Slashdot Mirror
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.
The numbers are a global average. Do you understand how averages work?
Raising taxes makes it get colder out.
It's 1, in the Trump Revolutionary Calendar. It's the 15th of Trumptember.
Luckily for all we Americans, President Bernie Sanders has committed to taking action on global warming, saving the coastal states from massive floods and storms, and ending the massive subsidies for inefficient fossil fuels like coal and oil, while transitioning our workforce to higher paying jobs in solar and wind installation and maintenance, jobs that are 1000 times more than any propping up of a dying fossil fuel pipeline would be.
We dodged one when that Trump guy lost. That was close.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
I stole this Sig
Paris Agreement requires the US Senate. It is a Treaty. Everything else is nothing but "pen and a phone", which can be undone with the same.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
A few years ago, about this time of year, I was told by a co-worker about how that year was forecast to be exceedingly warm. I pointed out that the year wasn't over and it is quite possible to have an unusually cold November and December to average it out. When January came around I found a news article on how the last year was merely average. When I presented this to that same hysterical co-worker merely two months later and he denied he had made any hysterical comments before.
Now we see people not even waiting until the year starts to make such predictions. Those that get all worked up over it now will be exceedingly forgetful if the predictions fail and have very very good memories if it does. Here's my tiny tiny little mention of this phenomenon. It will be interesting if someone remembers this post and revisits it a year later to see how well I did in my prediction.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The record-smashing heat led to searing heatwaves across the year: a new high of 42.7C was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in January; Mae Hong Son in Thailand saw 44.6C on 28 April; Phalodi in India reached 51.0C in May and Mitribah in Kuwait recorded 54.0C in July. Parts of Arctic Russia also saw extreme warming - 6C to 7C above average.
I've always found it fascinating that folks accuse China of generating the most greenhouse gasses and while yes by absolute number of people they probably do that's the worst interpretation of statistics ever. China has a LOT of people, if you believe in equality everyone should have the same chance at the standard of living as everyone else. The problem is that we're a very rich country, so per capita alone we generate per person more emissions than a typical Chinese citizen. We use more resources than a typical counterpart in China. (A lot of the stuff that China produces is sold to us.) and so on. It's like a billionaire asking why they can pay a tax of a 1/2 million dollars as pocket change while that would financially bankrupt the average citizen. As the leading country and the wealthiest we need to contribute a bigger share because it will technically hurt us per person less. If we don't how would we expect someone who might not be able to contribute without literally dying to give up a part of their share?
And it is a problem. Climate change is likely to hit poorer countries first, and when conditions are unsustainable, who's door do you think they'll come knocking on first? If you're the one with all the food and everyone else is starving to death, it doesn't matter if you're armed, you're in deep trouble if you don't share. And it's not like we can't share, we do actually have enough for everyone. It's just, it's hard to give up luxury.
Seriously. Did you read the article?
This article says that it's the hottest in 20 years.
Do you understand how patently *meaningless* that is?
We're in the middle of El Niño right now. Take that away and it's the hottest in 20 years. That's it. TWENTY.
Did you read the article? Apparently not:
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Wow. This is exactly why climate change is still "debated".
From the article - "The WMO’s temperature analysis combines the three main records, from the Met Office, Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and stretches back to 1880."
So, it was the hottest since 1880. This is in line with other sources that have been reporting similar things such as a continuous streak of record-breaking months for over a year now - as in they are now breaking the records set last year.
Elsewhere in the article, it did note that the el nino contributed to the early months of the year but have now dissipated and yet the heat continues.
Also, El Ninos are not a new phenomenon. They have been going on throughout the 136 years since 1880. They have always resulted in peaks, but those peaks are now always higher than before as are the troughs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-r...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I personally don't really understand
You could have just stopped typing there.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It doesn't need the US Senate. But it doesn't matter. Even if the old senate approved it the new one could repeal it. With both houses to the republicans and Trump as a president, even if it was impossible for the US to repeal the Paris agreement, the US would still fail to meet its target. And by that I mean will not even try to reach the target.
So yeah, the agreement is dead with Trump.
Oh God, just shut up about paid trolls already. No one is getting paid to post to SLASHDOT. Barely anyone reads slashdot. Certainly not people who make policy.
Just move on from Slashdot.
I gave up on fighting against the astroturfers here a few years back... wasn't worth the effort and stress anymore. I can still get good discussion about topics that matter to me at reddit -- just need to stay away from some of the subreddits there.
Every once in a while I come check on Slashdot, and remember anew why I left. The place went to shit once the sockpuppet accounts got critical mass on mod points.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Climate change zealots are retards, but "warmer than any year prior to the last two decades" doesn't mean "warmer than any year in the past two decades" like you said it does.
UN is a political organization.
The UN is the collective will of the world's nations.
Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question?
Most political organizations throughout history have felt it necessary to foster scientific discovery and invention, and to create self-regulating bodies to further the same.
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?
Putting all your attention on pollution and none on man-made climate change is like worrying about too much salt in your diet while someone is lighting your hair on fire.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And once again, for the deniers and their followers, weather != climate.,
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The ultimate irony is that even Saudi Arabia understands that the age of fossil fuels comes to and end, and prepares accordingly But not the US extremist right wing.
If even a backwards kleptocratic monarchy, rooted in a Middle Ages value system, beats you in terms of mental flexibility, you know that you are truly fucked.
AGW is beneficial for some people for a little while, but in the long run it's very damned bad. And you think scientists are so fucking stupid they don't track other climate elements in their models?
I can't tell whether you are being arrogant, or moronic, but this looks like a classic example of "Hi, I'm a random nobody on the Internet, and all those scientists never thought of this one..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Should we do more? that depends on which side of the political spectrum you fall onto.
No it doesn't. The global climate doesn't care what side of the aisle you're on.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Do you understand that CO2 in the atmosphere traps energy (heat) in the lower atmosphere? And why do you think plants have some infinite capacity to absorb it?
In fact the biggest overall absorber of CO2 to date is the oceans, and what that is doing is altering the oceans' pH. So not only do you have heating, you have overall changes in ocean chemistry.
But I get it, you're just a mindless meme machine. You know nothing, and don't want to, so you just repeat memes you've read.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Don't forget the Russians, who have a vested interest in fossil fuel consumption and use paid trolls in psy-ops campaigns.
I've had interactions here with people who are very likely Russian trolls: very pro-Putin, even pro-Yankuyovych, the disgraced and deposed Ukranian president who embezzled 70 billion dollars from the treasury and built this at a cost of a hundred million dollars of laundered money.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree completely, it's sad to see that the puppets are either swamping the moderator controls or worse still, actually influencing real moderators and commentators to the point that anti-AGW appears to be the more popular stance even on slashdot.
Also, I don't believe industry is going to be able to deny AGW forever. I'd bet that industry heads are doing everything they can to kick the can down the road so that by the time the evidence is truly overwhelming they (as individuals) have collected their bonuses and are out of the picture in terms of personal prosecution so that it is their future replacements who are left standing when the music stops.
Or:
The professional anti-AGW trolls have campaigned successfully and there are otherwise intelligent people here who honestly believe the BS they have been fed elsewhere.
We saw the same thing here recently when /. was flooded with SJW posts that pushed every tiny LGBTQRSC issue as if it were a matter of fundamental human rights.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
global warming is actually beneficial for the first couple of degrees for humanity as a whole, according to the IPCC even (AR5)
That finding relies on a paper by Richard Tol called “The Economic Effects of Climate Change”. It found that any benefits are sunk after 1C warming. Since we've already warmed by 1C, any further warming will have detrimental effects. The impact is non-linear so things do go down hill quite fast after the next 1C. This was an aggregate of previous studies. Unfortunately "Gremlins intervened" and among other issues, minus signs were dropped from two of the impact studies. The corrected paper is quite a bit less optimistic.
The CO2 based models are still getting it hopelessly wrong.
CMIP3 from the IPCC AR4 is pretty much bang on.
Hacker News is decent as far as civil intelligent discourse goes, albeit not much "regular news" to be found there, and the comment layout is such that it makes following a discussion thread more difficult than it need be.
Soylent News is barely even worth your time. The same clique posting and being upvoted, with more than a few of said clique posting the most bogus crap - that gets upvoted... that you can't vote down (unless you're in the regular clique) - even though everyone has 5 mod points/day.
Back before Slashdot was sold the first time, it always seemed (to me) that Slashdot almost always had the right mix of Odd News|Tech News|World News
Today - Slashdot is far too focused on Global Warming and the minutiae of American Politics.
Do you really think going from 0.025% to 0.040% atmospheric CO2 is what's driving all temperature change?
A change from 0.025 to 0.04 would cause a direct impact of 2.5 Wm^-2 based on radiative transfer codes. Over the surface of the Earth that is equivalent to 1,600,000 Hiroshima bombs per day. Yes, this is certainly what is causing most (possibly more than all) of the warming over the last 60 years.
When you consider that warmer air holds more H2O (a far more potent heat trapping molecule) then you begin to see that the overall impact is even larger than the direct effect.
Why do you claim the models ignore clouds? Of course they're included. The problem is their effect is difficult to predict precisely, as they trap heat as well as increase albedo, so the net contribution can vary significantly. There are a great many studies about their contribution though, and confidence is very high that the increasing humidity is a positive feedback even with the resulting extra clouds factored in.
I'm glad you agree that the climate is steadily warming. Obviously all record temperatures will be on El Niño years, just as La Niña contributes to the cooler periods between them (which some have mistakenly labelled a "pause"). The important part is that this El Niño year has been hotter than all the previous El Niño years - just like 2015, 2014, 2010, 2005 and 1998. Such a string of broken records can only be a sustained warming trend.
And may I suggest less complaining about others examples, and more looking for citations to back up your own claims.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You think the UN controls every major scientific organisation on the planet (all of which endorse the findings of AGW)? You think they also control every climate research organisation around the globe too? Is the UN paying for NASA's research? Do they have authority over NOAA or CRU or CSIRO, or the peer review structure of the many climate research journals as well?
What leads you to believe any political organisation has such an astonishingly far-reaching influence over the entire global science community?
Come to that, what the heck is a "climate change based tax regime"? The science has shown we're changing our climate, and that remains independently true regardless of any proposed political solutions. If you don't like a given tax regime, vote for a different solution - but don't confuse the solutions with the problem, because no amount of political criticism will make that go away.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Worth noting that - when there were dinosaurs there was also nothing that remotely resembled us - and no such thing could have survived then.
The closest thing was our very, very distant ancestor - a small shrew-like thingy called "Morganocodontis", the first known mammal, it lived in tiny little holes in the ground hiding from a seriously scary world. That it made it past the extinction of the dinosaurs and ended up being the ancestor to the next dominant animal group was not a result of it being in any way superior - it was much more likely a result of dumb fucking luck.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *