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Hot or Not?

creon.substack.com

111–120 of 179 posts

Re: Hot or Not?

#111
post #47

The scientific consensus is more than clear, doing your own "research" isn't going to make a difference except to engage with the people that are already happy to ignore science. If anything you'd have to begin to wonder in what ways airports are going to be different from global averages and I can think of a whole pile of reasons why the two would diverge (such as the presence of a large chunk of asphalt or concrete…

It's comments like this that serve as a reminder of how we can't have valuable discussions about a topic of importance without it degenerating into name-calling and allegations of disloyalty to "science". Too many have become so fearful of climate change they are no long in the realm of a scientific discussion. They are worshipping a religion. The author of the article made a good faith effort to simply look at the d…

> The author of the article made a good faith effort to simply look at the data.

Given some of their commentary, I'm not sure it can be claimed they were making a good-faith effort. There is a clear agenda to their analysis.

Re: Hot or Not?

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps: "These plots of this dataset don't show extreme effect either way"

These plots, of these specific points of this dataset don't show extreme effect. These are just arbitrary cities. Not to mention that, most climate change stuff looks at the start of the industrial revolution, so a starting point of around 1920 is going to necessarily look a lot different.

Why would the start point make a big difference? Is the assertion that if it started at 1820, you’d see a stair step and then flat from 1920 on?

Either way, these graphs look flat from 1920 on. That’s the point of the article.

Re: Hot or Not?

#113

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to…

> public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival

Might be good to find some new words there. Last time I heard those it was after government leaders were lying to me about masks.

Re: Hot or Not?

#114
I went to primary school in the Netherlands in the 70's. From those 8 years (2 years 'kleuterschool' (preschool) and 6 years 'lagere school' (primary school), a few high points:

- we had 'tropenrooster' (tropical schedule) several times when the temperature went above 30°C, this entailed an early start to the school day so we could go home around noon. The main reason was that the heat in the class rooms was too much to bear.

- roads were closed several times because of the asphalt melting from the heat

- ...while at the same time I skated (as in ice skates) to school several times, once even over the roads when they were covered in a few cm of ice

We had some hot summers and some cold winters, this was in the same period when there were warnings of "a new ice age". That ice age did not materialise just yet [1], nor did those hot summers mark the beginning of a trend.

During my first years at university I lived in a little house on a farm somewhere in the countryside. The first winter I was snowed in for a week. The toilet froze, there was a snow ledge on the inside of the front door. The "Elfstedentocht" - a 200+ km ice skating marathon between 11 cities in Friesland - was held twice during my time at university after a hiatus of several decades. It has not been held since.

All of this is anecdata but the story it tells is clear: it was hot back then, it was cold back then. It was hot in between, it was cold in between. It can be hot now, it can be cold now. It would be possible to draw a regression line in an attempt to show some trend but whatever it would show would be misleading, the period is too short and the data points too few. Have a look at the temperature graph for the Holocene [2] to see a trend line over a somewhat longer period, in this case about 11.800 years. Even there it is necessary to even out the bumps over several hundreds of years to get at the real trend which was a stark rise from ~11.800 years ago culminating in a maximum around ~8500-4000 years ago followed by a slow decline. Looking closer the "Little Ice Age", the Viking age warm period and the Roman warm period can be recognised, all of which had a large impact on human activities and development. As to whether the "Little Ice Age" never saw hot summers or the Viking/Roman warm periods never saw cold winters we can only assume they did, just like the supposedly cooler 70's saw some hot summers while the supposedly warmer 90's and early 2000's saw some cold winters.

[1] ...or rather we are still in the same ice age as before, to be more specific in the Holocene interglacial period which is probably running on its last legs if previous interglacials are something to go by, just a few thousand years from now there will most likely be a new glaciation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene...

Re: Hot or Not?

#115
post #6

All I can say as a 47 year old who lived most of his life in Germany is that the summers when I was a teen, so 30 years ago were considered hot when they were over 25°C. This year in May we had 32°C. Deny or criticize all you want cherries blossoming on Christmas in Berlin is NOT normal. And neither is the absence of snow in winter and mild temperatures. Those graphs don't impress me at all, because I remember what i…

The sea level has "dropped" where I grew up because they upgraded the beach. Are you sure you're not seeing the effects of artificial changes, natural erosion, or earthquakes? Those can easily completely dominate any climate change induced sea level rise in one area. Or perhaps when you went to the sea as a kid or adult, it was in some way connected with fishing or other activities that people timed to match the tide…

This comment reminded me of when Tuvalu's foreign minister stood in the water while giving a speech, to give the impression that the land was lost due to rising sea levels caused by climate change, but then it turned out it was really just due to erosion.

Re: Hot or Not?

#117

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to…

This reminds me a lot of the historical attempts to suppress heliocentrism.

Re: Hot or Not?

#118
Summary: I spent a few days making graphs and now I am more qualified to opine on the existence of climate change than people who have been studying climate for decades using actual science and supercomputers.

Re: Hot or Not?

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its an interesting anecdotal point but that's about it I hate quoting Bezos about this, but it's catchy and thought provoking: when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.

That's extremely context specific. You can imagine something like in social sciences where people have quite finely tuned but subjective personal awareness of human behavior and some data makes a coarse but objective measurement of it. It's hard for the data to be as "accurate" as the personal experience, so it can easily be wrong. But "it was colder when I was a kid" vs temperature measurements is the other way arou…

I mean, we're looking at an example where the anecdotes and data are fairly in agreement. But the point is that when you encounter a metric that's at odds with recurrent anecdotes, you should strongly consider that you aren't measuring the right thing. You can get incredibly accurate measurements of a doorframe's height but if people keep telling you they're having trouble getting packages in, it might just be that they don't fit the width.

Re: Hot or Not?

#120
Temperature changes are only a small part of climate change.

The majority of the concern has to do with ocean temperatures, sea levels, melting of permafrost, etc. how these cause changes in climate patterns, chemical changes to the oceans and atmosphere (besides GHG, water vapor affecting the ozone layer and UV) among many other factors, including extreme weather patterns- all of which affect the ecological balance in ways that may be disastrous as fauna and flora are not able to adapt at a fast enough pace to survive. Each of these things causes a domino effect of simultaneous chain reactions that also directly impact human life.

Additionally these temperature readings don't factor the specific location of the thermometers, correlating variables specific to airports, the reality that climates of different regions are affected differently by climate change, among other considerations not explored.

This seems like an overly simplistic "I am skeptical of scientists and science", when in fact climate change is much more complex than "temperatures are higher everywhere"- just looking at thermometers in airports isn't going to bring clarity or disprove the science that has been repeatedly warning about the impact of releasing excess greenhouse gasses for over a century now.

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