2020 Had the Warmest September on Record, Data Shows
nytimes.comIt is distinctly unhelpful to keep trying to make people feel bad. People experiencing negative emotions are less capable of effecting positive outcomes.
It is also unhelpful to keep referring to individual points like this as illustrative. It's hypocritical and provides ammunition to climate change deniers when they say things like "But this spring was really cold!" Weather is not climate and a year over year comparison of one calendar month is not a trend.
This is exactly the kind of nonsense article I would publish if I were a climate change denier.
> It is also unhelpful to keep referring to individual points like this as illustrative.
I don't know if you're in the US, but this is untrue here.
Our most-watched media outlet spreads climate-change denial, as does the (minority) party that has controlled our federal -- and most state -- governments for the last few years.
One of their tactics is literally to say that there is still snow, so global warming can't be real[1].
Articles like this are the counterpoints to that narrative, and there is evidence that individual data points are convincing[2] to people who are not able (or willing) to understand long-term statistical information.
1. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/02/3-years-ago-...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/03/climate-chan...
If your plan is to defend the truth with lies, don't be surprised when your political opponents don't take you seriously.
The environmentalist movement has long been dogged by a sizeable aura of people who dilute the message with craziness and false claims. They are the major reason why progress is so slow - very few people trust them anywhere near anything important. I've yet to see an English-speaking Green party that I'd accept as competent to set policy even assuming they have the correct problems identified.
>falsifiable claims
Surely you must mean "false" claims?
Yes. I was thinking "means able to be proved false" in my head, then I took myself too literally. I fixed it.
> dogged by a sizeable aura of people who dilute the message with craziness and false claims
Maybe .. but on the other hand, craziness and false claims emanating from right-wingers and even the Presidential Twitter Account seem to get taken seriously and make progress.
Scottish Green Party (separate from the Green Party of England And Wales, who do indeed have a bit of a lunatic fringe and ended up picketing their own council at one point) seem to be pretty good to me. Including sensible but difficult to implement policies like "how about we don't have a hundred-foot column of gas flame over Fife all the time".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5... (yes, this is a pet issue, but I can see a lot of CO2 right there)
Do you think they should not be publishing news on the fact that this September had the hottest global temperature average on record and that the previous record had been set just last year? If this is not newsworthy, I don't know what is.
The trend is extremely scary, and we sure as hell should be scared:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Your comment supposes that people are unable to make changes to their condition though.
This kind of data is helpful for people who like to make evidence-based decisions in life. If an asteroid were heading for Earth would you want the news to ignore it?
Normalcy bias is a huge problem but if you're paying attention it is prudent to use information like this to decide where to live, whether to have kids, etc. it could have a huge impact on decisions like "Should I apply for job in Los Angeles, or Toronto?" So far, I haven't regretted moving from the place the article uses to illustrate hot weather to a cooler, wetter, more stable country.
a year over year comparison of one calendar month is not a trend
I'm in my 40s and I've been seeing headlines like "hottest September on record" since my twenties. This is just the most recent one.
You will continue to see them for the rest of your life.
Putting your head in the sand, because of your own anxiety, will definitely not help more than articles such as this one.
In any important social movement, there is a large amount of people who will do nothing, there is a smaller amount of people that would provide support, and there is a much smaller group who will do the majority of the work.
The "make people feel bad" will only affect the large amount of people who wouldn't do anything anyway and who wouldn't be convinced to do anything until there is much larger social pressure.
These kinds of articles might actually inspire that smaller group do do more because it's so so bad. The data is REALLY bad. That small group will create a larger group who would provide support (financial, etc). Once a critical mass is hit, the larger group who was turned away because of bad feelings will come around.
It's more important to focus on the people who would actually do something and who would provide support. These articles and stories don't turn away the people doing all the work, it actually inspires them more.
For example, I am one of those people and this article makes me want to do more and puts more urgency into it.
> It is also unhelpful to keep referring to individual points like this as illustrative. It's hypocritical and provides ammunition to climate change deniers when they say things like "But this spring was really cold!"
I don’t know why you are bringing this up. The article is talking about global temperatures and global records. Not a cold snap in your local town.
Everyone should agree with the first point that it's unhelpful to try to make people feel bad, but I don't think that is what's happening here. Healthy people, almost by definition, should be able to look at all the major headlines in the world without getting emotional and going into a spiral of depression. We both probably have parents/friends with unhealthy emotional processing habits, but we shouldn't accept our distorted reality on how normal, healthy people emotionally process news.
What do you suggest as an alternative?
Let's say we stop publishing true facts like this, in order to maintain some sort of message control. What do you propose that message actually be?
I've looked a few times, but I have been unable to find a table of global average temperatures by month for the past few decades. The only "true facts" that newspapers publish are those that are cherry-picked.
I, personally, accept climate change on faith because I defer to the experts. However, it's shocking to me how inaccessible unbiased facts are. It is conceivable that record cold temps are being set just as often. It's conceivable that nearly everything is a record if global averages are just now being recorded by month (or if they have been rebaselined after a methodology change).
Articles like this raise more questions than they answer. They aren't going to convince someone who isn't already convinced, and they only demoralize those who already are convinced.
I believe that being exposed to the same piece of information repeatedly causes us humans to believe it is true, whether it's true or not. So the evidence suggests that articles like this actually are helpful, since there are only so many times you can read that this is the warmest [month] on record before you start to believe that things probably are getting warmer overall.
But as to what you were seeking, here were my first DDG results:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
I think newspapers publish things that are news, which means it's something that happens at a given point in time. A monthly number is news, while "the past few decades" is not. An organization putting out a press release is news, so if that mentions a long-term trend, that can become news, but if it hasn't changed in any detail since the last report, then it's not really news either.
Newspapers, and news sources in generally, are really bad at communicating long-term trends like global climate change, unfortunately.
It depends. For quick specific actions it is a proper method to make people feel bad. Examples: "Fire! Get out!" Or "Hot September! Sign petition here!"
However, if you want people to find creative solutions to complex problems, a positive message works better. "Yes, we can!"
Well, don't look back... see forward: September 2020 was one of the coldest Septembers of the next hundred years!
Is this not anxiety inducing for anyone else? Is that why I see these posts fall away quickly, or is news like this just expected now, and so not that interesting?
shrug I'm already maxed out on anxiety. Disaster is indeed expected now.
These large issues are tackled with large coordinated effort. Voting is the primary way to affect this.
Now, all we need is a place to vote if we want Climate Warning or not!
Instead, we have vote for president. That vote may affect the actions on climate change, but it may not be in the way you want. And it has lots and lots of related side affects.
Let us say that the president who would take more steps to curb global warming would also cause growth in a non US country that is environmentally destructive. Or that they themselves would make so many deals and compromises that the deal that gets passed is actually a long term net loss.
I am totally not saying that will happen, but making things too black and white can lead to surprises.
So, like it has worked for so many other issues...
I have had enough life experience to know that so much is beyond our control. We could die of a car accident tomorrow. Cancer could strike us down within the next six months.
We know the problem here. We have some solutions. We just need to act!
Yes! You could die in a car accident tomorrow, you can also ask the car companies to make safer cars. You could die of cancer within the next six months, and you can also ask the medical companies to make drugs to fight cancer.
As long as air conditioners continue to work and temperatures do not become unbearable in my lifetime, I don't see warming as a pressing problem.
Extreme weather kills crops. We can't air condition our way out of that one.
This is the modern way. Someone else’s problem as long as mine are solved. SMH we are never getting better enjoy the dying planet while you can.
They will become unbearable for billions of people in your life time. Maybe not where you live, but literally billions of people. Will you welcome some of them into your home?
You created an account 3 hours ago just to say this?
Here’s my issue. What amount of carbon cutting would satisfy you?
If we cut by 50% and the temperature is still rising year over year do we need to cut more? How far do you want to go and how much needs to be risked Before you’re satisfied that our carbon levels are acceptable. Sorry that you feel the world isn’t following your desires and expectations but they need more than a promise that things may get better to enact policy that will dramatically alter their entire economy, way of living, and social order.
Edit: sure downvote me and throw insults. That’s a good way to promote healthy discussion.
> the temperature is still rising year over year do we need to cut more
Cutting human carbon emission to zero today would still result in temperature increases over the next decade or so, because there's a planet-sized throughput delay in the system. Can't turn the oil tanker around that quickly.
The IPCC suggested target is 1.5-2C over the next century as being both reasonably achievable while not having too drastic an impact on the environment and agriculture.
That's covered fairly extensively in the vast amounts of literature on climate change mitigation, with all due respect. Carbon neutral in the next few decades is the short answer to your question.
Otherwise increasingly severe floods, droughts and storms will dramatically alter the economy, way of living and social order for billions of people anyway.
I have heard it claimed that 90% would be enough. I don’t know why, as at first glance that seems like it would merely slow down the rate of increase of CO2, not prevent further increases.
Likewise, I don’t know how close the world temperature is to the equilibrium for the current level of greenhouse gasses. If levels remain constant, is the global average temperature going to go up 0.5C? 0.01C? Or is equilibrium reached faster than the seasons change?
That said, I am optimistic: given the current exponential growth of renewables, I don’t think it matters. Even without major new breakthroughs in storage, all we need is to build the factories to build the solar panels, the batteries, the hydrogen electrolysis plants and the Sabatier machines. We can be carbon neutral and save money/grow our economies at the same time.
> I have heard it claimed that 90% would be enough. I don’t know why, as at first glance that seems like it would merely slow down the rate of increase of CO2, not prevent further increases.
CO₂ isn't a fixed quantity in the atmosphere that we add to. If we don't add to it, it gradually gets absorbed by natural processes on the Earth's surface.
The reason the amount in the upper atmosphere is rising is because we're producing more faster than the other processes can absorb it.
The picture is a little more complicated than that though. We are also destroying some of those absorption processes. For example through deforestation of the Amazon.
Also, CO₂ is now a proxy measure for other greenhouse gases produced by human activity. Methane in particular is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂, so that matters too and the aborption processes are different. So there are a number of cycles of different things going on, and it's a fairly complicated picture, thus all the models.
However, there are some useful simplifications, and it's too important to let arguing over details be used to avoid dealing with the basic problem. CO₂ is still the main concern and target, because it's produced by a large number of human activities, and they can be changed. Basically anything that involves burning things, whether obviously like in a car, or hidden away in some power station where you can't see it.
All that said, even if we get net CO₂ emissions down to zero now, or even negative (if we find a way), it is generally accepted that we are too late to stop a significant average temperature rise that will cause significant climate changes affecting us, and especially affecting nature across the world.
Because of this, targets these days are the result of negotiating some kind of "realistic" level of harm, which of course involves setting temperature-rise targets, and lots of politics, and plenty of political and industrial leaders trying to see what they can get away with. Nobody is really happy because some people would like less harm than the "realistic" minimum now, and some people would like to carry on with life as before because it was fun, and maybe their wealth depends on it.
> That said, I am optimistic: given the current exponential growth of renewables, I don’t think it matters. Even without major new breakthroughs in storage, all we need is to build the factories to build the solar panels, the batteries, the hydrogen electrolysis plants and the Sabatier machines. We can be carbon neutral and save money/grow our economies at the same time.
I'm completely with you on this. Technology will save the day if... well, the trouble is technology can't be taken for granted, even if there are plenty of great inventions around, and potential future inventions.
Technology can only save the day if politics, behaviour and the economy line up to allow it to happen.
I really don't think we can assume politics and people are collectively all that aligned on these issues or much else at the moment. We can't even agree on whether to protect each other from Covid or not by simple behavioral changes (social distancing, mask use etc), and that's a much more visible, short-term and simpler issue to understand than climate change.
I believe at this point it's negative, negative carbon. We are at the point where we have to start taking carbon out of the air soon. It's also not about satisfying "us" whoever "us" is. It's about preventing collapse of all life on earth including ours.
So, being genuine here. I don't care about carbon fuel, in the sense I have no particular attachment to it.
In every case where I've replaced carbon with something else, it's turned out to be preferable. Cleaner, quieter, lighter, longer lasting.
To me, there are lots of other reasons for cutting carbon than the environment. The environment is just a big plus. If we cut all carbon fuel and ended up with longer lasting, more efficient products, but global warming increased, why would I think cutting carbon had been a waste?
Personally, I'd like to see some state where there was a hypercompetitive market of many different energy sources, rather than being dominated by carbon. I'm not sure what that would eventually look like — maybe carbon would be a part, maybe not — but it would be better.
Markets won't fix this. The scale of the problem has no market solution.
The really scary thing about climate change is the time lag. The warming we are experiencing today is the effects of the carbon emitted 20 years ago. If we stopped cold turkey right now we’d still get another 20 years of warming- but we won’t. So 20 years from now, we’re going to look around and go, gee, this is getting bad, but at that point we will be committed already to another 20 years of warming after that.
I expected more from Covid, for it to be a miracle cure for global warming, what with planes grounded and people not in the same consumption patterns.
But no, turning off the taps or turning down the taps a tiny bit isn't going to suddenly bring a halt to warming temperatures.
Interestingly though we have some people wanting to bring emissions to a halt for climate change reasons. But, with things like Chess you have to think a few moves ahead. Has anyone thought ahead past a drastic cut in emissions? If everyone stopped consuming (as if) and temperatures still went up, how would that work out? It would be a bit like Covid where lockdowns happen but the pandemic is not brought under control, maybe just slowed down for a bit.
Why would you have expected Covid to have any effect on the current climate? Even the most short-lived greenhouse gas (methyl bromide) has a lifetime of 0.7 years, so any changes in emissions would not show up until now. And its relevance today is next to zero, since it's been banned along with many CFCs since the Montreal Protocol. The relevant greenhouse gases have lifetimes of years to decades.
My point is that even if we were able to drastically cut emissions (which is the current campaigning goal) we actually need to think a step further ahead than that, as in okay, we cut emissions, what now?
I have been reading the news on this climate chaos for decades so I am not naive enough to think that the planet will be magically restored to perfect tranquillity the minute the last burger eating SUV driver throws away their car keys and goes vegan. We all know we must cut emissions and go carbon negative but Covid has given us a glimpse as to how much work this really entails and how long we can sustain change for.
I think you overestimate the effect of Covid on carbon emissions. By a lot.