Slight inaccuracy, the data only goes back to 1979 and has not yet been verified by NOAA which has data going back to 1880.
It’s also worth noting that this is based on the Climate Reanalyzer which is intended for forecasting temperatures, not record keeping.
It would be more accurate to say it was the hottest day ever recorded by the Climate Reanalyzer.
Source: https://time.com/6292103/worlds-hottest-day-preliminary-record/
This. It’s also not accurate to say it’s the warmest we’ve been in the past 10,000 years, it was likely warmer during the roman warm period, and potentially a couple of other points. So we can only really say it’s the warmest we’ve seen in the last couple hundred years.
That’s not to say this isn’t concerning, we’re on track to smash the roman warm periods average temperatures within our lifetimes and make the earth the hottest it’s been since the paleoscene, which would have massive ramifications. But we’re not there yet, the problem is that we will likely get there in the next few decades.
in the next few decades.
I appreciate your optimism.
If you want some more optimism, we actually have slowed the rate of warming from what was predicted 20 years ago. The reality we are living in would have been considered an “optimistic prediction” at one point. We are still warming, things are still going in the wrong direction, but the changes that people have been making to mitigate global warming are making an impact. We might still be going over the cliff, but at least we’re doing it with our brakes on instead of full speed ahead. So yes, I do think it will be decades before we truly break temperature records that have been seen by humans, maybe even several decades. That doesn’t downplay the significance of the need to stop it though
From what I’ve heard about our current climate warming situation I’d downgrade the metaphor from using breaks to taking the foot off the pedal a bit.
You can slam the brakes on your Camry but there’s an oil tanker behind you and all they’re doing is laying on the horn and pointing at their green logo while shoving your car off the cliff.
That’s what the oil industry likes to think, but they’re actually with us in the Camry. There is only the Camry, we’re all on the Camry together, good and bad.
Yeah, but the mega rich oil execs have ejector seats and parachutes.
What about tipping points? I hear about ice cover, ocean currents, and other systems where once we get past a tipping point, additional warming is self sustaining. At that point it doesn’t matter if we have our brakes on, we’ve gone over the cliff right?
If we end up triggering a self-sustaining feedback loop, that’s how I understand it, yeah. We still do have some very high risk strategies we could implement, like solar shielding to reduce total light reaching the earth, or bioengineering plants that suck up carbon super efficiently, but it’s hard to say what the impacts of those would be
I don’t see either of those happening because there’s no short-term profit. Also, unintended consequences.
I wouldn’t consider solar shielding high risk, since it would be easy to design fail-safe, but I totally wouldn’t trust bioengineering methods, since life uhh… finds a way.
Too bad there’s a lag time of about 40 years on emissions. We’re only feeling the effects of what was emitted in the early 80s. Imagine how bad it’ll be in 20 years time.
Can you tell me more about this?
Sure. Essentially what happens is the ocean absorbs much of the CO2 that’s released by us. If you’ve ever heard the term “ocean acidification” that’s what causes it.
Water and the oceans change on a much more gradual scale than the atmosphere, so it takes decades for the CO2 to be released back into the air. For example, if you bring a pot of water to an open flame it still takes time for the water to reach the temperature to boil, it’s not instantaneous.
The ocean is far more massive than our atmosphere. It’ll take time for the changes to take effect, especially a noticeable one on our end. But if you take a look at the ph levels of the oceans over the last century it becomes abundantly clear we’re messing things up big time.
Oh that’s crazy I didnt know about that. Does the water just absorb the CO2 somehow or does it have to do with algea?
At least the “medieval warm period” which gets cited a lot, was a regional phenomenon and global temperatures are higher today. The Wikipedia page seems to suggest the same for the Roman warm period.
The Roman warm period was about 2 degrees F warmer than today when you’re measuring global average temperatures, not just in europe, although it was more pronounced in europe. At current rates though, we’ll break that bar in 40 years or so though
Imma need some sources for that claim.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last_2,000_years
You act like you use the word Paleoscene like you know when it was.
I don’t.
I did however hear on the BBC News Podcast that Nerds are saying we should change the name of the period we’re in now to be the “Time of Man” and I realised that I have no idea what Epoch we are currently in.
So I thought I’d ask you. Then I’ll memorise your answer and be less dumb.
Please help.
Edit: I know how to use Google but this way is more fun sometimes.
If I were to pick one, I’d call it the Menocene. Seems apt.
I did Google it though, if you want the actual answer.
Paleocene was the time right around when the dinosaurs died, so about 65 million years ago. you’ve heard of Jurassic, and maybe you’ve even heard of cretaceous, this is the one that comes right after those two. Right now we’re in the Holocene. The reason I mentioned it though is because (as far as we can tell) it was the hottest period in earth’s history, with average temperatures 8 degrees Celsius higher than today (which is a ton, the fact that it’s an average makes it seem less insane than it actually is). we’re nowhere close to getting as warm as it was then, but even if we got half that hot in a relatively fast amount of time (like we are) it could still cause mass extinction.
Thanks. I have heard of all of these times I just had no idea where they are in relation to each other.
Holocene is the current geological time it cover from now to a out 11,000 years ago from the last glacial period… The Paleoscene was about 66-56 million years ago.
the data only goes back to 1979 and has not yet been verified by NOAA which has data going back to 1880.
There’s a whole hot world outside of America who don’t need to wait for its underfunded organizations to get around to validating the data.
But I get it. The news is dire. It’s neat to cling to uncertainty in times like this unless you lived in Lytton
Welcome to the coldest summer for the rest of your life :)
Thats a nice way to put it. Thank you.
Why would you do that?
And just a week ago I was talking to these boomers that were explaining me how “we should all stop being so attached to climate fear” and that “everything will just sort itself out and we’ll live just fine”.
Yea, no shit boomer
They meant that they’ll live just fine. You see, they will be dead before climate change decimates our planet. 🤷♂️
It won’t decimate the planet, but it will make the planet a lot less habitable for humans.
So yes depending on where they live they will be just fine, but a lot of people will die. Because of this there will be huge migrations and struggels with having enough resources…
but it will make the planet a lot less habitable for humans.
And, unfortunately, for a wide range of other species.
And that is already happening in a small scale. All those natural disasters that are happening all over the world. And especially the poorer country’s on the south half of the globe are struggling with stuff like wood fires, smaller harvests because of the heat. And it’s all just going to get worse. I hate humanity.
Looks less likely every year, they’re running out of time quick
Boomers: “We had hot days in the 60’s and 70’s as well and you didn’t hear us complain”
My parents’ go-to is that everyone was freaking out about an incoming ice age in the 60s (they weren’t), and thus climate experts are all completely clueless and have no clue what they’re talking about.
And they wonder why I visit less than before.
I read this as olive oil and meat. LOL. Yum, steak!
Try avocado oil instead to avoid hot boxing your kitchen
Thanks for the tip. I like avocados as well.
So far.
So true it burns.
…enjoy this summer; it’s the coolest one you’ll experience for the rest of your life…
literally…
I think, as individuals; we all need to pick up our game and do our part in polluting and destroying the planet more. We can’t let the corporations do all the heavy lifting after all.
Edit: I don’t think I came across properly here, given the replies. This was sarcasm saying we need to fuck up the planet more to keep pace with the rate the corporations do.
But we are. According to the USDA, food waste makes up 22% of the food industries 26% CO2 emissions. And don’t forget the diseases food waste produces.
That food waste is largely due to arbitrary date labels and grocery stores throwing out literal tons of perfectly good food instead of donating it.
And believe it or not, part of this is because people don’t like to pick up the weird looking tomato, or the banana with a few peckles.
According to the USDA, again, the majority of food waste is at the household level.
Circling back to the arbitrary date labels
Yes. Our 12% will really make a difference vs corporations’ 80%. And we can get to that 12% if so 8 billion of us work together. I’m doing my 0.0000001% part!
You know corporations build shit people buy, right? It’s not like they pollute for the fun of it. They pollute because we give them money to do it…
Kinda orthogonal but I will say it’s weird that we can still vote with our wallets.
I personally plan on returning my rechargeable AA batteries and going single use from now on. it’s the little things that help
Honestly corporations are only producing what consume. We are using corporations as scapegoats. If we don’t realize this soon and don’t change it ways…
There are more efficient, greener ways to go about producing pretty much everything we use that doesn’t destroy the earth. Problem is is that it’s not as profitable for share holders.
If you haven’t seen it, The Good Place is a great show and they discuss this basically. Should we be responsible for tracking the output of every company before we buy any product?
(The answer is: of course not. We don’t have enough time in the world for that. The correct solution is regulation and taxing for negative externalities during the production process. If the cost of negative externalities is built into the cost of the product, then it will be less benificial to purchase a product with a dirty supply chain.)
How do you tax Saudi Arabia corporations? How do you tax Russian corporations? They just make up the difference we don’t produce. Is it wise to send all that money to those countries because we won’t stop consuming? How is taxing our corporations helping them be competitive on the world market? We give everyone else a free pass but bill our corporations.
Curious: how do they know that? Recorded history is like 5k years right?
Scientists use climate proxy records like coral skeletons, tree rings, glacial ice cores, and sediment layers. For example, the levels of oxygen 16 in a layer of ocean debris and fossils go up as temperatures rise. So a high level of oxygen 16 in sediment from one layer tells scientists that the planet was hot and watery when the sediment was laid down.
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The point is that they’ve established a relationship between o16 levels and temperature, so if you’ve got twice the o16 then say it was 25% warmer (made up ratio, I haven’t read the study).
This doesn’t tell us what the air temperature was, but it does tell us what it wasn’t (IE upper and lower bounds).
When you have several of these proxies it helps narrow down the temperature range (think how your god works better when you have more satellites).
Now if you know that the last seven days are the hottest on record and you know from your proxies that you are outside of temperatures of the past 100k years then it’s a pretty safe bet to state that we’re at the hottest time in the past 100k years.
There is no melodrama or lying in this fact, unfortunately.
It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).
Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.
Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place. For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C). Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.
Sources:
- IPCC WG1, figure2_1
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7
Also, about oxygen 16 and oxygen 18:
The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly higher concentration of heavy oxygen compared to the universal standard, and the ice develops a higher concentration of light oxygen. Thus, high concentrations of heavy oxygen in the ocean tell scientists that light oxygen was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios can show how much ice covered the Earth. Sources:
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_OxygenBalance which is based on https://hal.science/hal-03334828/file/jgrD1994Jouzel25791.pdf
- You may also find this wikipedia article useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Δ18O#Extrapolation_of_temperature
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Don’t forget steel. quick stats
Global temps can’t melt steel beams…
Vermont just had flooding that was on par with Hurricane Irene.
They’re calling it a 1000 year rarity. It happened 12 years ago. Only this time there was no hurricane.
There are ocean temperatures in the fucking 90s.
This hurricane season is gonna be batshit crazy, y’all.
Thanks humanity, I’m sure that this will cause no long term issues and we can just keep using the same economic and political systems while not worrying about it at all.
My fault. I like plastic straws in my scorpion bowls.
Damn, why’d you go and cause all of climate change? Not cool.
Nope, not cool, def hot! Getting hotter.
Don’t worry all of this will soon be over.
I guess this is supposed to be taken as a bleak joke but it won’t be over soon. We all will likely experience a direct hit to our quality of life. If you’re poor, your survival will get harder. If you have or want children they will have fundamentally worse lives, compared to what we experienced so far. This can go on for decades or centuries, depending on how much we can stsill fix and what tipping points occur.
So yeah, hope that is some motivation to change something. Or at least shout at some people. :)
The solution is not to have children. Everything else is pissing in the wind.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Until we colonize other planets, downsizing is the only way humanity will survive.
One thing to note is that if everyone stops having children, it will create a demographic crisis with a lot of older people / pensioners not able to work and not a lot of working age people to support the aging population. Good for environment ofc but quite bad for the remainder of population.
Fully agreed. But harder to sell unfortunately :(
There are other fulfilling things to do with your life besides having kids. People need to realize this.
Yes. But you are arguing against lots of social programming, cultural expectations and religious backgrounds. It’s hard.
The company I work for makes power infrastructure for data centres and the like, 3 phase 400v conductors, the smallest we make is 1000 amp rated and we go up to 6000 amp rated, that is a hell of a lot of power and we run 24 hours a day 7 days a week pumping out miles of these to power the data centres that run the internet so we can be shitty to each other
Gotta love them for giving us nice warm weather
The oil, meat and shipping industries: “It’s called a streak, baby”
If only we had deflation people would not overconsume so much
bu… buut economic growth > everything else …?
How else are they supposed to assuage the feeling that they’re not some immortal magical beings living some divine simulation/game as the chosen
onesplayers?We can’t deflate form 8 billion people and counting
Germany tried it once … I mean twice
Don’t forget about the Chinese. They tried too and they were much more efficient.
Malthus was wrong about this too. It’s not the population that’s a problem, it’s miles of strip malls, filled with cheap trash, and meat and dairy every meal of the day.
