"ever" is added for sensationalism and actually means "during the (relatively short) period of climate observations starting from 1991".
PS. September was quite warm, indeed.
September was the most anomalously hot month ever
261–270 of 439 posts
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#262So… Why is there a climate scientist working for a payments processor?
Large corporations who want to make decisions based on a sound understanding of the world around them will often employ skilled individuals who can give them contextualized information used to make business decisions.
In Stripe's case, they have a product called Climate that allows customers to redirect a portion of their revenue to fund carbon removal efforts.
If they did not have a climate scientist on staff to vet projects that would be a mistake.
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the refutations of this guy seem scientifically sound, they are tone deaf. He’s speaking to perceptions. There is a problem with how the issue is communicated in common parlance. How do we fix the communications?
It’s hard to keep up with the climate change denial propaganda noise machine without stooping to their level. In the end motivated reasoning means people will value cheap hydrocarbon energy over global benefits of less climate change. Just look at the French gilet jaunes protests.
a. X claims he didn't have enough money to live well.
and
b. The only way for X to reach his workplace is to consume a more and more expensive resource.
"Change job", " work more", "live somewhere else" are not good advices because X is often unqualified, works already a lot and cannot afford a place inside the town where he works.
What should X do ?
The necessity of consumption is a bigger problem than "we consume to much hydrocarbon energy". People don't value cheap hydrocarbon energy over the future of earth, but they value their own life, and no solution exists, for a lot of regions in france, to allow you to cease using your car.
In some places solutions are implemented in a weird manner, I personally had to take the bus at 5 am to go to " Lycée", where most of my courses began around 9-10am (if there were courses the morning) and then at 8pm to go back home (I was home at 9h30pm approximately, depending on the traffic). Lycée was great, now if I had to do this before and after a day of work, it would highly resemble what I call "a boring life". But still, while 3 hours or more in my life were dedicated to " transit" and a lot of time in the morning was dedicated to "wait", other people living in the city were just sleeping in the morning and probably reading their lessons or socializing.
Bus was taking a lot more time than cars to commute is these regions because there's a lot of villages to connect to the town. (My village was the last of the line). As of today, there is still only two bus that connects the village to the town, one in the morning at 5am, and one in the night, at 8pm.
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#264I was just remarking to a friend in Budapest today that it's already October, but all of the trees are still green like it's the middle of July. Very bizzare.
Noticed the same thing myself today. Not long until winter and it feels like a mild summers day.
Winter? Winter might be cancelled this year.
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#265This is just so unbelievably sad. How should one react to their powerlessness as an individual in the face of this looming catastrophe?
Realise what you can change and what you can't. Whether you as an individual go vegan, walk instead of drive, or skip holidays, nothing is going to change. Enjoy life to the fullest because the only thing that can turn this ship around is drastic action by those in power and it's not really in their interest.
Also, don't buy into hysteria. You're probably not going to die because of climate change.
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A billion people in India could die and US elections would still be determined by gas prices.
But what would India do? It might be something hard to ignore.
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food. Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less develop…
The economic model is going to change one way or another. A model designed around perpetual growth will always fail, and there are already plenty of cracks showing. A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.
That's the value of space colonization, or the hope and promise of space colonization -- Preservation on of the economy
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#268> 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…
If there is a potion of the population that is "sitting on the fence about climate change", it is highly unlikely that they "can be convinced by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening" Anybody capable of that, would either no longer be sitting on the fence, or are highly unlikely to be reading this article. Also, the basic premise of your comment assumes that the effects on the monthly temperature…
There are people who are "in principle" accepting climate change but skeptical about the urgency and magnitude of adaptation that is required. This includes critical segments of the business and political worlds who weigh any action against their vested interests. These people will never panic. But they may plot a "changing of stripes" strategy if the signals from experts and society are strong and persistent.
This is discussion is really about how the experts (and, subsequently, mass and social media) popularize the explanations of weather events and what effect this might have on various segments of the population.
> which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.
I didn't pressupose anything, I qualified my statement. In fact people posted various interesting recent pieces of research in the thread and I learned that there are both additional potential factors that may be currenty overlapping and that understanding of a potential climate change / El Nino link is still elusive.
But that is beside the point. Even if there was a known link it doesn't change my remark that better framing is required. You would simply condition on the dependence, show the growing El Nino "diversity" against the underlying trend and indicate how this may have created an outlier realization.
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#269Yet! September was the most anomalously hot month yet.
Jokes aside, and i know its only 1 small area, and the effect might not scale, but where I'm living the weather forecast is suggesting October is going to be worse, the next 2 weeks is expected to be 7 degrees celsius higher than average all day every day
Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever
#270Earlier 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…
> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target Believe it or not, only a handful of people genuinely care about "GDP growth targets" and they have very little influence on environmental policy. The reason why politicians oppose sweeping regulation to stop climate change is because they'd lose their jobs if they intentionally caused gas prices to…
I would argue most people care about GDP growth targets but they just don't understand them that way. GDP growth is what leads to improvements in real human quality of life. It is your ability to get healthcare, housing, food and all the other things that make life a lot less painful.
I would rather live in a society with a higher GDP than less (all things considered) and so would most people (as evidenced by population shifts across the world). If the GDP does not grow to at least match the population changes, the society would be poorer and have worse outcomes overall.