Not trying to deny anything but with the length of records and a random distribution you’d still expect “hottest year” to happen pretty often. (Somebody please do the statistics)
With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often.
In other words… setting records means something, but less than one would expect by default.
The more valid statistic is something like n of the last 30 years have been the warmest on record, or something along those lines.
It must have been so nice to experience the climate in the 1890s, imagine summers which were just nice and short, winters with beautiful, high quality and consistent snow falls and more permanently snow capped mountains.
There are also natural long period climate cycles that global warming is on top of. Solar changes, small orbital and axis changes, long period climate resonances caused by many other things as well.
Basically everyone ever for thousands of years experienced different weather patterns as adults than as children. Also perception of weather as an adult and what actually gets remembered…
Climate is not naturally static and you can’t attribute every change to humans. There is a lot going on.
I'm not sure which random distribution you mean ... But if you assume a normal distribution with constant mean, and, say, 100 years of records, the chances of you still getting the hottest now are very very small
It's important to keep in mind that the sensationalism we see in this sort of reporting is generally far removed from the actual science.
Most of this stuff is built on models that are constantly being improved with more data, or in some cases being skewed to meet a predetermined desired outcome.
The earth is in the final stages at the end of an ice age.
It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact. We exited a major glacial period and have been, for 11000 years, ending an ice age (a period with glacial ice at both polar regions).
CURRENTLY, the period of time we are living in, is considered interglacial despite glaciers still covering significant portions of earth. The expectation is a return to major glaciation. This would be horrible. It is also the predominant condition throughout the history of earth.
> It's weird, but for some reason people can't seem to recognize this fact.
Who is not recognizing that fact?
Where people are disagreeing with - and you've heard this before, don't act like this is new - is that us leaving an ice age doesn't explain the rapid rise in temperature we're experiencing. Previous ice ages haven't ended this abruptly. So what does your comment add here?
People keep throwing in things like this as if it was an actual insight instead of a distraction.
The state of climate will not have a direct effect on your life, the span of years you are alive. Not to a significant degree.
It can have an indirect effect on your life by the introduction of harmful regressive policies designed to "account" for a changing climate and assign blame to everyday people.
Everyday people do not cause any of the drivers of climate change. Large corporations, governments and militaries do cause these drivers.
So what I'm adding here is sense.
It makes no sense to cripple an economy and destroy the middle class when it is clear there will not be global cooperation in addressing climate change. To be clear we are talking about the fact that BRICs will not cripple their growth and economy for the sake of this guilt complex.
Most countries can't even make a measurable change in comparison to these groups.
> The state of climate will not have a direct effect on your life, the span of years you are alive. Not to a significant degree.
The state of the climate already has a direct effect on my life by making summers way hotter than normal. I hate the warm temperatures over weeks, and my grandparents literally haven't known these kinds of summers until the last couple of years. This wouldn't have shifted so fast if it was just the exit of the ice age.
And that's just me disliking warmth. There are people living in areas that now literally are getting too hot for humans, which they weren't previously. There are people living through catastrophes which most likely would have been less severe if not for climate change.
> It can have an indirect effect on your life by the introduction of harmful regressive policies designed to "account" for a changing climate and assign blame to everyday people.
It's having a worse effect just by itself!
> Everyday people do not cause any of the drivers of climate change. Large corporations, governments and militaries do cause these drivers.
And to work towards that fact you spread climate change denial in the form of "we're just exiting an ice age"?
Yes it is and your anecdotes don't mean much. You are saying the winters are less severe. The growing season is longer and it is generally more habitable.
>people living through catastrophes which most likely would have been less severe if not for climate change.
Disentangle some emotion from the facts. People are dying less than ever before due to catastrophes. People that die from natural disaster today, largely have encroached on land that was always disaster prone and built massive infrastructure. The cost of natural disasters today is a direct result of populating and constructing in areas that are prone to tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fire and flooding. It is almost completely preventable.
>you spread climate change denial
False. This is a blatant lie as my comment states clearly, I believe the climate is changing. We are exiting an ice age.
The solutions promoted by people like yourself, are going to cause greater harm than good because you choose to believe the climate should not change! Yes, you who choose to make foolish argument and use phrases like "climate change denial". Yes, you are in denial that the climate is allowed to change.
'The weather should be just the way it was when my grandparents remember the good old days' -you
No, sorry it is you and your internal strife with change that is the problem. Petition the government to change the ways companies and militaries pollute the environment. Leave the rest of us alone with your carbon tax bullshit that we must pay for.
>>> The state of climate will not have a direct effect on your life, the span of years you are alive. Not to a significant degree.
>> I describe the direct effect the state of climate is having on my life
> Yes it is and your anecdotes don't mean much.
What?
> The cost of natural disasters today is a direct result of populating and constructing in areas that are prone to tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fire and flooding. It is almost completely preventable.
False, natural disasters are happening more often and are more intense, leading people who didn't "encroach on Land" to suffer for it. Just look at the heat in large parts of Asia.
> False. This is a blatant lie as my comment states clearly, I believe the climate is changing. We are exiting an ice age.
I'm sure this felt very clever when you typed it, but you and I both know that I was referring to anthropomorphic climate change, which you are actively denying.
> The solutions promoted by people like yourself, are going to cause greater harm than good because you choose to believe the climate should not change!
Wrong. You know that is not my position, didn't act like you think it is.
Hey, I don't know you at all or your position. I don't assume anything other than the comments you make. You do seem to assume what I believe.
>you and I both know that I was referring to anthropomorphic climate change, which you are actively denying
I'm not denying anything about climate, I'm denying the severity of outcomes you claim. There is a major difference.
You should look into some data about natural disasters.
They cost more now. That's about it. Don't take some news infomercial segment as truth. Go read the statistics.
If someone makes a claim that something is "more severe" because the damage costs more to repair, then that is technically a factual statement. It doesn't further the position that the event was actually more severe than weather in the past.
The slight changes in weather you've experienced will not make your life shorter. You experience some discomfort because you aren't acclimated to warmer temperatures.
I'm claiming that the predictions of doom due to man made climate change are a farce. They are designed to get at you, emotionally.
It has worked.
The return to an ice age, even briefly (such as the Little Ice Age) would be truly catastrophic with today's population.
They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades.
Also, depending on where and how you measure, it will naturally be 'hotter' because the world is getting more urbanized. And cities are artificially hotter.
> People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever.
I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint. Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic?
It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about.
> I really don't get this kind of straw-man complaint.
I didn't make a straw man complaint. Also straw man isn't a complaint. It's a fallacious form of argument.
> Do you think people care about average temperature of the world during the Paleoproterozoic?
You completely missed my point. I don't know if it is intentional or not. Maybe this is a language issue?
> It's like hearing someone saying "Residents scramble as snowfall on Boston breaks record" and then complaining "The entire Boston area was under a mile of ice once!" Yes, we know, and that's not we're talking about.
No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'.
> No. It's like saying 'Boston in uncharted history as Boston breaks snowfall record since last winter'.
... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ...
We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose, and most likely quite a bit before that. It's even explained in TFA:
> While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century, they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ...
> ... And yet you take issue with me calling it a straw-man argument ...
Yes. Either you don't understand what a straw man is or it really is a language issue. Is english your native language? You completely missed my original point. And you missed the point of my response.
> We know that this is the hottest global temperature since the civilization arose
Civilization? We are talking about the 'hottest year on record'. Do you know what 'on record' means? It's only a few decades though many people mistake it to mean 'since forever'. It doesn't mean since civilization began. Also, civilization is about 5000 years old. Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. So even if it is the 'hottest' since civilization began, it really doesn't say much.
> '> While the records are based on data that only goes back to the mid-20th century'
That's my point. Do you know what that means?
> they are “almost certainly” the warmest the planet has seen over a much longer time period – “probably going back at least 100,000 years,” ...
From 'on record' to agenda driven weasel words like 'almost certainly' and 'probably'. I remember it was 'almost certainly' and 'probably' likely that the world would end due to global warming by 2020.
I'm having flashbacks to a famous decades old climate denialism talking point heavily pushed by the Koch pro oil media think tanks.
One so famous that it was studied in depth by a prominent US physics professor [1] and (then) climate skeptic using some Koch funding.
The results of the 2013 Berkeley Earth land temperature data analysis on urban heat islands answers your concerns:
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. [1]
and
The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies. [2]
You missed the followup. People investigated BEST and discovered it was doing the same things with the same sorts of mistakes as other climatological temperature datasets. For example they classified the weather stations at Bangkok airport as "very rural". Like always with climatology the process they used to do all this is non-replicable, so people could see the mistakes but not diagnose how they happened or attempt to fix them. Plus, although Berkeley Earth claimed UHI was unimportant, basic checks like comparing the warming of cities vs more rural stations showed huge differences.
There's also the issue that BEST has diverged drastically from satellite observations. It's not possible for both sources to be true simultaneously as they claim to be measuring the same thing.
It's not hugely surprising that they claimed to investigate these concerns and then simply duplicated the bad methodologies that were being criticized in the first place. Berkeley Earth is run by a guy who has said, amongst other things,
"I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium."
In the same article where he said that he observed that anyone who took issue with the Mann hockey-stick history rewrites were attacked and people had engaged in mass resignations simply because papers disagreeing with it were published.
There's a fundamental philosophy of science issue here that can't be resolved with the "one more study" approach. Climatologists don't attempt to improve their source data quality. They don't build and operate weather station networks, they rely on others that were built for other purposes. Although the changes they claim to be monitoring are very small (like 0.1-0.2 C per decade) they don't set up the instruments they need to obtain such precise and accurate measurements. Instead they suck up data from literally any thermometer they can find and then apply algorithms that they claim correct the bias and corruption. This isn't scientifically valid. If scientists have doubts about their source data they're supposed to use error bars, but when did you ever see a temperature graph that had error bars? They never do because many of the stations they use report uncertainty intervals of anywhere from half a degree C to even 5 degrees C. These CIs are much wider than the size of the claimed trend and would thus destroy any ability to detect warming from the ground station network. So, they rely on this algorithmic approach, but that isn't convincing due to how frequently they decided their previous algorithms were wrong and rewrite the history of the climate.
> They headlined it for emotional impact and clicks. People read "on record" and think it's the hottest the earth has been ever. When it's really 'the hottest' it's been the past few decades.
It's the hottest it's ever been for human civilization, and it's going to keep getting hotter and hotter.
With a very slightly warming planet it would indeed happen quite often.
In other words… setting records means something, but less than one would expect by default.
The more valid statistic is something like n of the last 30 years have been the warmest on record, or something along those lines.