the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.
A graph that should be front-page news
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Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#102Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised. Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground. "What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return…
War is one of the biggest emitter of co2 though.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#103That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...
What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)
But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.
The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?
Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?
Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.
What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#104In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed? What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the…
The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of
This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks wit…
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#106You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance
According to https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real , this is a 1 in 7000 years event (i.e. 3.5 sigmas).
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#107Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#108It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there are. Scientists compare the measurements from both methods in the time when there's data from both. For example ice cores formed last decade should match direct temperature measurements from last decade. It's the same way the oldest rings from living trees are matched against the newest rings from tree fossils, and radiocarbon dating is checked against all of that.
That does not look very reliable to me, because that implies certain things are only affected by ambient temperature. Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-c...