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Extreme Cold Weather Grips U.S., Dispelling Doubts About Climate Change
A poll released Tuesday showed that more people are starting to believe climate change is credible, partly due to the frigid weather which has gripped the United States.
The poll released by Associated Press showed that 48 percent of respondents found the science of human-induced climate change more convincing when the poll was taken in November 2018 than they did five years ago, compared to 14 percent who thought it less convincing.
Eighty-three percent of those polled who believe in climate change want the federal government to take actions to mitigate it, and 80 percent want their state governments to act, the survey found.
More people than expected supported a carbon tax to help curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to the survey.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/23/c_137768179.htm
Prolonged, Life-Threatening Cold to Grip Midwestern US This Week as Polar Vortex Plunges South
The coldest weather in years will put millions of people and animals throughout the midwestern United States at risk for frostbite to occur in minutes and hypothermia during the final days of January.
The deep freeze continued across the Upper Midwest on Sunday with temperatures plummeting well below zero in the morning. The low of 45 below zero F [-43°C] in International Falls, Minnesota, shattered the day's record of 36 below zero F [-38°C] from 1966.
As harsh as Sunday morning was, the worst is yet to come as the polar vortex gets displaced from the Arctic Circle and dives into the Midwest in the wake of the disruptive snowstorm starting this week.
https://news.yahoo.com/prolonged-life-threatening-cold-grip-165320957.html
Climate Change Cooks up Ideal Conditions for Snow
Look at all that snow in the Alps; has global warming taken a break? Alas, no, it turns out that the recent record-breaking dumps of snow across much of southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria are more likely a consequence of global warming. Why? Balmy temperatures in the North Sea and Baltic Sea are cooking up the ideal conditions to create snow.
[...]
Global warming enhances the current snowfall … Anomalously high sea surface temperatures in the North Sea and Baltic are loading winds from the north with moisture,” tweeted Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam last week.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 4, Interesting) by LVDOVICVS on Monday January 28 2019, @07:21AM (14 children)
I believe greenhouse gasses produced by humans are altering the climate. Since this change doesn't benefit humankind, doesn't it make sense to attempt to remedy the situation? Isn't it better to try than to do nothing?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by inertnet on Monday January 28 2019, @10:09AM (3 children)
Even aside from the climate change debate it would be wise for humanity to focus on the far future. Instead of behaving like greedy locusts and consume every resource we can get our hands on until its no longer available, it makes much more sense to prepare for any future mishaps that could threaten our existence. Our ancestors have survived because they happened to adapt or be adapted. It's time we stopped leaving survival to chance and do some real planning. As far as climate change is concerned, we should focus not only on reducing greenhouse gasses, but more on dealing with the consequences of the inevitable changes to come. In my own country all future wealth for the next couple of generations is already being claimed just for reducing CO2, which will have a negligible on the climate.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @12:52PM
But what about the next quarter results in the yearly ROI? Slash and fucking burn so we can get 2% more!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:29PM
Getting the majority of our resources from space. With all the raw materials available up there, if we were to deorbit some of them into designated areas with minimal heat shielding and some manuvering rockets, we could ensure they landed where we wanted. Save a ton of time, money, and ecological damage compared to terrestrial mining, and end up freeing up millions of workers from the hazarding terrestrial mining operations, leaving our focus only on the mines that by necessity can't be replaced with space mining, like uranium and certain other rare minerals, metals, and gasses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:20PM
This is something many more people could agree with. I am not sure why they have chosen to push this CO2 idea instead of more rational ones that could lead to the same behaviors. It makes one think perhaps they don't actually want people to plan ahead and reduce wasteful consumption of resources.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @10:14AM
See below. Plan your move into Canada, Northern Europe, Russia, etc. Make sure you have lots of guns and supplies.
The developing world will not agree to curb emissions. Even if every country did, we will still get the warming. It's time to expect the worst.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday January 28 2019, @12:16PM (5 children)
Investment into biodomes, archeologies, etc. Self contained
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @12:18PM
*arcologies
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:44PM (3 children)
Nerd fantasies. In a capitalist system, you need a business plan, investors, next quarter, IPO, and profit profit profit. Gotta suck the wealth out of the working class so that "environmentalist" pseudo-left posers like Algore can jet around from McMansion to McMansion and those ever important conferences to meet up with the other pseudo-left posers and have their caviar and expensive wine. Oh, and don't forget to hire some strippers! We can't come up with ineffective feel-good climate policy without those strippers!
In capitalism, all that matters is the bottom line, and caring for our planet and fellow human beings does not make for a good bottom line.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:01PM (2 children)
Yet another person who doesnt know what capitalism is. What you describe is what happens when you put government in charge of research and politicians in charge of marketing, ie crony-corporatism/socialism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
Oh look, another person who hasn't the first clue about capitalism. I think you do not know how close capitalism came to total collapse and how the social-democrats kept capitalism alive on life support for decades after that. Look at the numbers. 1968 is the year the neoliberals won over the social-democrats.
The only thing you know about capitalism you learned from Atlas Shrugged. Why not chance a journey out of your mom's basement now and then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:32PM
I've never read atlas shrugged. I just know the definition of capitalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:55PM
I don't think many people believe it has zero effect. It is more a matter of predicting what exactly this effect would be. It could be negligible relative to other influences, cause warming, or cause cooling.
I don't think anyone knows this with any sort of confidence.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:37AM
The problem is that it does greatly benefit humankind. The climate change doesn't maybe (it is remarkable how tenuuos the justification for the hate on climate change), but the processes generating the greenhouse gases do. Moving on to other repliers.
inertnet wrote:
And? While it's a bit unusual to see any advocacy for adaptation, I think it's too late to focus on reducing greenhouse gases. We have too many people to put the fossil fuel genie back in the bottle.
An AC speaks of space mining.
None of which would reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Nor is it that significant environmentally. Terrestrial mining can be quite destructive locally, but it's not a big factor in air quality, public sanitation, or the many polluting industries that receive those raw materials. A second AC wrote:
What's so valuable about consuming less resources? We could do that. Or we could put the effort of planning ahead into more valuable endeavors. A common example of how reducing wasteful consumption backfires is recycling. It's common to see people brag about the quality of recycling programs, noting that it only takes a few minutes to sort one's recycling. This ignores of course that the waste of human beings' time is more wasteful than the waste of virtually every resource that is being recycled! Your time is very scarce. Your paper, plastics, and cardboard are not so scarce.
I too often like to think of the far future, sometimes even the conceit to plan for it, but I don't think one plans for the future by wasteful actions that don't actually improve the future. Too often in environmentalism and climate change alarmism there is this great ignorance of what is valuable with the result of making the world a worse place in the name of the opposite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:00AM
I agree with actively reducing polutants is necessary, but what i don't agree with is this panic mode where everything seemingly bad needs to be banned yesterday. There are still real problems with e.g. electric vehicles. Scaling world wide, battery tech, battery and electricity polutions, price, etc. are real problems atm. Not to mention actual plotuion problems in industries in general, which are more of a problem than private transportation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:27AM (6 children)
I almost miss it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @09:52AM (1 child)
From the headline... I didn't know the Alps were in the U.S.A.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:45PM
You don't know what semicolons are for either.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday January 28 2019, @05:56PM (3 children)
Thanks buddy :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @06:09PM
Almost ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:00PM (1 child)
Get off my
lawndriveway!(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 28 2019, @10:09PM
Get off my
lawndrivewaybeach![SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @08:23AM (8 children)
Ah!, seems 'twas like only yesterday, we prattled on about Global Warming,
And how soon we'd all be growing coconut palms on our front lawns,
Hardhats while gardening,
Cheap Piña coladas...
Now, I see the error of our ways, Climate change is here to stay,
And all I can hear is a choir of brass monkeys, anguishedly howling,
as in tiny pieces, their frost shattered nuts,
on our lawns doth fall...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @10:09AM (5 children)
With 42C outside and 5 years drought, it's still on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @12:10PM (4 children)
Not here it isn't...I only wish the temperature was up in the 40's, at least for a month, so that the house would dry out properly so I can start on repairs..rain? this place is proverbially known for being somewhere where it always fucking rains...and recently it's been damper than usual (hence, need for repairs and upgrades to cope).
I know, i know, I was taking the piss out of the 'Climate change' brigade a wee bit, I know it's AGW they normally witter about as opposed to localised warming, but even they, it seems, find it a mite foolish to excitedly wave their arms and go 'look, look Global Warming at work!' at people who're shivering their balls off...that message doesn't square with people's perception of reality, so a nicer catch-all like 'Climate change' covers a multitude of sins (and changes of predictions, politics, 'off message weather' etc. etc.).
IANAFCS, but, for my sins, I used to work as a sysadmin in a Physics department where some of these strange beasties lurked, I've seen a computer model of the weather system running on a VMScluster which, at the time, had a better track record at predicting the daily weather here than a certain organisation's Cray..another one of their longer term models kept throwing up we're heading for another ice age..amusing as all this and the associated internecine warfare surrounding it was for a while, I gave up munching the popcorn and stuck to fixing their computer issues, fast forward a couple of decades and here we are..
Call me cynical, but what GBS said about the Irish applies to Climate scientists, put one on a spit and you'll get another to turn it, FWIW, both the AGW and 'New Ice Age - mini or otherwise' models mean that if I live long enough I might get to see icebergs in the estuary...which will make taking the boat out so much more fun..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:34PM (3 children)
Climate change was picked because global warming gives a mistaken idea about qhat is going on. The long term trend is warming, stop using short term weather patterns as your "proof". Possibly the planet will get much warmer, or it could devwlop so much cloud cover it goes into an ice age. It is hard to predict precisely, but the trends are still clear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:55PM (1 child)
So what use is this "knowledge"?
"According to my theory the earth may boil, or freeze, or anything in between."
- No one can plan based off this info.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:45AM
The knowledge informs us that our activities are accelerating a process artificially and thus we should curb those activities and reduce the acceleration.
Use your brain, stop trying to cherry pick little pieces so you can make a quick point. Either way, warm or cold, rapid climate change will be bad for humanity. Local weather patterns will be almost impossible to predict so I won't tell you to move to Canada or to Central America, but I will tell you to stop burning coal, gas, and other energy sources that pollute the atmosphere.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:39AM
FTFY.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 28 2019, @05:19PM
It's still global warming. They changed to calling it climate change because of idiots who thought local conditions were a good measure of global state.
FWIW, and to list just one effect, when the poles get warmer faster than the intermediate zones that decreases the speed of the jet stream which allows polar weather easier access to the intermediate area...further warming the poles.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @06:42PM
Climate change is here to stay
So is the Inquisition [youtube.com]. Nobody expected that!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 28 2019, @08:52AM (7 children)
This has all happened hundreds of thousands of times before, if not hundreds of millions. The only real difference here is, most of the population isn't old enough to remember killer winters and killer blizzards. It's easy for them to get hyped up over something they've never seen. Snow and cold and wind - there is nothing new or unusual about them.
Remember the rule of thirty. Flesh exposed to a thirty mile per hour wind, at thirty degrees, can freeze in thirty minutes. Don't take your dumb asses out into winter storm weather wearing a T-shirt and shorts. And, your feet - don't wear flip flops, because that nice warm flesh will get wet from melted snow, and WET exposed flesh will freeze in half the time that dry flesh freezes.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:58PM (3 children)
I remember trick-and-treating on Halloween with snow on the ground in the late 1970s. And that snow stayed until late March. The 1970s had cold winters and that was normal weather. I wasn't around before that, but I remember being told by the old-timers that the decades before that were different-some years were wetter, some years were dryer, some years spring came early, some years spring came late.
It's just weather-earth's atmosphere trying to reach thermal equilibrium. Temperature, pressure, wind, precipitation all fluctuate hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, and through the decades,centuries, and millennia.
People really love to behave like chicken-little just because today is 6 degrees warmer or colder than the same day last year, or the wind is calm today but yesterday it was blustery, or if it rains for five days straight. Just because you're not enough now to a cold winter or heavy snow winter doesn't mean that this year is the first time in the history of the planet that has happened. Weather patterns often last a few years so cold snowy winters might be the "norm" until the mid 2020's. Then winters might warm up again and the freakout will begin again. :)
Like the OP said, it has all happened before and will happen again, man-made climate change or not.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:39PM
I remember that year as well. I remember being pissed when my mother forced me to wear a winter coat over my costume. I also remember when we had our Easter egg hunt one April in the snow too. Finding eggs is pretty easy when you just have to follow the tracks in the snow. "Hey dad. It looks like the Easter Bunny wears the same size shoes as you."
(Score: 2) by gottabeme on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:58AM (1 child)
This comment is an example of why metamoderation is needed. Whoever modded this "Troll" should have his moderation privileges revoked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:32AM
You could make an argument that he is trolling the climate alarmists. Or possibly the denialists. Given how fervent both sides have gotten, just about any comment on the weather is a troll or flamebait to someone.
"Hi Jo, Nice day today." "YOU HORRIBLE PERSON WHY DO YOU HATE THE PLANET AND WANT US TO ALL DIE IN FIRE YOU DAMNED CLIMATE DENIALIST?"
"Hi Fred, bit of rain coming down out there" "GLOBAL WARMING IS HOAX TO CRIPPLE AMERICA YOU COMMIE BASTARD"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:11PM
Seriously. One winter back in the early 90's it got so cold that the rubber in my tires got so stiff that when I hit the throttle at a traffic light, the rim on the drive wheel broke the bead and I got a flat tire. It actually pulled loose from the damn wheel. A Ford Escort. The furnace at the house we had couldn't keep up with the cold. The thing burned 24/7 and it was still only about 60 degrees inside.
Now I'm looking at a low of -9F this week and the global warming witch doctors are claiming "OMG! See? See? We told you. This shit has never happened before. We're all gonna die from climate change." People watch too much hype from Weather Channel and other assorted bullshit artists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:23PM
"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." -- Ambrose Bierce
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:40AM
If it doesn't last at least 30 years, then it can't be climate change.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @08:57AM (5 children)
Jet stream is getting bent outta shape, letting the arctic air dip down further south.
If the climate warming clowns actually modelled/predicted this, they would have won more converts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @10:14AM (3 children)
Predict the temperature of a point in a glass of warming water while an ice-cube melts above.
You are bound to have chaotic conditions until an equilibrium is reached.
Now, imagine that the ice cube is the Arctic and the warming water is the ocean/atmosphere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:53PM (2 children)
I'll predict the temperature in every point of that glass of warming water while an ice cube melts. 32 degrees F or 0 degrees C. There is some kind of rule that an enclosed body of water of limited dimensions will maintain an even temperature throughout. No moving the goalposts now - you specified a glass of water, there are no tributaries dumping water in, and no outlets draining warmer or cooler water. Thanks for playing.
(Score: 4, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Monday January 28 2019, @02:28PM
Glasses are enclosed and a given body of water changes its temperature throughout all at once?
I think you failed a few classes in school.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:48PM
You're probably thinking that matter will remain at a constant temperature as energy is put into the phase change, but if you are older than 5, didn't life experience teach you that, as an ice cube melts on top, the tea underneath can still be really hot?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 28 2019, @05:22PM
They did.
Sorry if you didn't read that prediction years ago. All the worthwhile models predict it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @09:08AM (35 children)
Is the earth heating up?
Maybe, it's actually hard to tell since the #1 claim of, "higher highs" is more than compensated for by lower lows as evidenced by the last 20 years of progressively colder and more dangerous winters.
Let's be straight. I'm urging you to start looking at the raw data, sans the numerancy applied to it, to force it to fit the popular narrative and do so with an open mind. Don't just come to a conclusion and then read the data that supports your biases. Seek the truth, let the biases go and just look at the damned data.
From where I sit, I just see a widening swath of temperatures in general. This goes directly against the popular narrative which continually discounts documented historical facts about both warmer and cooler times from well before humans were a dominant force on the planet. We've had hot and cold stretches that run decades even centuries, it's recorded, you just have to look at it and take it into account.
If you draw your conclusions from all available data. It should be clear to anyone who respects the scientific method, anthropogenic climate change is just pseudo-scientific non-sense. It is not substantiated by the raw data and is quite contrary to what the data is actually telling us.
It's not a science, it is a religion. Like all religions it is preaching guilt and sin. But this religion is dangerous because it is wrapped up in the trappings of popular science.
It will one day be looked at as the luminous aether of our generation. This is already clear from the fact that anyone who takes a contrary position to the popular narrative or pokes holes in the claims, is immediately labeled a heretic / denier and lumped in with the flat earth crowd, which is the modern version of burning at the stake.
Calling a skeptic a denier is just intellectually dishonest, because the anthropogenic climate change religion is completely saturated with claims which would not be able to be substantiated in a real scientific field. The evidence is too flimsy to stand up to any actual scrutiny and data has to be shaped and molded for it to even fit the narrative of the religious leaders.
Just as celestial spheres were required to explain the orbits of the sun, moon, stars and planets about the earth a few hundred years ago. We eventually realized that was wrong and hopefully one day we will realize AGW is wrong as well. Hopefully one day we will get a Copernicus or Galileo who will set the record straight, but right now I'd settle for a Martin Luther.
The fact is, humans just can't compete with nature when it comes to pumping out CO2 and Methane. We could go extinct tomorrow and it wouldn't even slow things down. The PETM pretty well proves it. We weren't around back then, yet it got much hotter, much faster. The water temp at the equator was close to a hot bath and at the poles it was swim suit weather all year long. But global temps still varied enormously even back then.
Science keeps showing us that Earth has throughout most of its history had a much broader range of temps than it has for the last 10,000 years.
For the last 10,000 years we've been in a post glacial band of temps that is quite narrow and this is why we're freaked out about a possible 2 degree difference, when during the PETM, temps were easily 20 degrees higher than they are now. This narrow band of temperatures is likely what allowed civilizations to rise and flourish. But the end of that period of gentleness does not mean an end to civilization anymore than an end to nursery school means an end to life.
We will evolve, survive and thrive as we always have.
Does this mean we should just pollute to our hearts content?
No, but most animals don't need laws to tell them not to shit where they eat, so why should we?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @11:59AM (25 children)
how the fuck is this interesting?
here's the raw data https://xkcd.com/1732/, [xkcd.com] in a form that anyone can understand if they are willing to actually look at it.
The planet Earth is heating up. That is established scientific fact.
If you disagree with the measurements or the way they are performed, please address them in a coherent and factual way, don't just say "from where I sit", because that is meaningless.
Humans are the main cause for the Earth heating up. That is also established scientific fact, see reports by the Intergovernmental panel on climate change.
If you disagree with their conclusions, please make a factual rebuttal of their findings, don't just complain about being labeled a denier (which you are).
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Monday January 28 2019, @12:57PM (3 children)
The xkcd link is broken. Just sayin.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:23PM
I'm sorry, it's the comma. can't break the habit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)
It's so hard to wipe out the comma from the url as rendered by the dam' Perl script that powers S/N
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 28 2019, @10:08PM
Commas are valid in URLs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-4.0-5.0-pci-sig-specification,38460.html [tomshardware.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by SunTzuWarmaster on Monday January 28 2019, @01:41PM (2 children)
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
Poignant.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:26PM
geez, how do they know the temperature ...uhm ... errr ... 538 years ago?
i suppose using old wood, like when it's cold, they grow slow and when warm they grow faster, thus yielding "year rings", or how?
nothing can "capture" temperature today and reveal it, uhm ... errr ... say 100 years from now.
anyways, trees tend to generate shade and more trees, soon to be a forest(*).
forests are always colder then a non shaded area, methinks.
i imagine a thermometer hatching from a seedling, showing the temperature during its life time and then making a lot of other thermometers sprouting beside it.
the baby thermometers will show colder temperatures when growing up in the shade of the papa thermometer, until they reach the same height or papa was felled by some lightning or storm ...
anyways, modern thermometers tend to grow in cities, where there's lots of concert, asphalt and traffic and not on far away mountain tops or in deep wooden forests and modern thermometers generally show warmer weather ...
(*) maybe that comic curve also correlates with amount of trees on the planet?
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Monday January 28 2019, @11:11PM
From the xkcd link...
The title attribute of the comic image...
In most browsers, hold your mouse steady over the image until a tooltip appears.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 28 2019, @02:00PM (1 child)
Your link clearly demonstrats that civilization has risen thanks to temperature rise. And, then it has that Al Gore hockey stick. FFS - couldn't you do ANY BETTER?!?!?!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 28 2019, @11:01PM
https://xkcd.com/552/ [xkcd.com]
Better than using actual data and citing the data source and telling about the possible errors of the data? What would that be?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 28 2019, @02:03PM (6 children)
Yes, it IS interesting. If you've studied religion at all, any of the major religions, you would recognize how much AGWism resembles a religion. How many heretics have YOU burnt at the stake?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:32PM (5 children)
agwism? i dunno what that means. i am guessing its a new term used to somehow belittle the xenos outside of a clique of hardcore adherents.
i thought burning the heretics was a religion. heretics burning because the world is burning isn't technically fulfilling the goal ,although they do get crossed off the list of infidels to return to our maker to distribute His divine Justice.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:16PM (4 children)
anthropomorphic global warming ism
AGWism
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @06:32PM (3 children)
You embody pretty much everything dumb about the US, even if you are a paid agitator.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 28 2019, @07:12PM (2 children)
If I'm a paid agitator, then I want my pay. I've probably earned enough by now to pay for a cheeseburger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:48AM
Such a typically American comment, suspicious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:39AM
You sure you don't want a Royale with Cheese ?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:21PM (2 children)
Thank you for demonstrating my point so concisely.
You've helped me make several points.
The first one is data fitting.
That cartoon is an excellent example of a misleading graph which is precisely the type of intellectual dishonesty I was speaking about when I mentioned that AGW is not so much a science as it is a religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_graph [wikipedia.org]
The graph even though it is one of the better ones that exist, is misleading for a number of reasons.
The first reason is that near the bottom, the time axis is intentionally compressed to show an exaggerated effect. Secondly it is misleading because it spends such a short time on the "current time" area where do have somewhat decent data and then projects wildly into the future based on less than 2 decades of trend despite the fact that the older data shows trends cycling back and forth over the millennia.
In fact even with the skew, it doesn't break past +1 until several years past the end of the actual data and several years into the projected data and there isn't any support for those projections.
Another point this demonstrates is appeal to authority. I made an argument about data being massaged to fit a narrative. Rather than try to show actual data, we get a cartoon which sources its data from a narrative given by the exact same priesthood that I warned about. Yet, going back to the same graph you can clearly see that temps are about where they are now, going as far back as 8500 BCE.
Assuming the data in the chart is reasonably accurate, it would be far more honest to say that we haven't been this warm since 2000 BCE, but that we were this warm and warmer for up to 6500 years prior to that. Ergo, the last 4000 years have been part of a larger cycle with narrow temperature ranges that are now broadening and there is no clear correlation at all between human activity and this overall broadening.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @05:39PM
It is 331 pixels for every 500 years, all the way from the top of the graph to the bottom. Perhaps you were misled, because toward the end there are labels for every 100 years, instead of every 500. But that is common for such a graph since we have a lot more data about the last 500 than the 20,000 before it.
So my factory produced 200 widgets +/- 100 widgets, each day for 20 years. We had a seasonal cycle, where some months we ramped production to 300 widgets a day, and other months we ramped down to produce only 100 widgets/day. Now we upgrade the factory, hire new employees, and turn on a new manufacturing line. This month we produced 300 widgets/day.
By your logic, this must be part of our seasonal cycle because we have already had months in the past where we produced 300 widgets/day. There is no clear correlation at all between my manufacturing upgrades and the increased number of widgets. We must wait until we produce 400 widgets before we can be sure the new manufacturing line did anything at all.
In reality, we take into account the production of the old line, and the production of the new line, and we forecast under the idea that the old one produces a max of 300/day, and the new one 300/day, so we have a capacity of 600 per day +/-200 into the future.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:44AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:39PM (3 children)
Wow, a web comic is now considered "raw data" by the people concerned about this stuff... We have to be jumping the shark on this, it is like the shoeshine boy telling you to buy stocks. All the suckers are bought in, time to shear them. Perhaps that is related to blaming extreme cold on CO2 now too*.
* Actually, the original CO2 theory (from when they wanted to extrapolate a downward trend) was that it would increase humidity, which would turn to precipitation when the air traveled to the poles. This would cause more snow/ice to form there which would reflect more sunlight, thus leading to an "ice age". This idea will likely be making a come back in the next 10 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @06:12PM (2 children)
The XKCD author is a huge nerd that does quite a good job of using real data to make jokes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:47PM
So? A web comic does not pass for "raw data", even if a "huge nerd" made it. This is ridiculous.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @04:06AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @04:04PM
OP asked for the AGW / Climate Change proselytizers to review the raw data themselves without the fudging /normalizing and come to their own conclusions and you post a link to a hack cartoonist who is best known for a $5 wrench anti-crypto meme and you call it "raw data." Way to prove his point. This is why your opposition brands you as religious zealots and not scientists. What is sad is that you have enough penitent parishioners to exclaim AMEN and mod you as "informative." WTF?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 28 2019, @05:28PM
Sorry, but that humans are the cause of the warming is only a strongly indicated assumption. There are other possibilities, and why the hell should it matter, we still need to act to counter the warming, no matter who's to blame.
(OTOH, the effect of the CO2, methane, etc. is a scientific fact. It's just that volcanoes, etc., also emit CO2, etc., and we haven't carefully measured all sources. So that humans are contributing to the warming is a fact, but that they are causing the warming is only extremely highly probable.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 28 2019, @05:13PM (4 children)
It's not just hotter highs and colder lows. It's also more violent tornadoes and hurricanes. And more of them. Are we seeing more floods than ever before? More forest fires than ever before? More drought in some places?
Are these things real?
If they are and they get worse, shouldn't we begin trying to curb the damage being caused by humans? Or should we just ignore it for the convenience and profit of a few?
Major infrastructure changes take time. We should be working towards such changes before we're doing so under any kind of time pressure caused by constantly kicking the can down the road. Why NOT try to limit CO2 emissions -- within reason, and economic reason? Why not invest more in solar, wind, wave and battery technology? These things don't get perfected overnight. Just like the original primitive automobile. So why not try to work with other nations to try to gradually, reasonably fix this problem?
Why is that seen as such a bad thing?
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 28 2019, @05:32PM
To be fair, it had long been predicted that as we left the "little climatic optimum" storms and weather variability would increase. So what the "climate change" (aka "global warming") has done is merely increase the strength of something that would have happened anyway. So far. (Of course "merely" can mean the difference between a nuisance and a catastrophe, but what of that.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @05:49PM (1 child)
because of how it is done. with lies and force. don't fucking tell me i can't burn my wood stove to keep warm while whole cities of chem plants pump cancer into the air. don't try to steal more money from the people while the IRS loses 19 billion a year to fraud and spends the rest on death and lining leaches' pockets. fuck your establishment/government solutions, you dumb ass slave.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:07PM
This comment I think encapsulates very well the zeitgeist when capitalism nears the end of its curve.
The elites get away with murder and we cannot even heat our own houses.
It's one of the dangers of placing so much wealth under the control of so few people....
(Score: 2) by gottabeme on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:56AM
Even the government reports say that hurricanes are at a low, not a high.
Your rhetoric is so transparent. Asking a bunch of pseudo-scientific questions, appearing to be just so incredibly reasonable--how could anyone disagree with you? How could what you want possibly be seen as such a bad thing?
You're either a liar or a fool. Which is it?
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday January 28 2019, @10:39PM (3 children)
It is not about whether we can out-compete nature, it is about the balance that we are upsetting. You are correct in saying that things would continue to warm if we were to disappear tomorrow. This is a BAD thing. We have already set our course in motion, and it will take massive effort to turn it.
Humans might survive such massive changes in temperature, but it ain't gonna be pretty for civilization and there won't be 7+ billion of us anymore.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @11:05PM
Warmer temperatures are so much better than colder temperatures it isn't even worth discussing.
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Tuesday January 29 2019, @02:42AM (1 child)
Humans put 37 Gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere last year.
37 trillion kilograms!
The same weight as 100 million 747s
Or 7.5 billion elephants.
Or 75 times your weight (as well as 75X every other human)
That can't be good!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @04:17AM
The dissolved CO2 in the oceans is extimated as 137,100 GT*. https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?s=n&v=0&id=100969 [harvard.edu]
37 GT is about 0.02 % of that. Assuming no compensating mechanisms, in fifty years we will have changed the CO2 by about 1% of its value.
*That page gives carbon mass. multiply by 44/12 to get CO2 mass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @09:39AM (4 children)
The skeptics will never be convinced until it's too late. So let's just let it happen and let the chips fall where they may. It would be best to move up to Canada and stockpile as many guns and supplies as you can.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:59PM (3 children)
Yes, I have been waiting for coastal property to actually drop in price by an amount consistent with these concerns we keep hearing. While no one really knows what is going to happen, I would bet against someone who priced the property to reflect a belief it will soon be underwater.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 28 2019, @05:34PM
You can keep waiting. As long as the govt. keeps paying people to rebuild in areas subject to repeated flooding the prices will stay up. They don't even design the new houses to be more flood tolerant.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @08:33PM (1 child)
Using maps that show what the coasts would look like with X feet of flooding could be a good idea. I think it's just easier to pick a country with abundant natural resources and a low population density that would actually improve from a few degrees of warming.
(Score: 3, Informative) by lentilla on Tuesday January 29 2019, @03:44AM
Here you go - an interactive map [firetree.net]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday January 28 2019, @12:53PM (1 child)
I do like how "global warming" has morphed into "climate change", which can cover any sort of event. Cold winters in the US? Like those that froze the Ptomac in the 18th century? Oh, wait...
And "heavy snow" in the Alps? At a place I used to work, there were pictures from the 1930s of people literally tunneling through the snow. Once upon a time, the AGW alarmists pointed to events like that as proof of AGW. Now we get a couple of rounds of heavy snow, and suddenly they change their tune.
I live in Switzerland, and the winters haven't changed noticeably. Some years you have more snow, some you have less. The glaciers are retreating, yes, but they have been retreating since the end of the "little ice age" in the 18th century. The earth is warming, and has been for the past two centuries, news at 11:00.
That said, I'll agree that we shouldn't be carrying out planet-wide experiments with our atmosphere. Cutting CO2 is a worthy goal, not because it causes AGW (for which there is poor evidence), but simply because we don't actually know what effect it may have.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by gottabeme on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:07AM
Wouldn't cutting CO2 be a planet-wide experiment with our atmosphere, whose effect we don't know?
We only have actual, reliable, verifiable, non-proxy data for less than 100 years. If the planet is billions of years old, it's a joke to think that data covering less than 0.0004% of the whole is sufficient to base drastic policy changes on.
And that reveals the truth: This is not about science, it's about politics. It was explicitly stated at international government meetings decades ago that "climate change is a vehicle for effecting policy." Scientists admitted decades ago that they believe that the public should be lied to for what the scientists and policymakers think is their own good.
But as they say, it's easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:52PM
Do a poll in November when the weather is unusually warm and get a result the folks favor a carbon tax to cool the earth.
Publish the results in January when it is extreme cold and say that the extreme weather led folks to the result.
Climate predictions are now from expect ice age, to expect warming, to expect propaganda?
There may be a good case that the weather is becoming less predictable, but this study diminishes that case.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @02:29PM (2 children)
So, they always predicted an exceptionally cold winter? Or no?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 28 2019, @05:39PM (1 child)
They predicted that the temperate zones would tend to have exceptionally cold winters, hot summers, extended wet or dry spells, etc. This is a consequence of the jet stream slowing, so weather patterns tend to get locked in place.
They didn't predict that *this* winter would be exceptionally cold, or that *this* summer would be exceptionally hot, wet, or dry. That's a weather model, not a climate model, and it's iffy beyond a few days forwards because of "sensitivity to initial conditions". And you need to model each locale separately. Climate's a lot easier to model. E.g., everyone can model to the state that "summer's going to be warmer than winter".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:49PM
Source?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @03:48PM (2 children)
CO2 in the atmosphere is rising, and I accept that human activity is causing that. With the numbers the global population has reached, we must change how we power and craft our civilization.
However, this article is goofy. Cold temperatures and snow in January PROVE climate change is happening? Maybe that's true if you're the 22-yr old writing this breathless story, because you have the memory of a gnat, but for the rest of us who weren't born yesterday cold and snow in January are quite normal. It is what is supposed to happen. Also, these temperatures are well within the norm. Teens in the upper midwest and rockies? That is dead normal. Temperatures below zero are also quite common this time of year.
In fact this winter has been quite mild so far. Crazy mild. It has been so clement that this dip into historically normal winter temperatures is causing the young to panic, when they ought to be more alarmed at how warm it's been.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @09:42PM (1 child)
Ottawa, Ontario was affected by the same cold weather system as the midwest and northeastern US.
To call it "quite normal" in Ottawa is to seriously understate what is happening in the weather over the past week or so. Literally nobody alive today has seen anything in Ottawa comparable to the snowstorm that hit it on Jan 20, 2019, because the last time a similar storm occurred was in the late 19th century on Feb 8, 1895.
Sure, sometimes Ottawa has really cold winter days and sometimes there are really snowy winter days. But on Jan 20, it was, simultaneously exceptionally cold (with a maximum temperature of -18°C) and exceptionally snowy (between 20-30cm of accumulation). Super cold days do not normally get significant precipitation due to the lack of moisture in the air.
It was a bit exciting because at -18°C road salt simply does not work, so the mess persisted for about 3 days afterwards at which point the cold went away, promptly being replaced with freezing rain because Ottawa.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:41PM
Those temperatures and that snowfall from one storm are the furthest thing from extraordinary or freakish in that region. I lived in Chicago 6 years, which is roughly in the same weather zone, the Great Lakes, as the area you're talking about, and getting down to 0F/-18C is normal. Getting a foot of snow in a storm is a respectable amount, but quite far from OMG IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!! argle bargle grumble rumble...
What is not normal is for it to be in the 50s (F) in January, which it has been.
Chicago and most of the Midwest use road salt no matter the cold. In the northern Rockies where we got more snow and it was colder we used sand and gravel.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday January 28 2019, @05:04PM (3 children)
Science is not about polling people and what they believe is credible. This is the exact opposite of science. Climate change is something that requires scientific study. So if that's what passes for believing in science I'm tempted to say people should just stay in the dark.
And let's not get started that ONE season's winter being sufficient evidence that climate change IS real - or NOT. The synonym for this headline, in my opinion is, "More people are starting to believe the plural of anecdote is data, partly due to the fact that most people cannot critically think."
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Monday January 28 2019, @11:15PM (2 children)
You are absolutely correct.
HOWEVER...
In order to get people to actually do something about the problem, they need to accept the fact that it exists.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:38AM
Just because there is a problem doesnt mean there is anything to be done about it.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday February 01 2019, @09:31PM
True. But if they accept it for reasons that are BS, then they can be persuaded to believe there isn't a problem for reasons that are equally BS. If next year it is a mild winter and summer and people stop believing in the validity of climate change... it will be that much harder for what the truth was all along than if they'd never decided at all.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by leftover on Monday January 28 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
IMHO we should all just drop the smoke screen noise about whether change is caused by humans or not. Change is happening. Period. Change has always been happening. What do we need to do about it? Probably flood-proofing the coastal cities would be a good place to start. Perhaps we could also move water-intensive food production to places where there is water. And as Rev. Al Kinnison screamed long ago about food distribution, "Move to where the food is!"
In general, start doing something useful instead of pissing, moaning, and arguing.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @06:20PM
Thankfully other governments are working on the problem. The US is still stuck arguing with people like Runaway whose "common sense" beats out all the scientists everywhere.
Governments often only take action when the people are pissing, moaning, and arguing enough for them to take things seriously. The "human" portion is incredibly important because we need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions along with needed engineering projects.