The Institute's Climate Reanalyzer also has some visual data of historical daily sea surface temps that is referenced quite a bit these days.
Data only stretches back to the late 70s/early 80s, but many of the hottest trending years are within the last decade.
A recent example: Nordstream bombing was the "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history". US govt blames Ukrainian actors[1]. Yet Greta Thunberg hasn't made a peep about it, and recently did a photo op with the Ukrainian govt, which also hasn't spoke out about it.
It's unbelievably cynical. For some people, environmentalism is just a means to power.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
If you can't be convinced by simple explanations and if you can't be convinced by harder explanations then you are just spreading doubts and part of the problem.
edit: "what if we are wrong" fuck that shit, it's the same shit from the crowd of "but what if we develop interstellar travels and escape climate change consequences, haha gotcha" or "we'll just invent a carbon extractor in the next 10 years for the whole planet et voilà, ah!".
"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-...
Your comment reminded me of this comic, “what if we create a better world for nothing” is basically what you’re saying.
[1] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/SY/SY00/20160202/104399/HHRG...
For a long time scale, a rapid warming is associated with a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. This causes ocean acidification. Ocean acidification leaves a clear record in the paleontological record. The last one which was comparable to what we're doing through now was https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-... about 55 million years ago. And current projections for the speed and severity of acidification are worse. Which indicates that the warming that we are going through is also faster than that experienced at any point in the last 55 million years.
The science behind climate change is simple and more than 90% of the worlds experts in geology, ecology, climatology, oceanography, chemistry, physics, etc all are in agreement that global warming is real and caused by humans. Here's a FAQ from the times if you'd like a reference https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warmin...
Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people.
The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future.
This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario.
But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact.
[1]https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india...
- You Asked: If CO2 Is Only 0.04% of the Atmosphere, How Does it Drive Global Warming? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/30/co2-drives-glob...
- How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
- Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Antarctic Sea Ice Extent records: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/antarcti...
Ocean Temperature records: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2023/05/01/record-warm-oceans...
2-Meter Air Temperature records: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
You have to look back 3 million years to see the same GHGe concentrations and temperatures that earth is reaching now (the two are closely correllated throughout most of earth history, and easily explained by science - the greenhouse effects, and the thin earth surface and atmosphere mostly acting as a closed system).
We see that both ice, ocean and air are heating up and accellerating as of 2023. What is observed now is in-line with projections, such as summed up in this hobbyist article (taken with some grains of salt): https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
Even if some of what is summarized on the notes linked above may be exhaggerated, it seems this is now happening sooner, faster and more relentless than IPCC and scientific consensus have found so far.
Note that any averages or aggregates on measurements, such as those IPCC and climate scientists use, will lag reality by approximately half the period used. So using multi-year averages means we will already be too late when long-term averages show accelleration, even if final calculations will be more stable ("smoother") by using averages. Of course there's no way to really "cheat" this, but that means when we now see we are in uncharted territory, it should be taken seriously.
Now we do. That is lethal.
Stop telling everyone "this is fine" because it's not.
Walking back in time, we have to go to 115k-130k years ago to find a hotter time period. That's during a brief Eemian period, before the last glacial period (where the glaciars retreated for good). This is called the Pleistocene era. Heaven help us if we breach that peak, whatever it was, but for a couple hundred years it looks like it was +3.5 or 4 C hotter on average than our 1960-1990 average.
It was around 2.5m years ago that the earth actually stayed consistently hotter: the Pilocene era.
The data isnt exactly precise but the conclusion should be resounding & clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Ov...
Doing science. Thing is, unlike what everybody likes to pretend, doing science means to do a lot of tedious hard work and not a whole lot of quick explanations. So the thing is, that we understand the physics of dilute gasses at roughly room temperature phenomenally well, we did all the experiments of putting this gas into a piston, and then heating the piston slightly, and then do it with a slightly different gas mixture, and then we double checked all these experiments and finally we got a pretty good theory sometime around the turn of the 19th century. Then you start to integrate all that knowledge with a knowledge of radiation basis, and you start doing cross checks and try to understand weather, and at some point try to start forecasting wether, with all the associated trouble and that was then sometime in the let's say 1960ies or thereabouts. (During WWII the flying wing of the US Army had meteorologists at all airfields, I believe German news started to broadcast weather forecast in the late 60ies.) Then you do all that with bigger computers and quite a bit of theory of partial differential equations, and then you realize that understanding the 11 year average is a much much better defined problem than next weeks weather. And all of these steps do suggest different cross checks. (Actually in the Physical Science Basis part of the 5th IPCC report there is a chapter called Evaluation of Climate Models ([0], p. 741), which goes into quite a bit of detail on the most recent efforts along those lines.)
[0] AR5: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
the Principle Investigator here has a Nobel Prize in Physics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Criticisms
