2016 Will Be the Hottest Year On Record, UN Says (theguardian.com)

2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century. From an article on The Guardian:The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December. The El Nino weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor.

Comments

Re:uhm...

[quantaman]

UN is a political organization. Or is that in question? It's not a scientific organization. Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question? By the very nature of politics, the organization must prioritize its political agenda over unbiased fact-finding.

Of course when it comes from a scientific group you'll just discount it because it doesn't represent all scientists, or whatever group of dissident scientists you found that deny that AGW is happening.

No matter how many scientists or organizations agree that AGW is happening you'll find a principled stance on which to discount their warnings.

How Many Paid Oil/Gas Industry Trolls Post Here?

[dryriver]

Slashdot used to be a site once where actual nerds/geeks/science majors used to comment on science and technology news. You could learn a lot from their opinions and insights, whether they agreed with your viewpoint or not. Now every time someone posts a Global Warming related story on Slashdot, a 4 story building worth of paid-per-post anti-AGW Trolls, each likely operating 20 - 50 sock puppet accounts, seem to post crap that Global Warming "isn't happening" or "cannot caused by human activity". The mere fact that this happens on a once "free" discussion site like Slashdot leads me to believe that a) Global Warming must be getting VERY bad indeed and b) the Energy Industry is very concerned about financial liability issues arising from this. By this I mean that when AGW starts to cause early deaths, natural disasters, major economic and environmental damage, contagious disease outbreaks and similar trouble in different parts of the world, the industry wants to be able to pretend that "nobody is liable for this because AGW simply does not and cannot exist". For this you obviously need a few hundred million dollars worth of Internet Trolls who flood sites like Slashdot with "IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US..." Sad. Very, very sad.

Deniers

[JustNiz]

I was born and raised in the UK before moving to the US about 15 years ago.
Back then it was considered self-evident by pretty much every person in the EU that global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made), and also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly, which probably meant significant but necessary lifestyle compromises. Anybody that denied global warming was frankly considered a retard.
After doing significant ongoing research on the Internet I still believe that global warming is very real and anthropomorphic, and even though we don;t have absolute proof, since 99.9% of the scientific community and all indicators point that way, (and for those that don't, all have connections/funding to big oil), it just makes basic common sense to take global warming seriously and do all we can before its too late to do anything.
Fast forward to today. I now live in the US.
I'm honestly amazed by the number of Americans (including some of my best friends and apparently also including our next president) that apparently sincerely believe that global warming is not even happening and is all just made up by the scientists, or worse, just some commie plot.
With Trumps recent announcement of cutting the EPA and appointing Myron Ebell (famous climate change denier) to head the EPA transition team, I've got to ask:
Am I the fool for unduly worrying about our only means of survival, or is the majority of the rest of America the fool for being so willfully ignorant of all the scientific research and the associated danger of ultimate extinction of much if not all life on earth, for a few short-term dollars?

Re:Deniers

[MightyMartian]

There would be climatologists whether AGW was happening or not. And who has more to lose at this point, a few thousand researchers, or large international corporations? You have literally concocted the dumbest conspiracy theory in history, and for what, because you're too much a coward or too selfish?

Grow the fuck up, moron. The Universe doesn't care about your stock fucking portfolio or how much it costs to gas up your fucking car. CO2's properties have been known for over a century, and concocting conspiracy theories to make yourself feel better is irrelevant to the laws of fucking physics.

Jesus Christ, grow the fuck up.

Re:Deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were born and raised in the UK, you'll doubtless be familiar with the Four Stage Strategy:

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

The anti-AGW brigade is mostly, currently, on stage 3. They've made a small refinement to the basic model, however, and the argument you'll see most often parroted around here is "the solution the Enemy have come up with is wrong/ineffective because Al Gore sucks donkey balls". I paraphrase only slightly.