[HN Gopher] Tracking Crucial Metrics of Earth's Global Warming
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Tracking Crucial Metrics of Earth's Global Warming
Author : a2x
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-11-21 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.climatechangetracker.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.climatechangetracker.org)
| bowmessage wrote:
| I really like this website. Well presented and informative.
|
| I have been daydreaming of creating something similar that
| enabled testing weather hypotheses that are often thrown around
| by the media.
|
| E.g., "Heavy Vancouver Rainfall Due to Climate Change". It would
| be great to get rainfall information for that area graphed over
| the last X years.
|
| Does anyone have pointers to useful datasets or APIs that could
| aid in creating such a tool or website?
| neffy wrote:
| Here is one (artic temperatures):
|
| http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
|
| It's also quite useful in terms of seeing one aspect of the
| anomaly, in terms of temperature shift (compare 1958 with
| anything in the last 5 years)
| Nexus1 wrote:
| Great visualization of climate change metrics. Like the idea and
| the implementation.
| [deleted]
| seventytwo wrote:
| Add a chart that shows the global subsidies the fossil fuel
| industry gets over time.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| +6 degrees above the 30 year average in the north pole this year
|
| I knew it was up but that is a LOT
| esarbe wrote:
| Maybe visualizations like these will finally get the message
| through to the last bastions of ignorance.
|
| Or maybe not. If at this point you are still pretend to be
| skeptical about the data, it's probably more to do with willful
| blindness rather than intellectual rigor and no amount of data
| will ever convince you otherwise.
|
| Truth is that lots and lots of people benefit from that continued
| 'doubt' delaying further actions. Even though in the end we'll
| all suffer the devastating consequences - the political
| upheavals, the social unrest, the ecological destruction - there
| are still people that are so obtuse as to think that this will
| not tough them.
|
| Party 'til the house burns down, I guess.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| I have a feeling that the climate change charts induce a
| similar knee jerk reaction as IQ scores or vaccines. Most
| people have an ideology they subscribe to and will argue using
| facts and reason in order to support it. I have yet to witness
| a religious person be reasoned into atheism. I suspect the
| applies for the above mentioned categories, whatever side of
| the fence the person happens to be on.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Charts and visualisations are a great way to trick people.
| Not only is the source data obscured (and so readily cherry
| picked) but it opens up all sorts of tricks around visual
| perception.
|
| I also suspect most people yet to be convinced will
| immediately think back to Al Gore's infamous hockey stick
| chart when presented with visual simplifications of deeply
| complex climate data.
|
| At the heart of the matter, looking at such a chart isn't
| meant to inform you, it is meant to elicit an emotional
| response, and they have been trained to respond with
| skepticism.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| They have been trained to deny evidence that leads to
| conclusions they don't like.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Surely you mean the infamous _lies_ about the Mann 1999
| "hockey stick"? The Mann 1999 results are correct (see for
| instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC55051
| 19/figure/... for confirmation) and the graph doesn't do
| anything more nefarious than the plot summaries you'll see
| in imdb: it summarises a complicated thing.
| tdrdt wrote:
| Does anyone know why the change at the north pole is bigger than
| the south pole? Is this because the north pole is floating on
| water?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I think the biggest factor differentiating the climate on the
| halves of the globe is that there's more landmass on the upper*
| bit of the Earth, so my first guess would be that the
| difference is tied to this overall difference.
|
| *Comment by the North Hemisphere Gang
| Muromec wrote:
| Because co2 is not evenly distributed with most polluters
| concentrated in northern hemisphere and prevailing wind
| direction to be from equator to poles.
| wcoenen wrote:
| Any air moving towards the poles must necessarily be balanced
| by air moving away from the poles. This manifests as "Hadley
| cells" and other similar wind patterns.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Ea.
| ..
| [deleted]
| ximeng wrote:
| https://www.news18.com/amp/news/buzz/global-warning-north-po...
|
| This suggests that when the ice melts the darker water absorbs
| more energy from the light, and then warmer water freezes less
| resulting in a permanently warmer arctic.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I really dislike the use of the word "anomaly" in climate change
| circles. It may be technically correct, but it feels like
| propaganda. All it is is the difference to the average of an
| arbitrarily chosen time frame.
|
| It would actually be strange if temperatures where exactly like
| the average all the time, so calling it an anomaly if they are
| different from the average really seems misleading. Again, it may
| be the technically correct term, but it has a different meaning
| in "normal language" imo.
|
| The trend of the temperature may be "anomal", but that is not
| what they call an "anomaly".
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Anomaly relative to the climate without the extra human
| forcings, like how you could call the dead forest from acid
| rains an "anomaly". A simple average of a reference period is
| used as reference for simplicity but is by the fact that
| climate change is happening much faster than typical climate
| variations so it's fine for now: the difference is (still)
| essentially entirely out fault.
| tdrdt wrote:
| I think the point parent is making is that it is possible to
| cherrypick a reference period.
|
| You can say that the melting of glaciers is an anomaly but
| when an ancient forest appears below the melted glacier how
| can we agree on what an anomaly is?
|
| I don't want to deny global warming but I agree with the
| parent that it's difficult to state what an anomaly is.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| It is true that you don't want anomalies to be anomalous
| only with respect to some arbitrarily chosen (or sought)
| feature of the reference periods. The solution to this is
| to do sensitivity analysis of the anomaly to these
| 'arbitrary' features (length, starting/ending points). With
| most climate things, anomalies will persist. This is a
| standard thing to do.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| Propaganda? Calling it not an anomaly would be way less
| scientific. Is it just not fitting YOUR propaganda?
| 7952 wrote:
| Comparing to a baseline is useful because that is what our
| culture, technology and habits are adapted to. And the
| conditions that ecosystems can be based on. An increase in
| temperature away from that has consequences that need to be
| understood.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| To add to your post, where and how did they determine that 30
| years was the appropriate time scale to use?
|
| >The value we show is a 30 year rolling average of temperature
| change. We have chosen that long term trend because it fits the
| time scale of the climate and its changes.
| tonmoy wrote:
| There isn't enough temperature record around before that
| timeframe to estimate an accurate global average. You can
| still see the effects of temperate indirectly
| User23 wrote:
| Arguably, the quality record only began with the launch of
| satellites. How much can we really trust some weather
| station in the middle of Montana from 1880? And of course
| pre-satellite the data for the southern half of the globe
| is relatively sparse.
|
| When it comes to CO2 in particular, there are things like
| ice cores and plant fossil stomata that gives us some
| understanding over geological timeframes, but that's very
| different from a thirty year average.
| polotics wrote:
| How and why does it feel like propaganda? What is being
| compared is averages with and without CO2 induced forcing.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| No they picked a certain time frame and compare to the
| average temperature of that time frame. Nothing more, nothing
| less. I think the reference time frame is some 20 year period
| in the end of 20th century, but not sure if I remember it
| correctly.
| davidw wrote:
| My understanding is that it's changing at a faster rate than
| previous non human caused shifts. That's the anomaly.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| They use the term anomaly strictly in a technical sense:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly
|
| It means the difference to the average of a certain time
| frame. Whether it was caused by human activity is a different
| question. That is why I call it misleading. They certainly
| want to imply humans caused it, but at the point where they
| show the chart they haven't really shown it. That requires
| considering other aspects.
| landemva wrote:
| The fastest shifts occurred after large volcanic activity.
| And cold summers for a few years then led to crop failures.
|
| Am really interested in more analysis of correlation of
| reduced sunspot activity and then increased volcanic
| activity. It appears to be a fascinating correlation.
|
| Update - The mammoths with undigested grass in their
| stomachs, which froze to death while eating, may indicate
| magnetic pole flip creates faster climate change than
| volcanic activity.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Am really interested in more analysis of correlation of
| reduced sunspot activity and then increased volcanic
| activity. It appears to be a fascinating correlation.
|
| Sad to see the sunspot conspiracies still alive and
| kicking. Here, have some 14 year old news about how they
| don't matter enough to bother with in discussions about
| today's climate:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05072
| Angostura wrote:
| Temperatures _are_ anomalous, given what we know about the
| state of all the non anthropogenic factors acting upon climate
| at the moment. Nothing really contentious or 'propaganda'
| there.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| It is a technical term meaning difference to the average of a
| certain period of time. In itself such a difference to the
| average does not imply anything strange is going on. I'm not
| saying there isn't an anomaly in the sense of common speech,
| it just seems weird to me to use it in charts that are
| supposed to show the existence of an anomaly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_anomaly
| esarbe wrote:
| What are "climate change circles" supposed to be?
|
| You mean the people not willfully blind of the facts? Sure,
| must be propaganda.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I mean people trying to show or prove the effects of climate
| change. Whether you believe in it or not, there supposedly
| are specialists working in that area. At least that is
| usually the argument, that there are experts who worked it
| all out whom we should listen to. So I think those can be
| called "climate change circles".
| mistermann wrote:
| The non-purely-materialistic dimension of reality (the part
| that prevents humanity from actually doing anything
| substantial about climate change) unfolds according to
| people's perceptions of reality, not reality itself (which we
| do not see, even though it seems to be _the exact opposite of
| that_ ). It may be enjoyable to look down one's nose at the
| unintelligent, but realize that intelligence is a spectrum
| and the sense one has that they are at the apex of that
| spectrum is illusory.
|
| Science is a very useful tool, but it is not the only tool we
| need to deal with this problem, and it is certainly not the
| best tool for dealing with the most important unsolved (and
| seemingly _not even realized_ ) aspect of it: the human mind.
|
| I think we need to start thinking very differently about this
| problem - one approach (applied to a different domain) is
| described in this[1] post, I think it would provide more
| value than more and more scientific statistics, which seem to
| be accomplishing very little.
|
| [1] Sociotechnical Lenses into Software Systems
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282715
| beowulfey wrote:
| It is a comparison of two averages, not of a single temperature
| to an average. A changing average suggests a change in the
| underlying factors at play, because while a single observation
| may not ever match the average as you say, a system in
| equilibrium should not see the average changing. This is why it
| is called anomalous: the mean is changing continuously.
|
| It's a crude metric but in the framework of the analysis (pre-
| industrial vs post-industrial) it is an appropriate comparison.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I would consider that "anomaly" would refer to something
| unusual or unexpected, an outlier, or a weird unexplained
| occurrence contrary to our expectations, or a one-off
| deviation followed by a return to the norm.
|
| On the other hand, a continuously changing mean or a
| systematic pattern IMHO is not an "anomaly"; something can't
| be unusual for long - if something has become or is clearly
| going to become usual, then it's a "new normal", it's a
| "trend" or something like that, but not an anomaly anymore;
| if we're seeing what we expected to see, that can't be called
| an "anomaly" because that's the expected result.
|
| With respect to climate change we see that the underlying
| factors have changed, we mostly know why, we observe the
| consequences now, see their trends and can predict how the
| mean is going to change - so all the factors are contrary to
| the definition of "anomaly".
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I don't think that explanation is correct. The average
| temperature of a year is just a specific way to take a
| measurement. Comparing it to an average of averages over
| several years is then the same as comparing a measurement to
| an average of measurements.
|
| That the climate should never see averages changing seems
| obviously false. There clearly are cycles that last longer
| than a year, for example, as several ice ages came and went
| before industrialization. El Nino take phases last between
| two and seven years.
| marstall wrote:
| I'm presuming that the foundation here is solid and well-
| intentioned, but there are many different data sources that could
| be powering these visualizations so a clearer citation would be
| helpful (beyond what is provided, just the orgs, Berkeley
| earth+nasa).
| mistermann wrote:
| I'd like to see some innovation in reporting on the human side
| of the puzzle....how people perceive the problem of global
| warming, how they feel about it, what is behind how they feel
| about it, etc.
|
| Maybe it's just me, but preaching to the choir with ever more
| impressive science is not moving the ball forward very fast,
| and if you trust the science, moving the ball forward quickly
| is an ability that is crucially important.
| ogwh wrote:
| Website briefly flashes then disappears on mobile apparently.
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