Global heat in ‘uncharted territory’: 2023 could be the hottest year on record

You missed the followup. People investigated BEST and discovered it was doing the same things with the same sorts of mistakes as other climatological temperature datasets. For example they classified the weather stations at Bangkok airport as "very rural". Like always with climatology the process they used to do all this is non-replicable, so people could see the mistakes but not diagnose how they happened or attempt to fix them. Plus, although Berkeley Earth claimed UHI was unimportant, basic checks like comparing the warming of cities vs more rural stations showed huge differences.

There's also the issue that BEST has diverged drastically from satellite observations. It's not possible for both sources to be true simultaneously as they claim to be measuring the same thing.

It's not hugely surprising that they claimed to investigate these concerns and then simply duplicated the bad methodologies that were being criticized in the first place. Berkeley Earth is run by a guy who has said, amongst other things,

"I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium."

In the same article where he said that he observed that anyone who took issue with the Mann hockey-stick history rewrites were attacked and people had engaged in mass resignations simply because papers disagreeing with it were published.

There's a fundamental philosophy of science issue here that can't be resolved with the "one more study" approach. Climatologists don't attempt to improve their source data quality. They don't build and operate weather station networks, they rely on others that were built for other purposes. Although the changes they claim to be monitoring are very small (like 0.1-0.2 C per decade) they don't set up the instruments they need to obtain such precise and accurate measurements. Instead they suck up data from literally any thermometer they can find and then apply algorithms that they claim correct the bias and corruption. This isn't scientifically valid. If scientists have doubts about their source data they're supposed to use error bars, but when did you ever see a temperature graph that had error bars? They never do because many of the stations they use report uncertainty intervals of anywhere from half a degree C to even 5 degrees C. These CIs are much wider than the size of the claimed trend and would thus destroy any ability to detect warming from the ground station network. So, they rely on this algorithmic approach, but that isn't convincing due to how frequently they decided their previous algorithms were wrong and rewrite the history of the climate.

Accounts without much posting history here get rate limited, as do accounts that we've penalized for posting too many low-quality comments or getting involved in flamewars. Unfortunately, your account is doing mostly the latter; in fact, flamebait on divisive topics is literally all it has posted so far.

That's not the intended use of the site, and we end up having to ban such accounts. (No, not because we disagree with your views—we basically don't care about that. We're just trying to have a specific kind of forum here.)

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. But please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

>that's just me disliking warmth

Yes it is and your anecdotes don't mean much. You are saying the winters are less severe. The growing season is longer and it is generally more habitable.

>people living through catastrophes which most likely would have been less severe if not for climate change.

Disentangle some emotion from the facts. People are dying less than ever before due to catastrophes. People that die from natural disaster today, largely have encroached on land that was always disaster prone and built massive infrastructure. The cost of natural disasters today is a direct result of populating and constructing in areas that are prone to tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fire and flooding. It is almost completely preventable.

>you spread climate change denial

False. This is a blatant lie as my comment states clearly, I believe the climate is changing. We are exiting an ice age.

The solutions promoted by people like yourself, are going to cause greater harm than good because you choose to believe the climate should not change! Yes, you who choose to make foolish argument and use phrases like "climate change denial". Yes, you are in denial that the climate is allowed to change.

'The weather should be just the way it was when my grandparents remember the good old days' -you

No, sorry it is you and your internal strife with change that is the problem. Petition the government to change the ways companies and militaries pollute the environment. Leave the rest of us alone with your carbon tax bullshit that we must pay for.

Hey, I don't know you at all or your position. I don't assume anything other than the comments you make. You do seem to assume what I believe.

>you and I both know that I was referring to anthropomorphic climate change, which you are actively denying

I'm not denying anything about climate, I'm denying the severity of outcomes you claim. There is a major difference.

You should look into some data about natural disasters.

They cost more now. That's about it. Don't take some news infomercial segment as truth. Go read the statistics.

If someone makes a claim that something is "more severe" because the damage costs more to repair, then that is technically a factual statement. It doesn't further the position that the event was actually more severe than weather in the past.

The slight changes in weather you've experienced will not make your life shorter. You experience some discomfort because you aren't acclimated to warmer temperatures.

I'm claiming that the predictions of doom due to man made climate change are a farce. They are designed to get at you, emotionally.

It has worked.

The return to an ice age, even briefly (such as the Little Ice Age) would be truly catastrophic with today's population.