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Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

abc.net.au

11–20 of 189 posts

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#11
post #4

An interesting phenomenon drowned in a clickbait article. I sometimes understand the lunatics of the "climate change is a hoax" movement.

ok - but the 400 page report does not get promoted, this broadcast TV piece does..

The media often does a sensationalist job of presenting climate change. It's always in existential terms, then social media runs with that, and you have public figures talking about how we're all doomed if we don't do something drastic in the next 5-10 years. Instead of it being a range from less severe to more severe with risk factors and tradeoffs increasing, along with possible mitigation strategies from more mundane to more risky.

It becomes a binary of we're doomed or we do something drastic right now (massive degrowth, abandon capatalism, quit fossil fuel cold turkey, etc) with little in between.

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#12
post #4

An interesting phenomenon drowned in a clickbait article. I sometimes understand the lunatics of the "climate change is a hoax" movement.

Explain how this is clickbait.

The climatologists aren't in actual disbelief, just in a metaphorical one. That makes it slightly click-baity.

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#13
post #7

Lots of crazy things in the weather this year. The obvious thing is to blame climate change. But these are pretty sudden and extremely unusual. I don’t think this is at all what is predicted. I wonder how much the Hunga Tonga eruption of last year affected the weather this year. I think it injected some crazy amount of water into the atmosphere.

> I don’t think this is at all what is predicted.

This is exactly what was predicted. Governments leaned on climate scientists to focus on the lower end of the impact scale in public, and leave the worst case scenario for those who care about the research themselves. But this has been a reported possible outcome for years now.

Unfortunately, not wanting to alarm people has caused many to ignore the problem at hand.

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#14

“This is between 10C and 20C above what is normal for this time of year in parts of Chile and Argentina” Excuse the language, but it would appear that we are in a bit of a jam.

Up the proverbial river of excrement without a paddle, if you'll excuse my French

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain how this is clickbait.

The climatologists aren't in actual disbelief, just in a metaphorical one. That makes it slightly click-baity.

They are metaphorically in disbelief, but in actuality they are not in disbelief? Yeah I guess I understand the climate deniers too.

EDIT: Be cause I wrote the above in anger

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for as long as I have lived. They have consistently used the most optimistic scenarios and we have constantly done worse than that. Climate Deniers want to deny because the reality is an inconvenience to their ways of life. The costs of climate denial are diffuse; they can't be directly traced back to me. The benefits are acute and wholly captured by me. Add on to this that contribution toward climate change is disproportionately done by wealthier people and you get the most powerful people, who benefit the most from climate denial, trying to get others to deny with them.

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#16
Part of this may have been due to the Hunga Tonga eruption which injected an tremendous amount of water vapor into the upper atmosphere

https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1685971656198545408

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/tonga-eruption-blasted-unpr...

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#18
post #7

Lots of crazy things in the weather this year. The obvious thing is to blame climate change. But these are pretty sudden and extremely unusual. I don’t think this is at all what is predicted. I wonder how much the Hunga Tonga eruption of last year affected the weather this year. I think it injected some crazy amount of water into the atmosphere.

Wasn’t that about 146 million tons of water? It’s a lot in one go, but the atmosphere has about 2.5% water vapour, which is a total of ~ 1.3e17 kg.

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#19
I came across this hypothesis a few years ago and thought it was an interesting possibility, but that there wasn't any data that really supported it. In light of the data of the last few months I honestly can't think of a hypothesis that better explains what is going on with ocean temperature, especially in regions that should be in winter right now.

https://theethicalskeptic.com/2020/02/16/the-climate-change-...

It's a really long article and has been updated continuously for 3 years as new data has been coming in, but I think it really explains how this warming is being driven from the crust and bottom of the ocean up, and not via atmospheric warming. It also has an interesting proposal for the linkage between this observed warming and the variance of Earth's rotation, as well as the long observed weakening of the magnetic field.

Re: Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

#20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The climatologists aren't in actual disbelief, just in a metaphorical one. That makes it slightly click-baity.

They are metaphorically in disbelief, but in actuality they are not in disbelief? Yeah I guess I understand the climate deniers too. EDIT: Be cause I wrote the above in anger Scientists have been sounding the alarm for as long as I have lived. They have consistently used the most optimistic scenarios and we have constantly done worse than that. Climate Deniers want to deny because the reality is an inconvenience to t…

For the non-english speakers: "disbelief" has two meanings:

1. actually not believing something

2. astonishment/amazement

Climatologists believe the temperature anomaly, and are astonished by it.

Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

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