The colder temps worked out for me. AT&T has a research business center next to my home and when the temperature is above 45 degrees they turn on a chiller unit to keep their servers cool. It blasts over 45 DB (I sometimes go over 50 decibels) into my house all night as long as long as the temperature is over 45 degrees. With the colder temps outside, I've been able to sleep in my room. When the warmer weather hits I'm not able to sleep in my own room at night. My entire house is filled with an extremely torturous tone that will drive you insane. ATT won't do anything about it even though licensed professionals show they are above the city code allowed noise levels at night.
Out of curiosity, did the research center exist before the home was built or vice-versa?
The research center existing first doesn't normally preclude a nuisance claim. But land use legal scholars always like to point out that people tend to move to the nuisance, mostly because such residential developments tend to be cheaper. Sprawl tends to envelop industrial areas over time.
I'm just curious as a point of reference. No judgment. Heck, most American cities try too hard to separate land uses, which exacerbates sprawl. Rather than pretending we can always avoid conflicting uses through geographic dispersion, we should probably put in more effort to streamlining resolution of particular cases.
It existed before I bought the house, but I bought the house during the cool weather so I had no idea this chiller would be on at night. I didn't hear the chiller when I bought the house. I heard the normal hvac units outside but you can't hear them inside. It wasn't until after I moved in and later that the chiller started firing at night while I was in my be trying to sleep.
That's the plan. Waiting on the official report next week and will present it to the city (again). If the city continues to refuse to take action then I'll have to move forward with a lawsuit.
I dislike these headlines techniques a lot, and they are very frequent - like the coldest March 1st in 23 years, or the warmest Jan 8th in 12.5 years, etc. The warmest Feb. in 30+ years (though not, evidently, in 40+ years).
We don't see headlines passed around when the day doesn't break any records, and the bar is raised or lowered seemingly to fit the need for a record. Take any day, and find the last time the temp was colder or warmer, set the headline to those parameters and gen up some more anxiety.
I'm skeptical of how useful headlines like this are for any purpose, and suspect they do more harm than good in terms of giving people a tin ear to any real problem.
This is known as the multiple-endpoints fallacy, where you deliberately pick the outlying data point after the fact and ignore all the mundane ones.
Another example is when you see reports of some county experiencing a once-in-500-year flood, trying to establish the shock value of how unusual and terrible a catastrophe that is.
But if you're observing 500 such counties, then every year that will happen to some one of them. You just never notice the 499 data points where it didn't.
Its sports statistics, but climate statistics. People care enough to think perhaps the statistic has meaning, but its just another user engagement strategy.
"The coldest 2nd tuesday of a leap year March on record in the last 100 years."
That’s a very apt analogy - any football game will have the same stuff: “he just set the record for the most yards run in a third quarter during a second playoff game that happened on a Tuesday, in the history of the NFL.”
A few years ago, I heard a hypothesis why hotter summers in the northern hemisphere can cause colder winters. I forgot where, or from whom I heard it, but here it is:
Winters got more severe, and polar can vortex move further south because lands in the north became more dry, and there is less moisture both in the air, and soil.
If we’re going to have headlines “hottest year on record “ to confirm global warming , then what would this coldest record indicate ? I don’t think either are good indicators , just curious why confirming evidence is welcome and detracting evidence is not .
This is why a lot of scientists prefer the term "climate change" over "global warming"--the expected result isn't a uniform "everyone experiences warmer changes" but rather more severe disruptions in climate patterns.
One of those predicted disruptions is a weakening of the margins of the polar vertex. This results in cases where the front of vertex pushes deeply far south. As a result, cold polar air can move deep into the US interior (so, say, 0°F or less in St. Louis) while Alaska is baking in 50-60°F.
In other words, one of the predictions of global warming is that the US will see an increase in extreme cold events in winter even as the average Earth temperature is increasing.
IIUC but global warming is somewhat of a misnomer for local weather effects, which can include colder winters; i.e. global warming is thought to cause more extreme weather in general.
You clearly don't understand what is happening. The increase in CO2 causes wilder swings in weather, leading to more and more extremes. It also perturbed the Jet Stream, leading us to get in the USA what had been weather confined to the Arctic. This outcome is PRECISELY what had been predicted for the worst effects of climate change.
In fact, the amount of CO2 that we have already released has triggered the knock-on effects, which is the melting of permafrost and the subsequent release of vast quantities of Methane gas, which is 84 times more damaging than CO2.
Unfortunately, climate is not simple. By definition it is a complicated effect. But the coldest February ever seen is 100% in agreement with the predictions in Climate change.
So your claim is that the climate change predictions are that increased CO2 will cause an increase in extreme cold temperature events like we saw in the US recently.
But extreme cold events like that have been decreasing over the years, not increasing. We have been experiencing fewer cold waves in the US.
Given the predictions you described, does the fact of fewer cold waves make you doubt that climate change is happening?
It indicates global warming as well. Colder weather is occurring below the Arctic because the polar air is getting pushed down (my laymen's understanding), and the Arctic winters are getting warmer and warmer as a trend.
I would look towards the oceans if I wanted to see the effect of warming. From what I keep hearing, every year has a new "hottest year on record" for the average temperature measured by satellites.
Not quite every year, since there is occasionally a year that is even hotter than the normal trend that doesn't get beat for a few years, e.g. 2016, but all of the past six years are in the top 6 hottest.
It's not a matter of welcome vs unwelcome, it's a matter of global & persistent vs local and transient. Or, to put it another way, the larger your sample size, the better the signal-to-noise ratio is. So a single-month anomaly in one country isn't nearly as meaningful as a global anomaly over a whole year (which in turn is less meaningful than a global multi-year average).
And this is just local & transient. There's a good article that discusses this (and related things) at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-t.... Take a look at the temperature anomaly map at the bottom; it shows a big colder-than-usual area over the central US, and another over Siberia. But it also shows warmer-than-usual areas in between them (around the North Pole), and another in Southern Asia. And it lists the "World" anomaly as 0.0 °C. So it's not that everything was colder, it was just that the cold was in different places than usual, and we happened to be one of the colder-than-usual places.
But that map is just for February 19. When I look at the map for today (https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom), I see a cold area across part of Russia, and another around Alaska, but also warm bands across the Eastern US, Asia-Mideast-part-of-Africa, and parts of Antarctica. The World anomaly is listed as +0.4°C. Neither of these single-day maps tells you that much about what's going on in the longer term.
Similarly, this anomalous cold month in the US was just February. According to the report: "Meteorological winter (December through February) was quite mild and dry across the contiguous U.S. The average temperature was 33.6 degrees F, 1.4 degrees above average, placing Winter 2021 in the warmest third of the winter record. Maine had its third-warmest winter; California had its 12th warmest." So while February was colder than usual here, December and January were warm enough to more than make up for it.
You can certainly find many days and months where it was unusually cold in a particular country or region, and many where it was much hotter than usual in a particular country or region. But that doesn't really mean much of anything; you really need to look at averages over larger areas and longer times.
This is why I'm so skeptical of climate alarmists. It wasn't that long ago the alarmism was centered around a "big freeze" (http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19731203,00.html). I see it as a feeble attempt to acquire power and funnel money from hard-working citizens to the "scientific" community, without providing any tangible benefits. What do you guys think?
> This is why I'm so skeptical of climate alarmists.
Normally the jetstreams & currents of the atmosphere keep the cold up north.
What we are seeing is a destabilization of long running separation of different thermal systems[1]. The arctic is making a break for it. It's heading to places it's never been before. Because the climate is changing.
And it's melting the icecaps. It's making northern route shippings increasingly likely. It's possibly going to shut down the thermohaline circulation that is one of the major movers of ocean water.
> What do you guys think?
I am extremely sad that we have to deal with skeptics. That people aren't just shocked, awed, terrified, because they see such stupid little small minded evidence as "it was cold around here soooo....". This used to be a dynamic planet, where ocean currents flowed, where ice formed & ebbed, where birds and bees and insects flew. And all of that seems to be drying up. The entropy, the differences across earth, seem to be normalizing into a big boring average, where everything just sits, baking, in a world-wide equilibrium.
I think it's extremely sad to see such denialism. It's morally & existentially reckless, it's unserious in the extreme in the level of diligence it shows, and it's polluting the public space with it's unresearched, un-backed-up skepticism.
This whole "the winter was cold, global warming must be a lie!" nonsense has been around for longer than I've been alive, and I think it's a consequence of outright distrust of the scientific establishment. Don't you think the "lie" of climate change would be the scoop of the century for a scientist? Do you think that all the world's scientists are conspiring together?
A quick google search would bring up plenty of scientific literature about why global warming causes more extreme weather events. This past February (and several of the last winters) there have been incidents of instability of the polar vortex which are directly linked to the melting of the polar ice caps. Those areas get hot (in recent years, over 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and it blocks out the cold air [1]:
> While the polar vortex is well documented, its behavior has become more extreme as a result of climate change, according to Ullrich. He explains: warming of the Earth has led to the loss of Arctic sea ice, transforming a highly reflective icy surface to a dark absorptive surface. The change is warming higher latitudes and reducing the temperature difference between the warmer mid-latitude and polar regions. This weakens and destabilizes the polar jet stream, causing it to dip into lower latitudes, bringing polar air farther south. Ullrich expects future climate change to further weaken the polar jet stream, bringing rise to more extreme and unusual weather patterns.
The article accompanying that cover has nothing to do with climate [0]. It's discussing the 1973 oil crisis and its effects, one of which is a shortage of fuel to heat homes during the winter.
In addition, discussion of "global cooling"/a "big freeze" appears to be more representative of news coverage than the state of climate research at the time [1].
I am 60. I was a little nerd when I was around 11-12 yo and I read all pop science magazines.
Being afraid of an upcoming ice age definitely was a thing, many articles were written on it, quoting scientists, even in national newspapers. I remember writing an essay on it for school.
I don't have those magazines any more but you should be able to find them somewhere.
> Being afraid of an upcoming ice age definitely was a thing, many articles were written on it, quoting scientists, even in national newspapers.
I mean, I'm not denying that an imminent ice age was on the public consciousness at some point; as you point out, articles saying as much can be found relatively easily. I'm just saying that that isn't necessarily representative of climate research at the time.
> not necessarily representative of climate research at the time
If that's true it's hard to understand why the majority of the press was publishing information opposite to the state of the climate research at the time. Unlikely to me.
> If that's true it's hard to understand why the majority of the press was publishing information opposite to the state of the climate research at the time.
Those stories do have a kernel of truth, as there does appear to have been a cooling trend at the time; it sort of comes down to the difference between "What if this trend continues?" and "This trend is likely to continue and here are the consequences".
At least in the sampling of news stories in the paper I linked earlier, the quoted scientists seem to lean more towards "we need more data" and/or a more long-term warming trend, if they offered a long-term prediction at all.
Okay sorry, I was being Quick Draw McGraw with the articles.
This was the article published by time referencing the "New Ice Age": http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9449.... I knew I saw it before ;) And of course, the paper you linked quotes many, many more that perpetuates the myth. I'll be bookmarking that!
A quote:
"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."
So the scientific community seems to have the same perspective as I, whereby the media alarmists cause unnecessary fear among the population that accepts their orthodoxy unabated.
Thanks for the link! That does seem to be more in line with your original comment.
Makes me curious what the results might be if an analogous survey of news articles were done to see the proportion of ones covering global warming vs. global cooling. There are a few articles mentioned in the paper, but it's not comprehensive (though to be fair those are supposed to be the most frequently cited articles).
I sometimes joke that climate change orthodoxy is driven in part by the CIA in order to retard growth/industrialization in semi and non-developed countries in order to elongate America's hold on power.
I would describe myself as agnostic on the topic simply because I haven't done enough personal research, but the devout belief that many people have in human-caused global climate change is really off putting, primarily because it's hubristic in so many ways: that our presence and actions are harming a 4.5 billion year planet in the span of a few decades; that our models are that good; that our data is that good; that our analysis and conclusions are undoubtedly true, etc. My inner skeptic just freaks out.
We aren’t harming the planet. We are making it harder for ourselves to live comfortably on the planet.
If city lights can light up the Earth at night as seen from space, is it really such a huge stretch to think that industrial activity across the globe can alter the composition of the atmosphere in a significant way?
That mostly mirrors my sentiment, although I'd say that the government is inhibiting industrial growth foremost in the US, unfortunately without regard for the American workers that it hurts. Then for some strange reason, the same people who criticize industrial pollutants here turn around and revere China's industrial growth, all the while promoting "cheap goods" without taking responsibility for the pollution their goods cause there. Glaring hypocrisy.
you could also nuke the whole planet's surface and there probably still life afterwards. The phrasing is not accurate, this is about human, not the planet. And as human we don't just want to survive, we want to live comfortably.
Is climate change the most consequential effect of global warming? What does a 1C increase in temperature on a global / astronomical scale mean in terms of thermodynamics? How do we experience it at human scale?
I have a basic undergraduate understanding of physics (at best), and it seems to me that the planet should be experiencing a significant increase in entropy - meaning that everything (i.e. reality itself) is becoming less predictable — at least in our tiny local neighborhood. Is this interpretation totally wrong?
Weather is so complex that a nearly chaotic system, the butterfly effect comes from the idea that the flapping of a butterfly in south africa could be the thing that start a tropical storm in the caribbean a couple of weeks later.
It is so complex because the amount of things that play a role there. Some of the components you have are i.e. sea currents (like the Gulf Stream, making England warmer than it should be) or the polar vortex, a more or less stable cyclone that runs in the upper atmosphere. Global warming affect those components, and in particular was the polar vortex what caused the cold weather in the US the last months.
But when you talk about climate in the context of global warming, you are talking about yearly global temperature averages, not what happen in only one region or in a few days/months.
I think an increase in entropy is a great way to put it. More energy from the sun is being kept in the atmosphere (and the oceans), more energy is going to effect a complex system like the Earth's atmosphere in complex ways. More energy means changes in air currents and ocean currents that could have a significant impact on local weather patterns. More energy means larger more powerful storms. More energy means more moisture in the atmosphere which means potentially more rainfall/snowfall in some areas.
The temperature difference from the last ice age is only 5°C. Most of northern Europe was under a glacier all year long.
Forecasts are telling us a 2°C increase before the end of the centuary is already inevitable. If we do not change anything, a 4°C increase is really probable.
It is easy to imagine that a lot of place will become not be suitable to human life.
I have no proof, but as the climate has changed and mostly gotten warmer it seems like the summer heat takes longer and longer to dissipate from the ground and the water. We used to have snow at the end of November in PA. Now snow is only in January and February. It feels like winter is delayed a month because of our warmer summers. It also feels like spring is what keeps getting shorter. It warms slightly and then summer is full on again.
That's because the Jet Stream has moved South. The Arctic was much warmer, leading to melting of permafrost and the firing of the so-called methane clathrate gun, which releases vast amounts of tremendously-damaging methane gas.
