I always heard it was the rectal temperature of a cow, but that's not what wikipedia tells me, so someone probably made that up. One advantage of the Fahrenheit scale is that the range from 0 to 100 roughly corresponds to temperatures people normally deal with.
After moving to Europe I am completely on board with the simplicity of the metric system, however I do prefer the Fahrenheit scale for exactly the reason you described above.
A human will face winter weather conditions from 0-32F which converts to negative values on the Celsius scale (not practical).
On the other end of the spectrum for summer time conditions, there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C.
Why is it not practical? We're taught in schools that water freezes below 0C and boils above 100C thus more than 0 = hotter, less than 0 = colder, more than 100 = you're melting. If you wake up and see less than 0 on thermometer you know it's freezing time.
Am I missing something, or are we just adapted for very different climates? Freezing is "wear a sweater" to you? I don't own a winter coat, but if I did it would come out of the closet somewhere in the 5-10C range.
Yeah I mean it's certainly subjective and I aligned the numbers to fall at 10 degree boundaries. But that's roughly where I fall. Anything above freezing and I'll usually prefer a sweater with a light jacket to a full winter coat.
I'm also willing to admit that this is probably a case in which whatever system you grew up with, that's what you will prefer and no argument will sway your opinion in the other direction. (Although the metric system does have clear advantages)
Pre-industrial levels when we were still coming out of significant cooling period. In every other period of human history, increased average temperatures have coincided with golden ages. Depending on where you peg your baseline for what "normal" temperatures are, the projections can look more or less scary.
I'm suspicious of anyone attempting to boil down the operations of such a dynamic, chaotic system as climate into simple cause and effect. There's so damn many things that feed back on each other, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we think we understand. Much more research needs to be done.
I'm absolutely certain with governments moving this slow right now, making small goals for 2050, getting courted by lobbies to not push through massive restrictions, probably most of these very dark predictions will come true. I, as a concerned citizen can do nothing against the corporations ruling our society, overruling politicians or outright controlling them directly. We are probably beyond any point of return. The people that yearn for the next payday will get their money and probably will be able to save themselves in an underground bunker or a suite in the mountains, while the rest of the poor and middle class burn in the ashes they leave behind.
People blaming governments and corporations are merely using faceless scapegoats because the truth is too terrible to behold.
Normal every day people don't really believe in climate change, don't really want to do anything and in fact don't have the dimmest clue as to what needs to be done, nor how to do that.
I think dealing with the above fact is too much for people, so instead we simplify using familiar models and tropes.
Eh. This is a coordination problem, probably the most difficult one humanity has encountered. Governments were basically invented to help solve coordination problems. 7.5 billion people don’t just start caring about the problem by themselves.
That's not the number many would like to see, but it's a clear majority, and we ought to be able to get stuff done with it.
I think the problem is the "faceless" part. Voters need to hold their specific elected officials responsible, and avoid the products of the worst offending companies. We should create trustworthy independent organisations that can name and shame, until we get a comprehensive emissions tax.
This is absolutely not true. People don't know that. Ask 2000 people on the street in a southern red state what their contribution to climate change is. I bet you get 0s back. "Taht fake thing isn't real" - "My car doesn't pollute you schmuck" - "the Earth is here for us to pollute it, that's what god said", etc.
People do not know that their largest personal impact is cars and meat. They just don't know that at all because 1) they don't know that climate change is real thanks to Fox and Exxon, and 2) they don't think that their habits matter.
Your assumption that they do is dangerous and wrong.
Remember that Exxon Mobil has spent 40 years knowing about the dangers of climate change, but "educating" Americans through TV that it isn't a real threat. The primary education Americans get about this topic is from the megacorporations and mega rich people who are selling us polluting products with no alternatives, and is not a real education at all.
Go to a highly educated Silicon Valley tech company. Survey around. How many of these people eat beef? How many take frequent vacations via plane?
Per capita, especially due to the plane travel, their emissions are probably as high as someone in a southern red state. Personal convenience beats doing the right ting.
Yes, I am moving more and more towards that camp too. I don't own a car, never fly, eat mainly chicken instead of beef, and consistently vote green. But I refuse to take more responsibility when the rest of the world is so obviously not picking up its share.
Like another parent said, this is a coordination problem. The collective action that people have been clamouring for for decades hasn't happened, and my personal contribution is small enough to not make a hint of a dent. Frankly, I have resigned myself to the reality that peak civilization is behind us.
The vast majority of people I know (Texas) couldn't live a productive life without a car. Some people certainly could but not most. Meat, though, they could definitely do without—and for most of them it'd be healthier.
This always sounds phoney to my ears. Move to a suburb to have a large house (3 bedrooms!), vote for parties that build roads instead of public transport, despise public transport, don't walk 100m but go by car, don't own a bicycle and then "I couldn't live without a car".
Yes they can't live without a car, agreed. But this is by their own choosing.
I believe the topic is "Climate Change" so I don't know why you're talking about diabetes and heart disease.
The argument is probably that meat production emits higher levels of carbon than other types of food production.
Unrelated, meat does have an impact on diabetes and heart disease, so if you're concerned about those things, then you should definitely learn more about it.
The vast majority of the benefit comes from cutting beef (and lamb), which I don't think is that hard of an ask. Other meat reduction has much less benefit.. and it is harder for most people to do.
The most educated people I know take regular intercontinental flights and have huge carbon footprints. They also "hate" global warming but seem totally ignorant of their out sized role in producing it.
It's about economics. Climate change keeps being presented as something we need to make huge sacrifices to do something about, and this does not work. The unwillingness to make such sacrifices, we may find reprehensible when it comes from the rich who could easily afford it, and more sympathetic when it comes from people who are barely keeping their heads above water as it stands, and reasonably suspect they would end up in a pauper's grave and never see the future they were supposed to be defending, but whether we agree with it or not, that is people's revealed preference.
So the narrative needs to stop being about sacrifice, and start being about jobs. The immense task of converting the world to renewable energy, has the potential to create millions upon millions of badly-needed jobs. It needs to start being sold that way.
You as a concerned citizen can do plenty on your own. Most people could cut down their emissions and other environmental impacts by 50% easily if they really cared.
The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.
It's the tragedy of the commons though. If I stop driving my car and go vegan, we won't see any measurable difference in climate change. The only measurable thing that happens is my quality of life going down. If enough people do it and we actually get a benefit I could even see Republicans arguing for more deregulation and balancing out all the sacrifice we made. The only practical solution is collective action. In fact I'd argue that non action of countries should be the number one reason for sanctions and if necessary military force. Our entire future is at risk here.
There are limits to what individuals can do. Take automobile fuel efficiency. Cars these days are way more efficient and cleaner than they were fifty years ago, and they perform far better. Consumer choice would never have made this happen in response to market forces. You couldn't buy an efficient, high-performance car in the late 60s even if you wanted to. Companies needed an incentive to invest for the long-long term in technologies to improve the efficiency of their products. Short term price shocks weren't going to make that happen. Only multi-decade, ratcheting fuel-efficiency regulations that applied across the board and eliminated the risk to automakers for pursuing efficiency achieved our current state where we even _have_ the choice of buying cars that can achieve 50mpg or more with adequate performance.
Yeah let's take fuel efficiency. If Americans all still drove cars with 60s fuel economy, but only drove as much per year as Germans do, they'd still (give or take) be emitting the same amount as they are now[2][3].
Now, why do they drive so much and drive such inefficient cars? It's largely because fuel is so much cheaper in the US than in the EU.
What I was trying to get at in my original comment is not that we should all solve climate change by personal action, and that public policy shouldn't be involved. I wish I could pay more taxes so the country I'm living in would migrate to renewables faster.
Rather, it's that if you look at how concerned people are politically about climate change, and then look at their revealed preferences, both when it comes to what they do personally and what they'd really stand for politically, it turns out that in the aggregate they don't take the problem seriously.
How many people who say "we must do something" in the US would say put up with a 100% increase in fuel taxes (bringing it in more in line with the EU)? I bet you'd go from 50% approval to 5% approval pretty fast.
As positive as we should paint this, when somebody does this, it doesn't at all solve the problem. Corporations and Governments need to be kept at a level that stops climate change, to make a difference.
Citizens need a reeducation regarding meat, regarding travel, regarding transportation of goods and what the globalization does to the environment. The biggest change can only be triggered by either overthrowing the government or forcing them in some other way to start worrying about this.
We need artificial meat. Research and production should be funded by meat taxation.
We need environmentally friendly travel. Research and manufacturing should be funded by fossil fuel taxation.
These tasks should be implemented using the boiling frog principle. Increase taxes and funding by ~1.5% per year until we have met a goal of 50/50% meat/artificial meat consumption and 50/50% fossil fuel/renewable fuel. At which point the taxes and funding could be freezed until a 90/10 ratio is reached and then phased out by 1.5% each year.
It wouldn't shock anyone. You'd be "boiled" into a functioning world.
There shouldn't be any specific meat taxation, there should be a generic tax on carbon emissions, which would both the externalities of meat production, as well as other products.
If you just say tax meat by the kg you end up with stupid policies like discouraging UK customers from eating beef from New Zealand over domestic produce, even though importing it from abroad is more environmentally efficient (also counting for transport)[1].
> I, as a concerned citizen can do nothing against the corporations ruling our society
Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace.
Of course more peaceful means are preferable but the option needs to be kept on the table to remember why we have and want democratic solutions in the first place.
It seems unlikely that the proletariat will overthrow the government because that government has not curtailed their own ability to buy plastic goods, drive a car, or set the air conditioning at 65F.
At least for my country, you can scream as loud as you want, people just complain about you being louder than the Television. Nothing will happen, because governments have kept the majority of the people at a low enough education that they either don't understand or don't care about these things at all. I can always see people zoning out when I talk to them about this topic. Nobody cares, because they know they won't make a difference if they do anyway.
>Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace.
I'd guess the people involved in those rebellions felt the effects of bad governance much more acutely and directly than people do (currently ...) vis-à-vis climate change.
Even the chinese government recognized that at least doing something about the coal smog is something in their own interest. My understanding is that the risk of civil unrest is what drives them.
The driver seems to be the economic incentive of becoming the world leader in renewables by getting a head start while the rest of the world drags its feet. Say what you will about authoritarian governments but they can certainly get shit done.
This will happen. It's actually already happening in developing countries.
The disruption of food supplies has been causing annual riots all over the world. The US has remained insulated from these effects by virtue of being relatively rich and relying on over-priced, highly processed foods that have enough margin to buffer against price shocks. But this is clearly an untenable situation.
Shit goes south really fast when people can't afford to eat. And the difference between Mexican or Middle Eastern food riots and American ones is that Americans will come with lots of guns.
I actually think this huge block of gun owners in America share a particular mindset with each other that means they'll become the local arm of the government in the hinterland.
Just as you always see affinity between police forces and right-wing activists, you'll see the government put on a face friendly to rural gun culture, and that group will be installed as enforcers.
So I don't buy this argument that the wide availability of guns in America in any way ensures a "Freedman's Paradise." It ensures more oppression, as the (expensive) arm of Federal power recedes.
I'm hardly an advocate of the typical right-wing position that guns keep the government in check.
But I do foresee a situation where there's a clash between the well-fed police (who want to keep it that way) and the starving poor in the US. The inner city riots will not be an issue, most metro PDs have experienced and well equipped riot control departments.
It's the armed, rural uprisings that pose a threat. Think Cliven Bundy-types leading a group of protestors in sieges of government or office buildings.
We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem.
What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar energy is starting to become incredibly efficient but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves.
What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
What lies do you think we're being told exactly? The talks of solutions have been going on for decades it's just very hard to get different governments to agree to anything even if it's non binding. Have a look at the Paris agreement and the history of failed agreements that preceded it for more information.
I believe the parent comment is referring to the lip service that politicians and business-people pay to decarbonizing, while they do very little in actuality to achieve those goals. For instance, the USA talked of the clean power plan and used it as leverage for the Paris Accords. And yet, that policy never went into effect: it was blocked by the courts and then abandoned by the current administration.
I really wish the more popular phrase were "global climate change" rather than "global warming." The delta in the mean might not appear to be huge (a few degrees C over a span of a century or two, perhaps), but the key concept is the variance or volatility of climate patterns.
As man-made climate change progresses, the average recorded temperature will likely continue to climb, sure--but the change in variance is far more significant in terms of the extreme events that will occur with increasing regularity.
I'm worried that this could be just 'the tip of the iceberg' [1]. I have a suspicion that even J. Hansen is still underestimating the issue. Just looking at [2] the variability of current estimates of stored methane is enormous - going from 10E2 to 5x10E4 Gigatonnes! Methane does greenhouse forcing 20-25x as strong as CO2 over 100 years, or as much as ~160x if you only count 10 years. Depending on how fast methane gets released this really matters - if the released methane triggers more methane to come out through warming we may be in big trouble, even without burning all coal, oil and gas reserves currently known.
Further reading concerning methane: [3], [4].
Reason why dismissing this using PETM boundary is probably invalid: There was with high certainty less methane around since PETM didn't immediately follow a cold high-storage period, solar energy was also weaker, and most importantly, PETM was caused by methane alone, not a combination of fossil fuel burning in addition to methane [5].
Just to clarify: If we get the effects of PETM alone, this means around +8C global average on top of what we're doing. But from what I'm reading, PETM effects are not the whole story as pointed out above. Not that it really matters, +10-12C global average is almost certainly a global killer alone (except bacteria), it's just that I don't think it would stabilise there, it would go on to pressure cook earth's surface until absolutely nothing is left.
This stuff has me worried by far the most, especially for my now 2yo son.
This is indeed worrisome, but the evidence I've heard suggests that it won't be as bad as +12C. Also the Earth was at +14C with respect to today at it's hottest point during the PETM, which was very bad for the earth, but life survived.
The earth will one day reach a true runaway greenhouse when the sun brightens by 10% in about 1.1 billion years. But according to J. Hansen in 2013 a complete greenhouse runaway can't happen unless the high temperatures are maintained for several million years, long enough for all the oceans to evaporate, and our own forcing will only(!) last a few tens of thousands. So my understanding is that we won't cause all life to go extinct, if that makes you feel any better.
Didn’t Hansen state that burning all coal and oil sand would do it? I‘m always wondering how much methane is assumed to be mixed in, as the amount of methane to be released is poorly understood as pointed out above.
Sorry, I should clarify: Hansen's paper indicated that burning all fossil fuels would create a 16 degree C warming, which would definitely be the end of the line for us, for reasons of heatstroke if nothing else, but in the same paper he does say that the temperature can't go up to Venus levels. So nature would eventually recover.
> I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
That's massively misleading.
The scientists that predicted that predicted it because they forecast that the cooling effect from particulate pollution such as smog would be bigger than the warming affect from greenhouse gases.
Not long after, we actually made fairly strong clean air laws and greatly cut back the particulate emissions, thus changing the assumptions that the cooling predictions were based on. The scientists that had predicted cooling, which had only been a small minority, then agreed with the rest that we'd have warming (assuming we didn't also get the greenhouse gases dealt with).
Back in the 70s there was indeed a concern (no stronger than that) that we might have been heading for a new ice age over the next few centuries. That concern was based on the fact that we are in an interglacial period and ought to start thinking about how and when it might end, and what we might do about it. Ice ages and interglacials are caused by variations in the Earth's orbit and tilt, and calculations suggested that the current interglacial is coming to an end.
However it then turned out that global warming due to CO2 was happing way faster and way more than any potential cooling. The scientists weren't wrong: the cooling effect is still there. Its just completely swamped by all the things we are doing to the atmosphere.
The "global cooling" thing is just throwing sand in our eyes- and you know it.
Everything you've heard about global warming has been true the whole time, and you haven't been listening. I keep trying to wrap my head around the worldview of someone whose commitment to ideology is so powerful that they are willing to condemn their grandchildren to such suffering. It has to be some kind of religious thing.
Everyone who said during the 1970s that we should be afraid of global cooling are the same people who now demand that we believe them on global warming.
Oceanic thermocline: explain the data we have and the mathematical model we have to cover this phenomenon.
You can't, because you don't actually know. You just blindly believe it, don't you?
There is a gigantic mountain of evidence in favor of climate change, and you're listening to industry propaganda produced by the very people who have a clear monetary interest in doing nothing!
"Oceanic thermocline" never fails to trigger people.
As soon as they actually do in fact research it, they realize that:
a) we don't have the data
b) we don't have an accurate/sane mathematical model for it.
We can't use satellites to measure anything other than surface temperature of the ocean; it would require an actual, physically located sensor network spread throughout the oceans of the world to get this information. Which we don't have now and never had in the past...
> We can't use satellites to measure anything other than surface temperature of the ocean
...and atmospheric temperature, and surface temperature of the land, and the solar energy arriving on Earth, and the energy being radiated away from Earth. There are plenty of things we can measure to show that there is warming beside just deep ocean temperature. We probably need deep ocean temperature measurements to predict accurately how the warming effects will be distributed, but we don't need it to show the warming is happening.
I don't know what you are going on with about the oceanic thermocline because all you've said is that there is some problem with some data related to some phenomenon involving it and that we don't have enough data to understand the oceanic thermocline.
You seem to think this thermocline problem is inconsistent with global warming. Let's say you are right. So what? You noted that we don't have good data or models for the thermocline.
We do have good data and models on dozens of things that do indicate warming. Generally in science when you have a lot of things that have good data and good models and support a theory, and some thing without good data or a good model that doesn't fit the theory, you wait until you get good data on the later before considering throwing out the theory.
The Pacific Ocean, alone, has a greater surface area than all the land masses of Earth, combined.
Water, especially a large deep mass of water like the Pacific, can hold a lot of heat energy.
And we don't know what is happening with the heat transfer and storage cycle; we don't even understand the full operation of heat exchange between ocean and the rest of the planet.
We have a whole fleet of submersible thermometers that dive down to 2000 meters. And it's not that hard to tie a thermometer to a lead sinker and take a deep ocean temperature.
We don't even have 20 years' worth of data. As far as historical data, nothing at all.
"In 1999, to combat this lack of data, an innovative step was taken by scientists to greatly improve the collection of observations inside the ocean through increased sampling of old and new quantities and increased coverage in terms of time and area.
A few scientists thought global cooling could be an issue. It was an immature theory and was ultimately rejected when more work was done.
The science underpining the theory of global warming on the other hand is far, far more robust. I don't feel the need to recount how robust it is but I'll just note that it has withstood "red teams" funded by the Koch brothers, as well as Exxon and the other major oil companies who now all accept the science behind global warming.
It is highly disingenuous to equate it with global cooling.
I don't know, I've seen what temperatures have been in the past decade in Europe and I can tell that it doesn't get any hotter, in fact, it could be getting colder. Can anyone show some statistics supporting the global warming?
Edit:
I know how to google myself but I am asking people to get a little more involved and not lay out facts out of memory. I thought I could make a good discussion on the topic but kept getting hostility for some reason.
> According to different observational records of global average annual near-surface (land and ocean) temperature, the last decade (2008–2017) was 0.89 °C to 0.93 °C warmer than the pre-industrial average, which makes it the warmest decade on record. Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2000. The year 2017 was one of the world’s three warmest years on record together with the years 2016 and 2015.
> The average annual temperature for the European land area for the last decade (2008–2017) was between 1.6 °C and 1.7 °C above the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. In Europe, 2017 was colder than the previous 3 years.
What exactly is "the pre-industrial average"? does that correspond to the Little Ice Age? why is that a good reference point, or baseline for comparison?
100-200 years is pretty fast when compared to how slowly climate moves in one direction or the other. Also those 100-200 years are the same in which human instrialization took place.
Measuring temperature in a global scale is a very daunting task and it is open to interpretations by negationists and reactionaries, but you can look for pictures of the last 30 years in the North Pole. The Arctic is going to be open to navigation soon.
You can also ask the climate experts, we have to rely on them, and the vast majority of them are predicting a similar effect.
First you yourself start talking about "the last decade", and now one or two centuries isn't long enough.
You also say you think the last decade seemed colder, the reply you got was that 16 of the 17 hottest years since recording began were after 2000. But you ignore that part of the reply.
You are working for the forces that want to stop our mitigation of the problem, you are the enemy.
People who are stirring up discussions and ignore the answers have an agenda, they are trying to make it look like there is still serious disagreement about the existence and causes of climate change, because they want to hinder mitigation.
It is no use to try to win them over, that's not why they're arguing.
Calling someone "the enemy" doesn't help people decide who to believe. Belief about scientific topics like global warming should be based on facts not in-group/out-group thinking.
A change of 4-5°C is a change of 7-9 degrees Fahrenheit, not 39-41.