those talk about tank domes, salt domes, limiting dome height tests, etc etc.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#66

Post by Lutger »

mrpopo wrote: post #51

Reminder: what is happening now is the result of past emissions and will keep happening year after year no matter what. After humanity finally stops emitting greenhouse gases, it will not get better, it will just stop getting worse. The earlier we act the less bad the consequences.

Whether that is true depends on your sense of scale. After we move to zero emissions, it will take only a couple of decades before CO2 will start to drop again, as the biosphere starts absorbing the greenhouse gases.

There's some latency in temperature, much more in sealevel rise, but generally it isn't as bad as frequently depicted. I only learned this recently, I used to think we are unavoidably messed up for centuries, but that's really not the case. For my son I believe there's a scenario it will get better, not worse, in his lifetime. Though it's not a scenario I think is likely to happen.

I'm not optimistic about our societies willingness and ability to do so, but all action does matter and we definitely have the possibility. Ironically, drastic and massive climate action is also the cheapest thing to do.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#67

Post by gadders »

antonvs wrote: post #13
nevi-me wrote: post #5

We have experienced the coldest winter since 2011 in the Southern Hemisphere (at least South Africa) this year. The summer was also warmer than average. I wonder what less conservative global warming forecasts would look like, and whether the winter this year will be average in US and CA.

"Global warming" involves extremes of temperature on both ends of the scale, and "coldest winters" are not inconsistent with that. Think about a pot of hot water vs. one that's boiling. The surface of the water in the boiling pot is not smooth, it has peaks and troughs. The level of some of those troughs will be lower than the level of the water in a less energetic pot. The situation with global warming is similar, a…

How is this falsifiable? i.e. how would you prove that a weather extreme is not due to global warming? (general question, not specifically aimed at you).

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#68

Post by wesleywt »

lmm wrote: post #25
mwill wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the second half of the article is almost entirely quotes from "Michael Wehner, a a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory" Including the section “You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straig…

Without statistics there is no meat; the Guardian is good at narrative but not so good at objectively reporting on trends. I see only one concrete point in the article; that the heat in certain areas broke records by 5.5 degrees is a relevant factual datum, but to understand what it actually means you have to ask things like: how many standard deviations is that? How long have these records been kept in this many pla…

You get these in the scientific articles, you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these. It should only include the interpretation of experts of these statistics. Not the statistics itself. That data is up to you to look into yourself...if you are an expert in the field.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#69

Post by bryanrasmussen »

canal-crab wrote: post #47
Barrin92 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you gotta explain the logic to me that should make anyone less concerned about climate crises just because people also used to die of them 200 years ago. We're not reinventing any phenomena because we're emitting CO2, we're just putting the foot on the gas pedal, both literally and metaphorically. Same argument occasionally crops up during the pandemic. Yes, we've had them before, but that doesn't make this one any l…

Well, if the current events tell us we're in a crisis, were we also in a crisis a century ago? Two centuries ago? Three centuries ago? We can look in history books and see the same kinds of events happening back then. If they indicate a crisis now, don't they also indicate the crisis was happening back then?

if a kid threw a small rock at you some years ago and then slowly over the years more kids throw rocks at you, only a couple at a time, and then one day you walk out the door and there are hundreds of kids throwing rocks at you and there is a newspaper on your front porch with headline "Kids throwing rocks projected to increase 50% by tomorrow"; do you think "I guess I've had a kid throw a rock at me before, this is no different"?

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#70

Post by trainsplanes »

laydn wrote: post #20

For the first time in my life, I experienced a massive heat wave, torrential rainfall and flooding, a forest fire and hail, all within a single month. I am NOT looking forward to what's coming in a few years.

I'm afraid that in a decade, humans will just accept this as our reality and forget that it wasn't always like this. In 20 years, we'll have a generation of adults who'll think our stories of years of generally calm weather sound like pure fantasy.
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