September was the most anomalously hot month ever • Hacker News Board

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#111

Post by ziddoap » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

frob wrote: post #98

ziddoap wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "global warming" being seen as interchangeable with "climate change" has really been troublesome, and I think has led a lot of people to think surface warming is the entirety of what "climate change" is.

The term "climate change" was literally created by conservative activist and Bush pollster Frank Luntz to confuse people about global warming and muddy the waters. From his Wikipedia article: > Although Luntz later tried to distance himself from the Bush administration policy, it was his idea that administration communications reframe global warming as climate change since "climate change" was thought to sound less s…

The scientific use of both terms has been around since the 80s, and is pretty well-settled, with climate change evolving from "inadvertent climate modification" which was the go-to term in the 70s.

The memo you are referring to happened well over 20 years later. The term was not created by Frank Luntz.

>In the 1980s, the terms global warming and climate change became more common. Though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably,[24] scientifically, global warming refers only to increased surface warming, while climate change describes the totality of changes to Earth's climate system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology

https://web.archive.org/web/20100809221926/http://www.nasa.g...

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#112

Post by moffkalast » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #90

ramraj07 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe it’s possible to avoid anything anymore, Merely the scale will be determined at best. It’s not just going to be 800 million refugees. I suspect it’s going to be actual deaths in that range. And with no real intervention as is the case now, likely in the billions. Given how the whole world handled the pandemic I have no confidence it’ll unfurl any other way. A sobering thought that keeps me awake for a…

I think some time in the next decade there will be a “perfect storm” heat wave combined with a power failure, and millions will die in days. This will jerk the Overton window and popular sentiment in an unpredictable direction, and no one knows what the world will look like on the other side of that.

Yeah it might be wise to invest into some backup solar and an inverter to run off-grid in a pickle, after all max heat will also typically mean max solar output at the same time.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#113

Post by pjdesno » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

naiv wrote: post #33

chakintosh wrote: post #29

Just like August, July, June, May, April ...

[flagged]

Um, no.

Looking at NASA's climate graph: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/pag... the most rapid upswing rose almost 10C in 1850 or so years, or about 0.5C per century. (the total change was a bit more, maybe 12-13C)

In addition, you've evidently failed to notice that we're currently *not* in an ice age, which means that mean temperatures are near the peak estimated values over the last 800,000 years. Living in the Boston area, I've definitely noticed that my house isn't covered with a thousand feet of ice that's scraping it south towards Long Island...

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#114

Post by gjulianm » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

flagrant_taco wrote: post #91

nologic01 wrote: post #50

> Two main factors are at play in driving temperatures to such extremes: their inexorable increase from burning fossil fuels and an El Niño event that is shaping up to be a strong one. It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it…

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

> There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared.

That's the issue, a lot of people just don't care or refuse to believe it. Questions like the one in the parent comment are starting to seriously annoy me because they're demanding an unachievable level of evidence before doing anything, a level that's never asked for in any other kind of intervention (for example, interest rate hikes).

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#115

Post by itsyaboi » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

skepticATX wrote: post #15

yakattak wrote: post #4

Can someone help me understand why when there’s a record cold month, there’s a convo like this > non-believer: “see global warming doesn’t exist” > believer: “you can’t measure this on a monthly scale, it’s too slow of a process” But often when the case is reversed, it’s used as evidence of global warming? I know global warming is real and I am a firm believer in it but this duality seems to cause a lot of issues whe…

Have there actually be any global record cold months in the 21st century? Sure, we have months that are cooler than our (elevated) average, but I don't think we're breaking any records. On the other hand, "hottest month ever" is not uncommon to hear. That plus the fact that we are trending in the wrong direction might be cause for alarm.

Didn't Texas freeze over a couple years ago?

Edit: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/great-texas-freeze-february-2...

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#116

Post by hughw » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #108

flagrant_taco wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that…

You're probably right but I fear the end of that road is a completely "re-terraformed" Earth we create to adapt to support our industrial society.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#117

Post by continuitylimit » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

continuitylimit wrote: post #79

Last week of September in NYC was the coldest I remember this time of year. Rainy, windy and cold.

[This is just data - I’m sure it was “abnormally hot” in many places, but NYC was not one of those places. Believe it or not, 2000 and 1960 were just randomly picked out of a hat and the only other dates I tried fwiw]

September 1960: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...

September 2000: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...

September 2023: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...

2000 was a “hot” September.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#118

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #60

zemvpferreira wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do need to urgently discuss the role of the first world towards massive third world calamities. I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geogr…

I'm sure the wealthy coastal elite, rolling in the cash mountains of globalization arbitrage and extolling the virtues of humanitarianism, will be bending over backwards to build refugee camps and in turn permanent housing in their towns to accommodate mass migrations of third world climate refugees.

The same people that as of today [1] waived 26 Federal laws so they can begin building a border wall after dismantling and selling for pennies on the dollar the previous one that was being built.

It’s funny how something considered racist is now considered necessary now that the migrants are being dumped in their front yards.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration...

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#119

Post by steve_adams_86 » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

naiv wrote: post #33

chakintosh wrote: post #29

Just like August, July, June, May, April ...

[flagged]

The last 100 years and our current trend doesn’t fit any cycle we have evidence for, spanning millions of years of proxy records.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#120

Post by flagrant_taco » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #108

flagrant_taco wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that…

What you're describing is the path to inevitable collapse. If people will never be able to give up convenience or growth then we really are doomed, tech advantages only slow down that runaway train.

I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat.

To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further.

We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.