Slashdot Mirror
India Records Its Hottest Day Ever As Temperature Hits 51C (123.8F) (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A city in northern India has shattered the national heat record, registering a searing 51C -- the highest since records began -- amid a nationwide heatwave. The new record was set in Phalodi, a city in the desert state of Rajasthan, and is the equivalent of 123.8F. It tops a previous record of 50.6C set in 1956."Yesterday (Thursday) was the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country... 51C in Phalodi," said BP Yadav, a director of India's meteorological department, on Friday.
If this trend continues, and it looks like it will, we will see "environmental refugees" increase. It will become more difficult to support life in certain parts of this planet, places that have had human civilization for quite a long time.
Sure, technology could alleviate many of the problems of living in a place with extreme heat, but that requires money and political will.
We have already seen the warnings about areas of the Middle East becoming uninhabitable later this century.
Where will these people go?
Who will support them?
How will governments deal with the crisis?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
You know it's a bad sign when the weather report for the day is "sous-vide".
The only cure is more cowbell...
Facts will never get in the way of ideology...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Personal change is of course an important place to start, butwhat we seem to have forgotten since the civil rights movements of the 60's and 70's is that systematic change at the level which is needed to address the causes and effects of climate change can only come about through an organized movement.
The Bill Moyers interview linked below discusses the difference between consumer focused change where we can "go green" by changing our own habits and citizen focused change which involves exercising our collective political power to effect change at the policy level.
http://billmoyers.com/2013/01/04/citizens-not-consumers-are-key-to-solving-climate-crisis/
Excerpt:
Each of us has two different roles we play in society, almost like two muscles: a consumer muscle and a citizen muscle. Our consumer muscle is spoken to and validated constantly. We’re called upon to use it every day and, as a result, we’re really good at it. It’s overdeveloped so much that being a consumer is our primary role in society so much that the words “consumer” and “person” are used interchangeably. At the same time, our citizen muscle has atrophied. So when we’re faced with problems as gigantic as disruption of the global climate, we stick with the familiar consumer muscle. We buy green products, switch our lightbulbs, reject bottled water, carry a reusable bag to the store. Now, don’t get me wrong – those are all very good things to do. But those are not about making transformative change like we need right now. To do this, we need to step out of our consumer role and into our citizen role and work together, through our democratic structures, to achieve big bold change. Perfecting our day to day eco-choices can be a step in the right direction, or it can be a distraction if we’re deluded into thinking that we’ve done our part since we shopped at Whole Foods. That’s why the subtitle of our last movie is “Why citizens, not shoppers, hold the key to a better world.” We need to start exercising our citizen muscles again.
OB xkcd.
Well we still have to figure out an effective strategy to deal with the sociopathic douchebags.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I think that's the point of calling you sociopathic. You shouldn't need a reason, because the empathy present in most humans would be enough.
I can't give you a personal reason, but I can give you one that applies to people as a collective: I live the full live I have now because of the sacrifices made by the generations that came before. People who put off their own happiness to improve the world in some way. It's a form of paying it forward, and I have a huge debt. I'll never be able compensate those countless generations who got the world to where it is now, but I can do my part to improve upon their work.
Last post!
Who is doing the weighting (adjusting) and how? What #define-s do they use in their code? Would they not stop "adjusting" before the results show the trend, which they sincerely believe must be there? See, what is "sold" to the public as objective recordings of scientific instruments are, in fact, results of "adjustments" by unknown programs using unspecified parameters...
How would you know? I'll bet you've never even tried looking for those "unknown programs" and "unspecified parameters".
You can start looking here. There are lots of links to NOAA's methods and reasons for adjusting temperatures and even a couple of graphs that compare adjusted to raw temperatures.
Or you can check out the BEST temperature record which is not funded by the government. This page describes how they process the data set and this page contains links to the code they use to process the data.
No one has destroyed any of the raw data. Some have deleted their copies of the data when they no longer need it.
But I seriously doubt you'll take the time to look into it for yourself and you will continue to gullibily believe the people who tell you those things. Unfortunately for you the real world will continue to respond to anthropogenic influences and if you live long enough you will find many of the things scientists are predicting will come to pass.