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2016 Was Second Hottest Year For US In More Than 120 Years of Record Keeping (climatecentral.org)
Last year was the second hottest year for the United States in more than 120 years of record keeping, according to the National Climatic Data Center, marking 20 above-average years in a row. While Georgia and Alaska recorded their hottest year, every state had a temperature ranking at least in the top seven. Climate Central reports: The announcement comes a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which released the U.S. data, and NASA are expected to announce that 2016 set the record for the hottest year globally. Both the global record and the U.S. near-record are largely attributable to greenhouse gas-driven warming of the planet. In addition to the pervasive warmth over the last year, the U.S. also had to deal with 15 weather and climate disasters that each caused more than $1 billion in damage. Together, they totaled more than $46 billion in losses and included several disastrous rain-driven flooding events. These events, along with continued drought, lay bare the challenge for the country to learn how to cope with and prepare for a changing climate, said Deke Arndt, the climate monitoring chief of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. The temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average for 2016, displacing 2015 and ranking only behind 2012, when searing heat waves hit the middle of the country. More notable than the back-to-back second place years, Arndt said, was that 2016 was the 20th consecutive warmer-than-normal year for the U.S. and that the five hottest years for the country have all happened since 1998. Those streaks mirror global trends, with 15 of the 16 hottest years on record occurring in the 21st century and no record cold year globally since 1911.
the earth is over 4 billion years old and has had icecaps for 20% of the time.
What's the maths on 4 billion vs 120 years?
Well, considering that humans have been on earth for only about the past 200,000 years, I wouldn't want to risk our chances with an earth that has no ice caps. It may be inevitable, but let's slow it down long enough for us to find some other place in the universe to live, m'kay?
And keep in mind that no ice caps means very high temperatures and flooding over most of the coastal areas. Not to mention the loss or migration of other species we depend on to survive.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You're right. 120 years is a blink of the eye in the context of life on earth. And that's what makes it such a big problem.
It's the current rate of change that scares scientists. Not the amount. The Earth can handle temperatures raising or dropping over millennia, but over mere decades, it's considered a catastrophe.
Trees, for example, can't migrate towards colder areas quickly enough, and then the ecosystems that depend on the trees die too.
And coastal ecosystems can't migrate as fast as the water is rising, and ocean life can't evolve into more acid resistant species quickly enough as the CO2 levels increase and oceans get acidified.
Your back of the napkin familiarity on the subject matter in an age of scientific hyper specialization makes any opinion you have on the matter totally moot.
How on earth do you think you could possibly add any line of thinking that hasn't already been thought of, proposed, hashed over, and sorted out by the people who've been studying these lines of science for decades?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Individual measurements being inaccurate does not change the validity of the trend. Yes, better calibration helps getting more accurate results with less uncertainties, but it's highly unlikely that all calibration errors were in the same direction and skewed over time into the opposite direction.
Climate change deniers get stuck on individual errors or error margins, and believe they invalidate the entire research. They need to talk to some statisticians. The trends are still perfectly valid and beyond any reasonable doubt and even unreasonable doubt.
Woohoo! According the the summary, the US is above average, just like all the children in Lake Wobegon!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's absurd to say that ALL of the weather disasters we encountered are attributable to global warming.
No one says that. Scientists say that climate change is a significant contributing factor.
Weather changes, sometimes to extremes. Over time there will be massive droughts and floods and hurricanes and all other things, just as there have been through the entire history of Earth. So stop with the nonsense of trying to tie all that to GW because it just makes you all look like a bunch of panicked idiots.
That's the same argumentation people used for cigarettes not causing cancer. Yes, cancer occurs even among non-smokers. And no, you cannot point to any individual cancer case and say with certainty that it was caused by smoking. But the statistics are overwhelmingly showing that smoking causes cancer, and even the most die-hard smokers or tobacco manufacturers have long since given up this kind of "reasoning". When pitched against statistics and hard math, it doesn't hold up.
One of us is an idiot, yes. I don't think you have the mental capacity to determine which of us it is.
You really don't know what you're talking about. Temperature and pressure (and magnetic field strength and orientation) have both been accurately measured for at least 150+years (it's longer, but for purposes of your post, 150 years works). Just because they didn't have the Internet doesn't mean they were clueless savages. Heck you can also get a gauge of global temperatures using a variety of proxies, Tree rings, O16/O18 ratios, heck Dr. Kim Cobb has been doing some fascinating work using coral growth to reconstruct temperature history. All of these can be correlated together to create a pretty comprehensive Temperature history. If you still have doubts, enroll in a paleoclimatology and paleooceanography class, learn the techniques and concepts involved in temperature reconstruction. It's some really cool stuff.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
We're all going to die except the solipsist, whoever he or she is.
Ok, if I agree not every disaster is a direct result of Athtoprogenic Global Warming (AGW), can you agree that there are a series of trends that point towards increased extreme meteorological events. And that those events are most simply explain by the increase in CO2? For example, take a look at the number of record highs versus the number of record lows. Or alternately, take a look at the trend of pH in the oceans. You can also look at other events such as the northward movememt of the centers of Bermuda and Pacific High pressures. Sure, it's *possible* that each of these examples (and dozens of others that are beyond the scope of this post), but the hypotheses that have best withstood testing remain the ones that include AGW and various GHG. If you think they are wrong, I'm sure there are plenty of corporations that would pay really really good money for a hypothesis that works to explain the events without changes im GHG as a factor.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
Psh. If the planet were truly overpopulated then population would be decreasing, not climbing. What you really mean to say by the planet is overpopulated is that you don't think as many people deserve the same standard if living as you, or perhaps that they don't deserve to live at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How do you reconcile between eras so far apart in both the breadth of measurements and accuracies and methodology between now and then?
By comparing datasets from multiple sources that overlap in the time domain.
I don't think it is possible to any close "degree." Look, people didn't calibrate their thermometers all the time back then, nor did they have the scientific rigor in measurement technique to make sure they had an acceptable "averaging" setup for the measurement on a specific time and circumstance each day.
First of all, people did calibrate thermometers "all the time back then." It wasn't hard. The freezing and boiling points of water at sea level are convenient standard fiduciary marks.
As for "scientifc rigor" -- what I think you really mean is the care taken in measurements. Consider for example, Tyco Brahe. He gathered enormous amounts of data that informed Kepler to create his laws of planetary motion. And he didn't have a telescope. He took extraordinary care to use his measuring instruments to the best of his ability. My point is that data that is "old" is not necessarily lacking in "rigor."
Finally, regarding data quoted to a fraction of a degree -- you need to understand that individual measurements can have a moderate errors, but their average can be highly accurate. Google on "standard error of the mean" for details.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
That's what your daddy said when people wanted to put cancer warnings on cigarette packages, and when the big librul gubbmit came for your grandaddies asbestos insulation.
Of the 4 billion, how many supported human life? What's the maths on how long your grandkids live when the planet can only support a small percentage of the current human population?
I once read someplace that if a great sudden disaster occurred that wiped out 85% or so of the population, well, once they got over the shock, the rest would find themselves relatively well-off. As long as the disaster wasn't all-out nuclear war or something else that would bring long-term devastation. If it was something like an epedemic plague, well then the survivors would find themselves resource-rich with plenty of real estate. Wars of resources would no longer be necessary unless we later overpopulate again.
The people who would survive would tend to be those who keep emergency supplies of food/water stocked up so they can hold out a while while they try to find new sources. That includes those who understand things like just how fragile the power grid really is (a single "Carrington Event"-style X-flare away from total destruction, not "if" but "when"), or the fact that populous areas like NYC only have 2-3 days of food on hand at any given time. Y'know, the ones who are called "nutters" by the current mainstream, just like those who suspected massive government surveillance until the whole Snowden debacle made it undeniable.
I mean you wear your seatbelt and (presumably) carry insurance, though you have no intention of getting into a severe car crash. Why are other important things treated so differently? Because they imply a world unlike the one you know now? That makes them impossible how, exactly? Ideally, your insurance premiums are wasted money and you never need to file a claim. Ideally the cost of putting away some extra food and water, maybe investing in things like water filters and off-grid power, ideally those things are wasted money too. It's like a weapon - you sure hope you don't need it at all, ever, but if you do need one, you need it RIGHT NOW.
I think you're at the "ok, global warming is real, but its not a big deal, honest" stage?? But that's at least semi-positive. You've accepted the basic warming, even if you want to downplay the short time scale its happened over by adding in ancient ice cap melts.
The earth will be fine, its not a living thing in and of itself, it's the stuff on the earth that dies e.g. Dinosaurs, Triassic extinction event, trilobites extinction and the biggest of them all, the Permian extinction (96% of life wiped out), life gets wiped out on it's surface, but the earth chugs on.
It's worth looking at the Permian extinction, the great dying where 96% of species died out. A similar style dyout would wipe humans off the planet. That was a rise of 8 degrees celcius, with 2000 parts per million CO2. We've raised the CO2 from 280ppm to 370ppm to the year 2000 and to 404ppm this year and still accelerating.
So we're looking at as much as 1000ppm by 2100, which is really past a point at which we could stop it.
Permian is believed to be a de-oxygenating event of the ocean, so all marine life died out because it couldn't breath, which in turn released decay gasses into the atmosphere and snuffed out the land animals.
That's potentially Trumps great grandchildren dead, so not really a big deal, he'll never meet them, let alone date them.
Yes, better calibration helps getting more accurate results with less uncertainties, but it's highly unlikely that all calibration errors were in the same direction and skewed over time into the opposite direction.
Good lord folks -- I'm tired of this discussion coming up periodically and people talking out of their asses.
Look: thermometers dating back the mid-1800s were highly precise and did not need frequent calibration. They had perfected glass tubes of mercury and could make very even marks on them by that point. A late 19th-century thermometer had precision that was easily within +/-0.1 degree. (For specialized applications and laboratory thermometers, there were plenty that were manufactured by the late 1800s to be read down to 0.01 degree.)
And a sealed glass tube doesn't need repeated calibration if it's not disturbed or damaged. The issue here is simply how good the (somewhat permanent) calibration was. By the first couple decades of the 1900s, there were standards organizations which existed that would do standardized calibrations (i.e., where you could get a standard calibrated thermometer or send one away to be checked for calibration). We have actual logbooks when many thermometers were checked for accuracy. We have actual logbooks where thermometers were replaced and the old thermometers were compared with the new ones in terms of their scales and calibration. Etc., etc.
Just because you cannot fathom that people 100 years ago could read a thermometer or manufacture an even glass tube doesn't mean they didn't. They did. We still have many of these thermometers today to prove it. A 1900-era thermometers is about as accurate as a 1900-era RULER.
In fact, in terms of precision AND accuracy, what you should be questioning instead is MODERN electronic thermometers, which DO need frequent calibration and are frequently only accurate to maybe +/- 1 degree even when calibrated properly. But they're used for convenience because they no longer need a human to go look at it and write it down. Ask any meteorologist who knows anything about temperature measurement, and he'll likely tell you that stuff they were using decades and even over a century ago (often accurate to +/-0.1 degree) is more accurate than the stuff weather records are generated with now. (And regardless, that +/-1 degree or whatever is plenty to generate an average over several years to compare temperature records.)
No -- the real issue in dealing with old records is questions of siting and distribution. Historical thermometers weren't always located in the best of places, but again, most were, and we generally have records of those that were. The biggest statistical issue is that we didn't have such even distribution for samples all over the globe, so there's some sampling bias. Again, there's a lot of work statisticians do to take this into account when looking at long-term global averages.
Anyhow, I personally have complete confidence that those statistical analyses are good and reflect the overall trend. But people who are arguing that old thermometers were bad and needed frequent calibration simply have ABSOLUTELY no clue what they're talking about.
Learn the difference between contribute and attribute. It's significant.
It is entirely reasonable that calibration errors tended to one direction over the other if the same methods of calibration were used.
But that doesn't matter. What matters are the trends. If all slashdotters buy crappy thermometers from the same manufacturer and they all show 1-3 degrees less than they should, and our average is lower this year than next, we can still say with fairly high certainty that the temperature has increased.
And if we then all buy crappy thermometers from another manufacturer and they all show 1-3 degrees more than they should, and our average continues to increase, we can still say that our average has increased.
What is measured is the same thermometers against the same thermometers. If recalibrating or swapping out the equipment, measuring starts again. If a measuring station shows 15C one year, 16C the next, and then swap thermometers and show 13C that year and 14C the next, the data doesn't show that the temperature has dropped from 15C to 14C - it shows a 2 degree increase. Combined with other measurements that show a similar increase, it becomes significant and gives high certainty for a trend.
Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?!?
With the aid of swallows.
But take your typical sugar maple tree. The wings they spin off don't make it very far from the parent. They spread slowly, generation by generation. That's good enough when temperatures overall change slowly. Then they die off in one direction and thrive in another, and the forests move, even if the individual trees don't.
But the temperature rise right now happens too quickly for the maple forests to be able to keep up the tempo. With the result that maple forests are dying out, and the species that depend on them can't follow a slow migration, because there is no slow migration.
Or look at pines and firs. After the last ice age, most of Scandinavia was covered largely by pine trees. As temperatures slowly rose, fir trees took over as the dominant species, except at higher altitudes. It happened so slowly that the forests and their habitats could move. Not so now. Neither pine nor fir forests are endangered yet, but the trends say that they soon will be.
If I disagreed with it and was certain (with proof) that I was right, then I would falsify your statement with references, right then and there
Why bother going to all that trouble for someone who made some pretty bold claims without references themselves. The most likely outcome would be that when the next climate-related story comes out the OP will simply ignore any evidence posted to the contrary (since all scientists are corrupt frauds) and repeat the same nonsense again.
A down-mod is my nice, easy, comfortable, anonymous "screw you" that faces no danger of me being personally questioned for choosing it. So there. Ha-ha!
Says the Anonymous Coward. Nice one.
Once again you entirely miss the point.
Statistically it proves a rising trend. If there were no trend, we'd expect a 50% chance of getting an above-average year. Now work out the odds of flipping a coin and getting 20 heads in a row (about 1 in 2^20). But with a rising trend, the probability of eventually getting 20 in a row approaches 1.0.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
All of that is based on the premise that the economy will tank if do anything to address global warming. But that is the same argument that has been leveled at every attempt to fix an environmental or social problem, like banning CFCs to stop destroying the ozone layer, or stopping the dumping harmful chemicals in any old place without a care for the health effects, or improving safety in factories to prevent workers dying from the chemicals they use, or the abolition of slavery, etc.
And yet here were are after all those changes. The economy wasn't destroyed, and scientific research is still being funded. That is because the economy adapted, as it always does. In this case we might have some short-term pain with the cost of converting to cleaner energy sources and technologies, but that will get forgotten once we find that we can save money by being smart about taking the energy from the air and sunlight around us. While coal miners won't be happy about the reduction of coal use, solar panel manufacturers will delight as their industry booms. While some things might cost us more as we have to find environmentally friendly ways of manufacturing goods, the work we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have the effect of lowering levels of all pollutions. This will lead to a reduction in pollution-related diseases lowering the health care costs.
We will soon forget about what we had to do to fix climate change just as we have with all the other changes that I mentioned above. Eventually, some other problem will occur and nay-sayers will predict the ruin of the economy yet again.
He was downmodded for (obvious) trolling, not because of some grand political conspiracy against people who confuse science with politics.
You just proved his point. You believe your opinion is as relevant as someone who has spent a greater part of his life learning about climate science.
If you truly believe what you're saying, YOU need to go through the rigors of education the researcher you're equating yourself with before you can argue against the consensus.
The "smell test" is fine for localized things that don't matter much, but the reason the science fields exist is to perform research and analysis that the average layman cannot.
You can decide to personally accept the scientific community's consensus, or not, but it's analogous to deciding that 99% of medical doctors don't know how to treat a 20 year old disease, or that 99% of architects dont know how to build skyscrapers, or that most successful businessman don't know how to run a business.
Deciding that an entire field is incorrect in spite of the aggregate expertise of the members of that field is an extraordinary claim, and you'll either need to prove a vast conspiracy or perform repeatable science to properly refute the science. You went be successful at either, but you're welcome to try. Sadly, intelligent yet arrogant folks like you can convince fools of your beliefs, and they adopt them. We are seeing a revolt against expertise, and it's frankly astounding and perplexing in the extreme.
I would like to see the papers and the critics. If the critics were some internet randos who are not scientists in the field, then yes, criticism is most likely moot. If the criticism is about some specific aspect of the paper (for example, pointing out problems with statistical methods), then it can be valid so long as the critic understands the aspect he/she is criticizing. If the authors of the research are making policy suggestions, then basically everyone can be a critic (e.g. you if prove that black kids are doing wore in school than white kids, it does not mean that the *right* policy is to concentrate teaching resources on the white kids *or* to attempt to equalize education outcomes).
As for GP case, it is really silly to expect that rather well established field will be overthrown by “that particular thing looks fishy”. Is is like expecting to disprove gravity by pointing to birds.
There was a statistically insignificant difference between 2016 and 1998 (0.02C). Both of these years were very strong El Nino years, fyi. In other words, after 18 years of "global warming" the El Nino years have the same temperature.
Please can we stop the tsunami of bollocks about global warming? It's fucking tiresome.
None of that is really relevant. Yes, there will be winners and losers - that is what evolution does. The big problem, as far as humans are concerned is that WE are likely to be one of the losers given our location at the top of the food chain.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If your conspiracy theory was right- all the scientists would be publishing climate denial papers and a few crazy kooks would be publishing papers saying the theory is right. The exact opposite of what actually happens - because the biggest corporate funders have a massive vested interest in climate change being false.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually, the Ice Age did NOT end 12K years ago. We're merely between Continental Glacial Advances. The current Ice Age started ~2.58 million years ago. And we're due for another Continental Glacial Advance, "real soon now". . . .in geologic terms.
"real soon now" meaning within the next 10-50 thousand years. . .
But that 99.999% of population has a right to decide whether they want to fund the fight against climate change or not.
That is absolutely true. The climate scientists aren't the ones who should be deciding whether coastal cities are worth saving, for instance. That is the responsibility of the general public. The general public certainly has the right to say they simply don't care, or aren't willing to make sacrifices for future generations. They can even let some amount of uncertainty about the negative effects of climate change enter into their risk management, such as using a predictive model where there is a 10% there are no negative effects.
But the current strategy of claiming the science isn't solid enough to be taken as "fact" by non-experts is indefensible.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
By the way, that whole "97% consensus" thing is pure organic fertilizer. So not even your claims of consensus hold up to scrutiny.
Did you even read the articles you quoted? The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but the Politifact article rated the statement "Over 97 percent of the scientific community believe that humans are contributing to climate change." as mostly true. The only reason it wasn't entirely true is that over 97 percent of active researchers in relevant fields of the scientific community agree, not 97 percent of the entire scientific community. Considering those are the only people in the scientific community whose opinions hold much weight, its not a big mistake. There was also another researcher who disagreed with the criteria used to determine if the researcher agreed, and independently came up with a 91% consensus. That same researcher then stated "There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans."
So it seems your own Googling backs up his consensus statements quite well.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I don't know if a roulette wheel will pay out on the next spin, but I DO know how fast I'll lose money if I continue to put my money down on black.
That's the difference between weather and climate. You don't need to predict the next 5 day's weather to know that 100 years from now we're fucked if we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere... and we may be fucked even if we manage to reduce greenhouse gases dramatically in the near future.
The data HAS been verified. For instance, look at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. This was a project funded by right-wing activists who doubted the climate science. They specifically objected to use of satellite data and felt that terrestrial weather stations were not being vetted correctly. (For instance, showing pictures of temperature stations a few feet away from buildings or barbecues which they said tainted the results.) The Berkeley guys were led in part by Richard Muller, who has been a long-time skeptic. They went and got original raw data, and did a thorough job vetting each data point.
The result is that their data agrees completely with the climate change models. Muller's public summary is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...
There are other contrarian opinions, but very few of them work with large data sets in any honest way. Nearly all the contrarian viewpoints can be linked to right-wing money and other professional gains that their mainstream colleagues do not enjoy.
But mostly, the arguments they make are trash - which is why they aren't published. They're dumb ideas, easily seen through. Science works by honest appraisal of ideas and data, not opinion or groupthink as you seem to believe. It's not perfect - lord knows I disagree with a lot of scientific colleagues' approaches - but by and large good science tends to win out over bad science.
Its not snowing where I am, so you're obviously wrong about everything!
Man that was a convincing argument.