Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533
"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-o...
It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.
I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".
You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.
Lol
The result of such a collapse is a complete upheaval of global climate patterns, destroying agricultural production on a civilization-ending scale.
Generally, the actual seriousness of these things is so out of proportions for normal people, they have great difficulty appreciating it properly. Taking their hunches from public postures and stances assumed by "authority" figures on the matter doesn't help.
Improving the design of that article will do absolutely nothing for its public reception.
Voicing reasonable reactions to the salient content actually helps furthering the discussion. Nitpicking does the opposite.
But they don't: they go to the comments here first and try to get the gist of reactions, in order to save themselves the time to actually read the piece.
You pretend, it wasn't trivial for people to scroll down to the graph. Such things aren't the issue at all.
The reactions you cause with your comment above are.
It’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
You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.
The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.
They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.
They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.
The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
I don’t know how China could possibly be considered worse except that they historically used coal, and are rapidly transitioning away.
China ostensibly cares, their five year plans drawn up by committees of Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical) and Scientists are on an arc to minimise reliance on fossil fuels and transition to renewables (wind, solar), and nuclear.
There are strategic reasons for this, of course.
> Isnt China far worse thsn the US?
"It's complicated"
* Historically the US is responsible for a greater mass of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere.
* Currently, China is adding more per annum (and India is in the bleeding edge mix also, as is Australia) in absolute terms, but still less(?) in per capita terms (having a much much larger population).
* China is still using coal (although they are on the cusp of peaking their use) - that gets thrown at them a lot, the caveats are
-- China shut down a lot of badly polluting inefficient coal power plants.
-- China opened up a lot of more up to date less polluting but still coal power plants.
-- China is using these to power all manner of stuff including the build out of the largest renewable power components production line in the world.
-- Coal is set to be phased out "soon" (and it seems to be slowly going that way, see peaked comment above).
* A lot of China's CO2 emissions are a direct result of their mineral processing, production, and assembly of the rest of the world's consumption.
( eg: The case can be argued that the fall in US per capita CO2 emissions is a result of US consumption now being met by manufacturing that has moved from the US to China)
There are literal books and stacks of research papers arguing about each point mentioned above - and that's just skimming the surface.
> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...
It feels like we are at the point where we should be talking a lot more about how live decent lives assuming that prevention and mitigation are unlikely.
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 … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."
That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.
That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.
In fact, any scheme like this will almost certainly be used to forcibly prevent development in already impoverished nations.
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...
I think this kind of writing is low quality.
But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.
That 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.
There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand
The graph has a key on the right hand side that clearly labels each colour of line, and the horizontal axis is scaled in months of each year. Scrolling down gets you notes and links to data sources.
In answer to another poster in this thread, the dataset only reaches back to 1983, I'm assuming because that is when they started monitoring these temperatures?
That's what El Niño is about: instead of declining after a peak in June, temperature plateaus and then rise again later in the year.
So the fact that the Pacific is much hotter than it was in 2015 is particularly scary, because it leads us to believe that it will also be this hotter than 2015 in November.
The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.
If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.
The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?
[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.
standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.
So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.
According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.
I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.
The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.
Here's the link that I read off the figure.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...
Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.
It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).
I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.
3.5 what, according to you?
You're reading this graph wrong: we're currently 3.63 standard deviation above the mean.
It's clearer on the original article[1] that this AI-generated blog is taking the graph from, the average temperature on the period at this time of the year is around 27.5°, the ocean is almost at 29.5°, just short of 2°C above average, and the standard deviation is 0.55°C.
[1]: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
Edit: note that the original article is 6 days old, and we've unfortunately crossed the 2°C threshold right after it was posted, so the situation of even direr than described: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
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...
This is fairly 1:1 linkage, and the Earth-heating effect of atmospheric CO2 was established in what, early 20th century or so?
But this seems to imply that global temperatures are only dependent on CO2 levels. That is a pretty flawed assumption...
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
There are no proxies that record monthly water temperature. Only second order effects that are at best weakly correlated with water temperature.
I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.
So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.
We migrate to renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and less-polluting baseload (nuclear).
We run desalination plants with the energy.
We quit running farms in deserts (California almond farmers).
We take energy load and run CO2 scrubbers with leftover energy.
We put quotas on how much CO2 you can emit. None of this goofy selling CO2 credits. If you make more CO2, you buy local scrubbers and run them.
The problems aren't climate healing rules. The problem is governments and incumbent companies, and the idea we can't change things rapidly. Or the fact that a company might lose money (or make, GASP, less profit)
> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
It's quite possible that this one could worse.
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 “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)
These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.
We could build out private solar farms though.
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.
- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...
As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.
In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.
No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.
For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".
This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)
Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"
This is also very short sighted.
But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.
(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )
The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...
I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.
Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.
I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.
This "signal" too will pass.
Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.
We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.
These are not projections. These are measurements.
These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.
Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.
"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.
Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?
Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!
It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Or to put it another way - which of those things is under our control? If one can do something more, then why not? Because billionaires? The climate doesn't blame anyone, it just exists; being to blame or not, doesn't matter when we're all in the same boat together.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether to build coal vs solar vs nuclear. Public policy does. No new oil/gas/coal plants, period, and start working to shut down the ones we have. Electricity generation is the source of about a third of all CO2 emissions.
Consumer demand doesn't determine whether we do carbon capture, or reforestation. Those require public policy.
I’m the first to recycle, so you’re preaching to the choir. What I’m saying if we could do better than self-flagellating. Or rather, there is nothing our self-flagellation will achieve in the end.
We keep focusing on things that are easy to measure like how much meat does one person eat, rather than the real numbers that are effectively immeasurable. Am I a worse person for eating beef, yet not using LLMs nor driving a car, than a vegan would might do all those things? Only for my conscience to know. In the end, it all amounts to hypocrisy, and squabbling among the plebes, while the rich keep polluting the planet.
How does enforcing emissions regulations result in less productive cars?
Cars move about 1.5 people per trip on average. A big pickup or SUV is not any more productive doing this task than a mid sized car.
Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.
The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.
However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...
Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.
> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.
Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.