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Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

public.wmo.int

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Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't back it up because it was a televised congressional committee hearing and I don't remember the name of the scientist but he said that his data he had been studying and working with that was published in the 1940's was different from the data that is now published for that same time period. He made no accusations he just said his data showed no signs of global warming. So, I guess as a skeptic, yes this does m…

What are you skeptic of? There is so much misleading denialism of what is now ao blindingly obvious to any casual reasonable observer, that I propose you apply you skepticism with a bit a cui bono.

polotics says "...what is now ao(sic) blindingly obvious to any casual reasonable observer..."

Hmmm, "any casual reasonable observer" - that would be a scientist perhaps, and "casual reasonable observation" would be "science"?

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3071/the-r... > Scientists have been building estimates of Earth’s average global temperature for more than a century, using temperature records from weather stations. But before 1880, there just wasn’t enough data They always says "on record" or "ever measured" in these headlines. Which means it's since ~140 years, and we know that is very very likely that past tempe…

Does it even matter if it was warmer in the past? Right here, right now, we can prove that human efforts have changed the temperature of the planet. Right here, right now, we can see the effects of that change. Increased frequency of storms, increased intensity of storms, shifting of seasons, decline in animal populations, etc. Being a "skeptic" just because you can't prove that it's currently warmer than it was 200…

You'll see, everything will be fine, even better than fine. Maybe you'll even live long enough to finally understand what this is all about, maybe not, that's not important. We'll be fine.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#83

Seasons, global climate related cycles like El Niño, unpredictable weather and so on push temperatures up and down, eventually it will get colder next winter. But the complex system that is the planet have a lot of tipping points, that once reached things will go increasingly worse with no turning back. I'm not sure if we didn't reach that stage already, or if this kind of events will give us the extra push to cross…

This is the part of the problem it’s almost impossible to get people to accept and understand.

The wilful ignorance, even among some of my own relatives, is legitimately terrifying. I tried to explain the concept of a tipping point and got chastised for buying into fake news.

For a while I thought maybe a lot of people just think it’s exaggerated or something. Nope. They fully think the entire concept is a work of fiction, despite the overwhelming (and increasing) mountain of evidence.

It’s legitimately crazy out there.

Climate tipping points are poorly understood and are cumulative. We really don’t know if melting the glaciers is going to be enough by itself to raise the temperature enough to trigger the next domino to fall without further emissions which are also still increasing.

It’s not been over-dramatised. If anything, I believe the consensus view is too reserved in how it views the limits of impacts at 1.5 degrees.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change deniers tell each other we are coming out of The Little Ice Age that started in 1200AD. Which is technically correct. What they don’t tell each other is that “Little” is an understatement and we shot way past the prior “Medieval Warm Period” long ago and are only accelerating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#/media/File%3...

That chart covers a very short duration. Here's a more complete chart of Earth's temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... As you can see, we are indeed coming out of one of the coldest periods ever in Earth's history.

Looks to me more like we were in a very long, very cool period and are suddenly popping out of it and are only accelerating. That’s fine for the planet. But, sucks pretty hard for any life forms that evolved to fit the Earth in the last 10 million years according to that chart.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read what you wrote several times and I still don't understand what your point is. Can you please elaborate?

eschelon said that we are in an ice age and multiple people asked “how can you call this an ice age?” I either didn’t see the linked reference or it wasn’t there when I read eschelon’s comment. Either way, I’ve seen the Little Ice Age come up enough lately to be extremely irritating. So, I knee-jerked the rebuttal. Now I think eschelon was actually asking if we are overriding the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quate…

I'm not a climate change denier. I'm very interested in climate science, I'm just not informed as I'd like to be.

I edited my comment to include sources for things I knew off-hand. I left the core comment largely intact, just changing a few words to better flow with the sources.

I want more information and reading around the questions I asked.

From my understanding, it looks like we're about to enter a period that is actually slightly more sustainable for humans on average (increases in arable land, easier to access hydrocarbons - yikes) [1].

But from there, we may quickly slip into ranges that kill everything. Especially if the Clathrate gun hypothesis [2] or similar runaway mechanisms turn out correct.

And obviously even if slightly warmer temperatures are better for people on average, every temperature increment results in enormous and permanent erasure of species diversity. That's an incalculable loss that we cannot recover.

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ... "And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. It is positioned farther north than all of its South Asian neighbors, which collectively are home to the largest global population fending off displacement from rising seas, drought and an overheating climate. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow. Its crop production is expected to be boosted by warming temperatures over the coming decades even as farm yields in the United States, Europe and India are all forecast to decrease. And whether by accident or cunning strategy or, most likely, some combination of the two, the steps its leaders have steadily taken — planting flags in the Arctic and propping up domestic grain production among them — have increasingly positioned Russia to regain its superpower mantle in a warmer world." (There are lots of other geopolitical takes on climate change that cite similar outcomes for a host of other countries.)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#86
post #58

Apparently still not hot enough that anyone is power is doing any large changes

Elections are every roughly every half decade in most of the world, right? I think the leaders know that we won't panic about our climate changing over that time span. What do we call the climate change equivalent of an Overton window?

I posit that the Overton Window is increasingly less relevant in highly polarized political environments.

Taking climate change as an example, a large fraction of the population in some countries is growing more skeptical of aggressive climate change policy, not less. Thats not going to shift policy acceptability even if the public's opinion shifts the opposite direction on average.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#90
My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period.

Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.

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