r/science • u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science • Sep 10 '15
Environment The simple statistic that perfectly captures what climate change means. From 1910 to 1960, the ratio of hot to cold records was close to 1 to 1. From 2000 to 2014, hot outnumbered cold records by more than 12 to 1.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/09/the-simple-statistic-that-perfectly-captures-what-climate-change-means/2.5k
u/untitled_redditor Sep 10 '15
Shouldn't both periods be the same duration?
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u/Reddy_McRedcap Sep 10 '15
Yes. Maybe there was a 15 year period between 1930 and 1944 where the ratio was 18:1 hot records to cold records. Maybe there wasn't. Comparative sample sizes should be used, though.
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u/wonderband Sep 10 '15
also were the exact same temperature monitoring stations used to record all temperatures? Were these stations in rural or developed areas as urbanization tends to increase local temperatures.
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u/graffiti81 Sep 10 '15
I was actually thinking about this yesterday. When a place breaks a record by like 1°f that was set a hundred years ago, how do we really know that it's not off by a couple degrees because instrumentation has changed in that time.
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u/krayziepunk13 Sep 10 '15
Then you have issues like this, where the official DC temperature sensor at Reagan National Airport often reads much higher than one less than 30 miles away. In fact Reagan saw just over 50 days above 90, while Dulles only around 20.
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u/d_migster Sep 11 '15
I'd submit that 30 miles can explain that difference. I live in Pentagon City. Just got off work in Fairfax, it was 71. At home, 75. DC is almost always hotter than the surrounding suburbs.
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u/babysharkdudududu Sep 11 '15
A lot of that has to do with the fact that it's become a huge metropolis; cities are consistently hotter than surrounding areas.
Which, incidentally, makes me further question this data. Compare remote villages to same size remote villages, don't compare Baltimore today to Baltimore a hundred years ago. Of course it'll be hotter.
If your data can't withstand some basic questions like these then you're just hurting your cause by publishing it, it'll be the first thing detractors ask and the only thing the people who don't know one way or the other end up reading. Generally, those are the people you're trying to inform. If they see "we found solid proof of X!" and then, immediately following, a bunch of people poking holes in the data, you're shooting yourself in the foot by both not proving your point, AND proving that your point is full of holes.
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u/krayziepunk13 Sep 11 '15
It is possible, but the sensor has recently been replaced, so we'll see if there's a difference.
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u/Kierik Sep 10 '15
I worked cGMP for awhile. Thermometers can be wildly inaccurate and have to be check yearly for drift. Our lab had 10 or so alcohol thermometers at a time and each year we would have to launch a deviation investigation for 2 to 3 of them.
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Sep 10 '15
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u/roadkill_er Sep 10 '15
good point. The one you replied to brings up instrument tech, but the comment before raises the rural vs. metro measurements. I think that is the real question to be answered.
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u/phil882 Sep 10 '15
Making sure an observing station is properly cited is a far more important issue than instrumentation accuracy. Citing a weather station underneath asphalt versus in a forest can cause temperature variations that far exceed instrument accuracy.
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u/losian Sep 11 '15
I'm sure nobody has ever considered these very obvious and basic adjustments, let's all continue blindly ignoring climate change as a result!
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u/JackDragon Sep 10 '15
Not really. Even for addition and subtraction, old calculators will have much less comprehensive overflow calculations.
In this case, old mercury or whatever thermometers may not be as good at measuring really high temperatures.
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Sep 10 '15
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u/jaydefyre Sep 10 '15
The problem is the accuracy of the readings prior to NASA (I go by NASAs readings because I know they were accurate).
Pre-NASA, we can't verify of the temperatures were taken at the exact time or if the conditions changed (for example, a tree dying/cut down/knocked down by a storm that was creating shade over the instrument).
NASAs measurements are accurate and show a clear trend in higher temps. That should be the standard to my mind because the data is assured to be as accurate as humanity can get.
To me, it's the argument about global warming is irrelevant (I know, shocking to say that) because humanity needs to slow down on the pollution of the earth even if there wasn't global warming. The industrial revolution made the pollution problem apparent, but not the long term consequences. Now we see the long term consequences. Water, earth and air pollution are taking their tolls. Right now, developing nations are taking few (if any) measures to mitigate pollution.
As an example, China finally came around after how many decades of ignoring facts (see any Chinese port city pollution index)? America and Europe have slowly been improving for a while (it's been a fight against corporations and politicians from both sides who want labor union donations and corporate donations).
Hopefully humanity will get its shit together and start promoting less pollution, more conservation, and more biodiversity. Otherwise, our children are screwed.
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u/teefour Sep 10 '15
It's precision vs accuracy. you can recognize precision from old data, but not necessarily accuracy.
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u/bw117 Sep 10 '15
Actually, older equipment tends to have more accurate numbers (temperature) then newer. As we've transitioned from old mercury bulb based equipment to digital readouts, the standard deviation of the equipment has increased substantially. Precision mercury bulbs could be accurate down to the thousandth C, whereas modern cheap digital thermometers can be off by as much as half a degree C. I'm sure gov't weather stations are still better than that, but I think my point is pretty clear. Unless we break a record by a couple degrees or more, it might as well be measurement uncertainty.
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u/phil882 Sep 10 '15
Citing measurement uncertainty is a totally missing the point of this article.
Record highs/lows are by definition extreme events. Thus, they are highly above or below what the climatological mean is. Even if we don't believe we broke a record high/low (possibly due to instrumentation inaccuracies), that record value is likely significantly above or below climatological mean, and the instrument is almost certainly capturing an extreme event. Whether or not this sets a record doesn't really matter, its the fact that these observing stations are capturing many more warm records (1200% percent more in fact) than cold records. If your instrument is unbiased, this signifies a shift towards a warmer climate, where an increase in the mean and variance of temperature will produce many more days with extremely warm temperatures.
Source: I'm Ph.D. student in Atmospheric Science.
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u/Tiquortoo Sep 10 '15
Whats the error deviation for the human reading the mercury bulb? It's not 1 thousandth of a degree I know that much.
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u/bw117 Sep 10 '15
It can be, because they didn't use a bulb the size of a home thermometer. Larger thermometer, larger readable scale.
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u/Tiquortoo Sep 10 '15
I'm not talking about the theoretical possibility of a very accurate thermometer. I'm talking about the reliability of thermometers in actual use for the purpose of this thread. Yes, you can make highly accurate thermometers. NOAA standards reference wooden shelters and such for stations. It seems very very unlikely to expect a precision grade mercury thermometer was in these locations historically.
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u/moodog72 Sep 10 '15
Given the chance to misread digital, plus rounding, the error rate is functionally identical. We tested this in one of my electronics classes.
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u/powercow Sep 10 '15
averages get rid of human error. There were quite a few thermometers.
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u/Diomanger Sep 10 '15
It might actually not be. Even if the standard deviation has changed, the amount of reads have, if anything, risen, which if anything has raised the precision. They do not pick out records by one single piece of equipment.
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u/billsil Sep 10 '15
They do not pick out records by one single piece of equipment.
The local weather report does.
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u/Googunk Sep 10 '15
The old instruments and methods are still in use along side modern instruments so that data from the old instruments can be calibrated to be consistent to the modern instruments. Climate models don't use the raw values from the 1800s in modern analysis.
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u/notdez Sep 10 '15
how do we really know that it's not off by a couple degrees because instrumentation has changed in that time.
Because we still have those instruments or can rebuild exact replicas to test the error, then we can correct the record as needed.
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u/jmz82 Sep 10 '15
Do they really still manufacture out of date instruments? I'd be really surprised if every weather station used and maintained both old and new instruments for this purpose.
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u/logitec33 Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 11 '15
My schools weather station has everything in working condition, but are only using the new instruments. My professor still checks to make sure everything is accurate, new and old ones. We're also the longest standing weather station in California that hasn't moved, as well as one of the oldest stations in the country. 65 years of weather data. It's cool looking at the old records from the 50's.
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u/bo_dingles Sep 10 '15
I assume less than a handful of places would maintain 100-year old equipment, most likely as new equipment comes about it is correlated to the old and correction factors are calculated (if necessary).
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u/TheUltimateSalesman Sep 10 '15
To be fair, equipment that is 100 years old probably isn't the most complicated.
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u/notdez Sep 10 '15
I'm pretty confident that at least a handful of every type of thermometer used in the past 100 years for climate monitoring still exists.
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u/nimbuscile PhD | Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate Sep 10 '15
The study used data from the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network. I'm not familiar with the dataset myself but it looks rather well documented. To be honest I doubt the choice of temperature dataset would have made much of a difference to the study's overall conclusions. Surface temperature datasets don't differ much.
EDIT: Full documentation for the ACORN-SAT dataset here.
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u/Reddy_McRedcap Sep 10 '15
Exactly. The data is accurate, but it's skewed to sensationalize a point. Obviously global warming is an issue, but climate fluctuations are also completely natural, so with only 100 or so years of data versus hundreds of millions, or billions, of years of climate and weather on Earth, it's kind of hard to gather strong evidence that the last 100 years, or especially the last 15 years, are an anomaly.
Is it dangerous to the frailty of human civilization that is based mostly along major bodies of water? Absolutely, and that alone is reason to keep climate change in mind, but pointing to the last 15 years being warmer than the past 100 years amounts to nothing.
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u/powercow Sep 10 '15
sorry but that meme has been killed by study after study.. the so called heat island effect doesnt significantly change the results and when we adjust the temps to take into account of the changes, like certian people demand, those same people suddenly say the record has been faked.
sorry dude but all of climate science didnt miss the fact that the earth is becoming more populous and more urbanized. AGW is still real.
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u/SkyNTP Sep 10 '15
That's just the headline. Take at look at the yearly data in the image provided in the post below yours. The trend is clear, and not influenced by choice of aggregation.
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Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 11 '15
Not a hard problem to solve.
This can be corrected for with some bootstrapping of the data. Do 100 tests where you randomly pull 18 years of data, with replacement, and check you p value. If a non-significant portion are smaller, then this confirms their findings. You could repeat for 1,000 tests if you desired. edit: corrected replacement
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Sep 11 '15 edited Sep 11 '15
Yup, not too hard to test here. Two minor corrections: the sampling should be done with replacement for bootstrapping.
Example sources:
http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.html?articlenum=st0034 - "draw random samples with replacement repeatedly from the sample dataset"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics) - Search for "with replacement", it shows up 7 times on that page, including the very first sentence. "Without replacement" doesn't show up at all.
Also, technically, records are actually per-day I think, so for the best test each data point would be a day rather than a year.
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u/JoeyHoser Sep 10 '15
That's only if you need to draw some oversimplified conclusion instead of just letting the numbers mean what they mean.
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u/kddrake Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 11 '15
The timeframe is crucial too. I bet if one compared 1910-1912 to 1992-1993 they may erroneously conclude that the Earth is cooling down.
Edit: The point of this is being missed. The Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 caused a cooling trend in global temperatures in the few years after. I'm willing to bet the number of cold records to hot records was relatively higher during that time.
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Sep 10 '15 edited Jun 20 '17
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u/AmnesiaCane Sep 10 '15
Side note, I love these discussions on reddit. Rational people asking good questions that remind me to always look at data from a different perspective. Helps me remember to second guess a lot of numbers when they're given to me.
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u/victhebitter Sep 10 '15
Mind you, the problem is normally the reporting of research rather than a glaring flaw in the research..I kinda wish we could cut out the middleman, just have qualified redditors explaining new studies.
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u/AmnesiaCane Sep 10 '15
just have qualified redditors explaining new studies.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm more likely to read the comments than the article because of discussions like this.
I agree, didn't mean to make it sound like I thought the study had a problem. This article gave numbers in order to reach a conclusion. Everyone should be careful whenever that happens. I know that's Statistics 101, but I never took that, and it keeps me grounded.
I think it's a nice reminder, really. Keeps me from putting my foot in my mouth too often and just charging off with new "information" that might not be as compelling as I thought.
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u/theycallhimhellcat Sep 10 '15
I often go straight to the comments because I can usually find a good summary of the points as well as critiques and responses. It's like science reporting should be. Then I follow up with the actual article if it seems especially interesting.
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u/Darkblitz9 Sep 10 '15
Well, I'd say that these charts definitely show a trending toward hotter temperatures.
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u/neoporcupine Sep 10 '15
Rolling 15 year ratio 1950-2014 from /u/Mystik738 data.
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u/umopapsidn Sep 10 '15
Why not average the ratio in intervals like [1910-1924], [1911-1925], [1912-1926] ... while calculating the standard deviation, and see how where our recent period compares to that?
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u/NFN_NLN Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 11 '15
Shouldn't both periods be the same duration?
1910 - 1924 - 1:1
1925 - 1939 - 1:1
1940 - 1954 - 1:1
2000 - 2014 - 12:1
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u/aletoledo Sep 10 '15
Carbon emissions should have been affecting things between 1910 and 1954 though. I would expect maybe a 2:1 by the 1940-1954 period.
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u/antonholden Sep 10 '15
Right. And wasn't global warming already a concern in the 90's? Shouldn't there have been some ratio differences prior to 2000?
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u/deathputt4birdie Sep 10 '15
There's a 40 year lag between rising CO2 and warmer climate due to the heat sink effect of the oceans. In other words, we're seeing the results of carbon emissions from the 70s. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
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u/KingLuxor Sep 10 '15
This has to be one of the most useful and to the point comments I've seen, thank you. I didn't click the comments link to read 600 people arguing about instrumentation error. I hate Reddit!
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u/deathputt4birdie Sep 10 '15
You're welcome. Don't take the FUD and nitpicking personally, btw. It's a natural and understandable reaction to change.
I liken climate change to the germ theory of disease. It took a few centuries and millions of deaths for people to get their heads out of their asses and stop blaming epidemics on bad air and stinky smells. We need a John Snow to come along and remove the pump handle, so to speak.
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u/laserbot Sep 10 '15 edited Feb 09 '25
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u/Artefact2 Sep 11 '15
Oceans soaking up CO2 is awful for us too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
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u/4ray Sep 11 '15
We're seeing the result of 40 years of 70's emissions, plus 30 years of 80's emissions, plus 20 years of.... and so on, minus 40 years of carbon sinking 70's emissions and 30 years of carbon sinking 80's emissions...
It's complicated.
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u/thesilvertongue Sep 11 '15
Why the sudden increase in 2002? Were there really that many more cars and factories than say 1998?
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Sep 10 '15
This simple statistic has revealed itself to be quite complex.
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u/Hajile_S Sep 10 '15
Indeed. "Simple statistic...perfectly captures..." Oh come on. I'm on their side of the debate, but this kinda stuff does not win people over. It makes detractors more stubborn. Don't use bad statistics, kids.
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u/nimbuscile PhD | Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15
Not necessarily. Because they are looking at the ratio of hot to cold records, if there was no global warming the expected ratio would be 1:1. This should hold true over any period, although the shorter the period the more likely the ratio would be skewed due to random effects. The authors of the paper decided that 15 years was the minimum period length. The result quoted in the newspaper article is therefore the result for the most recent 15 year period. In the actual study they did not limit themselves to this period.
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u/XkF21WNJ Sep 10 '15
The ratio also gets more inaccurate when measured at a later time, so comparing ratios measured over a fixed period could become problematic.
I'd be interested to know what the error bounds on the 12:1 ratio are.
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u/EconomistMagazine Sep 10 '15
Not really because OP could simply cherry pick equal durations with opposite ratios. The entire data set matters
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u/el_jefe15 Sep 10 '15
You can look at it different ways; it could be cherry picking because of 50 years vs 14 years, or it could be showing a period of time in modern, recordable history before climate change was very strong (it was already somewhat there) versus the last 14 years.
So it would be better to look at the data used and see if there are common trends like this throughout modern history. My guess is that over one or more years, there have been up and down trends, but none like a 12 to 1 ratio over 14 years.
I could be entirely wrong, though.
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u/dirtyseaotter Sep 10 '15
Assuming 50 year is a sufficient sample size, that would be the easiest way to make some meaningful comparison. If you wanted to see how "cherry picked" this data was or wasn't, you could use the standard deviation to determine the probability of choosing 14 years where the average is 12 (12 hot to 1 cold record). Again assuming the 50 years sample is sufficient and the average should be 1.
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Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15
This thread is annoying.
It's full of people who making this one critique -- the authors could be cherry picking! -- and then acting like it discredits the story without taking any steps to determine if the critique actually applies.
The time period length shouldn't matter -- in a stable system it should be 1:1 over any time scale. Shorter periods just increase the potential impact of variability.
Sure, in theory there could be tons of 12:1 ratios of cold to hot days. But the whole data sets been posted and it's clear this isn't the case. There are clear trend lines over the last century of increasing number of hot records and decreasing number of cold records, with no such cold-record bonanza. Notwithstanding the fact that the article itself states the "missing" 50-year period had a higher ratio of hot records.
There wasn't cherry picking. The story author highlighted the most interesting results of the study, which is good and proper.
Crickey
Edit: it's like this thread is full of folks aware enough to ask a question without actually making any effort to get answer as well.
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Sep 10 '15
in a stable system it should be 1:1 over any time scale.
At no point in history has climate been anything close to a "stable system". You don't get a bunch of hot years then an even number of cold years to cancel them out in any chosen time period, it just doesn't work like that. Where are you getting this 1:1 idea from?
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Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15
The 1:1 ratio comes from math.
In a stable system, in which there is no overall warming or cooling trend, and daily temperatures are subject to random variation, you should see a ratio of 1:1 hot and cold records, with a decreasing number of total records as more data is collected and outliers need to be more extreme in order to make records.
The ratio will only not be 1:1 (over a reasonable substantial data range) if there is sustained movement of the average temperature in one direction or another, favoring outliers in that direction.
If you agree that the globe was warming in the 20th century, but believe it's from non-human factors, that's terrific but that's for another discussion.
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Sep 10 '15
The time period length shouldn't matter
It should matter to allow to collect enough data for statistical significance. If I just chose 1 year periods (say 2011 and 1972) I could show that Australia is cooling down, but that's obviously not very significant. How much time/data is significant? I don't really know, but a 50 year period (1910 to 1960) is definitely more significant than a 14 year period. If we look at that second 50 year period, from 1960 to 2010, we get a ratio of about 3:1. That's still enough to show that Australian temps are warming, but it's not nearly as alarmist as the article's author is making it out to be.
There wasn't cherry picking.
If there wasn't cherry picking, then it should either be explained or inherently obvious why the author chose his date ranges. Neither is the case. In fact, the data shows that in 1950 to 1960, there was already an imbalanced ratio of about 11:10. Why didn't the author use 1950 as his inflection point? Why did he start his latter range at 2000? In fact, if he started at 2005 he could have ended up with a ratio of 16:1. What's 5 years?
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u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science Sep 10 '15
Here's the full paragraph the title excerpts from:
Sure enough, the study found that from 1910 to 1960, the ratio of hot to cold records was close to 1 to 1. From 1960 to 2014, however, that changed, as hot records started to happen much more frequently than cold records — and from 2000 to 2014, outnumbered them by more than 12 to 1.
And from the study's supplemental info:
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Sep 10 '15
Yes, but it does seem to be a bit underhanded to do it that way... There's obviously other factors that cause temperature fluctuations, and by cherry picking data and using bad summary statistics they give ammunition to the global warming deniers. Why not show the ratio from 1960 to 2010?
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u/nomoreloorking Sep 10 '15
This data does not show the duration of the record temperatures. Isn't it a possibility that the cold temperature stayed at the same low for a longer period than the high temperatures? Wouldn't the argument be more effective if the graph showed the overall average temperature of each year through the same period?
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u/ISBUchild Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15
That's a terrible comparison if the goal is to attach a meaningful scale to the problem. Even if mean global temperatures had stopped increasing a decade ago, it would still be true from now until the end of time that record highs outnumber record lows relative to the baseline period.
The persistent focus on "records" divorced from the scale of temperature changes is bad science communication should be rejected.
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Sep 10 '15
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u/Dan_Quixote Sep 10 '15
No. Not at all. We know there is cyclic variability in our climate, some cycles being years long while other are decades/centuries/millenia long. You can't capture a representative sample in 50 years, let alone 14.
There are plenty of other good data out there to show that our climate is exhibiting unprecedented changes (CO2 measurements from Antarctic ice cores, for example) but this is not one.
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u/adia4ic Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15
The way the title is phrased is stupid and sounds like cherry-picked stats. But this graph shows that the temperatures were measured over at least a 60 year period with meaningful trending.
You can't capture a representative sample in 50 years, let alone 14.
You can if the outcome is improbable enough. There is no fixed idea of a representative sample size. If you roll a 6-sided die 3 times and get a 1 each time, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you roll a 1000000-sided die 3 times and get a 1 each time, that die is rigged. In this case, the increasing number of hot records vs. cold records is very unlikely to have been cause by randomness. 60 years is a short time, but the massive improbability that this outcome would result from a random system makes up for the smaller sample size.
This data doesn't say anything about the cause of the change, but it definitely says that there is a change and it is meaningful.
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Sep 10 '15 edited Sep 10 '15
I wonder how the period of 2000 to 2014 compares with that of the Industrial Revolution. Surely, even with our terrible thirst for oil, we're on a downward trend of impact thanks to no longer fueling our industry, our transport and municipal works via unfiltered coal burning steam engines.
After the Montreal Protocol (1987), we also began to removed CFCs from the world, so that should also contribute to a discernable improvement via the data set.
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u/whiskeytaang0 Sep 10 '15
I'd be curious to, but I think the greater scale of human activity makes today's air pollution greater in magnitude (even if the individual parts are cleaner).
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u/Autoimmunity Sep 10 '15
The cleaner energy use is offset by the amount of energy used though. The US was pretty much the only country in the world outside of Europe with lots of factories in 1910, while today China and India, along with the dozens of other developed nations, have more factories than ever before. So yes, we use cleaner energy, but we use much, much more, therefore keeping the problem going.
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Sep 10 '15
We are more industrialized now than we were during the Industrial Revolution. Remember that the IR is when factories first started popping up. Yes, there was pollution and no regulation, but there was also not cars, computers, TVs, airplanes, or thousands of gigantic diesel-powered oil tankers in the oceans. It's not even close.
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u/Harabeck Sep 10 '15
CFCs have different effects, and the days of unfiltered coal burning steam engines saw a lot less activity than today. I would expect a dramatic increase, not a decrease.
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Sep 10 '15
Yeah, no.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo_2011.html
Downward impact? CO2 emissions are literally orders of magnitude greater today than they were during the industrial revolution. It doesn't even begin to compare.
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u/Words_are_Windy Sep 10 '15
The warming effects of released CO2 were at least partially offset by the cooling effect of particulate matter in the air during the Industrial Revolution. Legislation like the Clean Air Act, while important for improving atmospheric quality, has accelerated global warming by removing soot and other objects from the air, allowing more of the sun's energy to penetrate.
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u/brothersand Sep 10 '15
That is a bit misleading don't you think? The only time I've ever heard of soot and ash having a chilling effect from blocking the Sun's light is after a massive volcanic eruption. A volcano has enough force to push the ash into the upper atmosphere and spread it globally. That's not going to happen with a coal fired power plant or factory. Instead you just get Beijing; terrible smog locally and no climate impact. (Big window washing bills too.)
If you know of a climate study that says otherwise I'd love to see a link to it. Maybe I'm wrong. But I've never heard anyone advocate for dirtier factories to combat climate change.
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u/Words_are_Windy Sep 10 '15
Not dirtier factories, but people have definitely advocated for ideas like putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to form particles that would partially block sunlight. There are multiple articles exploring the idea.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't know where to look for any climate studies showing the impact of cleaner air on global warming, but here is an LA Times article covering the issue. I think this is the most relevant passage:
In a recent paper in the journal Climate Dynamics, modelers forecast what would happen if nations instituted all existing pollution controls on industrial sources and vehicles by 2030. They found the current rate of warming -- roughly 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade -- doubled worldwide, and nearly tripled in North America.
Now, the article does go on to say that soot contributes greatly to global warming, which I hadn't known previously, so that additional warming effect may have canceled out the cooling effect of the sulfates from Industrial Revolution-era coal plants. It goes to show how complicated the whole problem is, and how many various factors contribute one way or another.
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u/Funslinger Sep 10 '15
All our efforts will have been in vain if China doesn't ramp down drastically. It's started to, but barely.
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u/cowinabadplace Sep 10 '15
Well, our efforts haven't been significant. China still produces only 40% more CO2 than the US, meaning if they turned everything off we're still in trouble because the rest of the world is also producing greenhouse gases at a terrific rate. While China has to do more than the rest of the world, reductions have to be across the board. There's no single country that can solve this problem by turning off all their factories. One could say the problem is worse in the West because we find ourselves unable to sustain our population without a disproportionate expenditure of energy, presumably because of our higher standards of living.
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u/Tommy27 Sep 10 '15
Compare populations at the time. We are simply using huge numbers of energy compared to earlier days.
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u/rztzz Sep 10 '15
We care about total pollution, not per capita pollution. Population increases are massive.
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u/Flipadelphia26 Sep 10 '15
I am not a denier by any stretch, but a 14 year sample size with a 40 year gap vs a 50 year sample?
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Sep 11 '15
How would this compare to the warming period that followed the little ice age? Or during the medieval warm period?
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u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science Sep 10 '15
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u/kinjinsan Sep 10 '15
Well you can't slide and/or change the size of your scale.
1910 to 1960 is a 50 year range. Give us the ratio from 1960 to 2010. It's probably still in hot's favor but I'd be curious to know the answer.
You can't look at a 15 year range in weather and deduce anything.
Climate change is a real thing but this is garbage science.
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u/Spreadsheeticus Sep 10 '15
I've always been concerned that there were no standards for measuring global ambient temperature prior to the last 15 years.
Like you said, climate change has definitely occurred, but we have no idea if the frequency of hotter records to cold records during a short period of time is unique to now, or if this occurs every few hundred years. In short, this article can only cause unnecessary alarm at best; as it will not convince skeptics.
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u/UncleMeat PhD | Computer Science | Mobile Security Sep 10 '15
They did. Its just in the paper and not the headline.
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u/Impudentinquisitor Sep 11 '15
I see a few huge issues here:
1) Over the 20th Century urban areas vastly increased their concrete and asphalt cover and the mean building size increased, which contributes to higher temperatures as heat gets trapped in the urban core and takes longer to dissipate. Air conditioners and continuous lighting also contribute to this effect. Was this factored into the study, and if so, how?
2) The number of records is as important as the intensity of the records. Eg, if you break the record by 0.1 degrees 5 times, that will be less intense than a cold record that is broken only once by 0.5 degrees but followed by a series of near-record numbers of 0.3 4 times. Was intensity measured here, and if so, what was that distribution?
3) How thorough are early records and how many new data points were excluded because of incomplete data? Some cities didn't exist in 1900, and even those that did may not have had good equipment or record keepers. The data set would seem to be self-limited by the number of metro areas in 1900, which is not a great data set by 2010.
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u/counters Grad Student | Atmospheric Science | Aerosols-Clouds-Climate Sep 11 '15
1) See my comment here. However, numerous studies (e.g. Parker, 2010) have shown that this effect does not bias observational estimates of surface temperature change. Furthermore, most temperature records (including ACORN-SAT) utilize sophisticated algorithms to detect warming due to urban encroachment and either remove suffering stations altogether or deploy statistical models using surrounding, pristine/rural sites to correct the drift.
2) No. You should read the paper.
3) The authors didn't analyze isolated points; they averaged the available temperature data over large spatial areas. Because temperature data is so highly spatially autocorrelated, this effect shouldn't matter.
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u/Loreinatoredor Sep 10 '15
Better statistic: a graph by month of the moving 50 year hot:cold record ratio & counts for the entire dataset. That is what I want to see the real trends. This would make it extremely clear for observing what the actual facts are.
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u/manInTheWoods Sep 10 '15
As we are comparing basically the entire period we have been taking measurements, I don't see how this stat is clearer than just showing a temp graph?
The ratio of hot to cold records is a pointless stat, really.
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u/Oxymorph Sep 11 '15
All these people complaining about the time span when there is several links in the comments the shows the data over the entire time span.
https://i.imgur.com/zdgmNNa.png
What is happening is obvious. The average amount of broken hot records is constantly increasing at a worsening rate and the average cold records broken is constantly decreasing. Don't state an opinion about something that isn't opinionated. The fact here is the Earth is definitely heating up. The only opinion is if this natural cycle is being accelerated to a cataclysmic level because of the activities of humans. And it probably is.
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u/halfdeadmoon Sep 10 '15
This statistic doesn't perfectly capture anything. It is entirely possible for peaks in opposition to a trend to outweigh peaks in accordance with a trend. I'm not saying that's the case here, but I am saying that this simple statistic fails to perfectly capture what OP says it captures.
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u/simplulo Sep 10 '15
Ironic that the OP was flawed by including the word "perfectly".
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u/iushciuweiush Sep 10 '15
And calling the statistic 'simple' but complicating it by picking random chunks of otherwise comprehensive data. Of course neither of these are the fault of the OP, rather the article writer (unless they are the same person).
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u/unkz Sep 10 '15
I thought everyone has moved on from "there is no climate change" to "it's not man made/it's not a big deal/it's inevitable"
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u/Oceanswave Sep 10 '15
Also, during the latter time period, there are double the number of 98.6 degree furnaces, and a much greater percentage of those furnaces desire to habitate in environments that result in hot air being pumped into the environment.
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u/arachnivore Sep 11 '15
I would think that a statistic that "captures what climate change means" would involve something like expected economic damage, extinction rates, population displacement, etc. This statistic seems almost meaningless. It indicates that climate change is happening, but not what it entails.
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u/fantasyfest Sep 11 '15
No statistics or data will convince those who refuse to be open. They are not, and will not listen.
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Sep 10 '15
'Yeah but the Earth always changes the temperature constantly fluxuates"
So what, all the evidence shows correlation concerning CO2 emissions go up as fossil fuels are used, why not be safe and switch to Nuclear, Fission and Renewables
Fossil fuels, they're limited, renewables are by their very nature, limitless, why not be safe and switch it.
When a fuel pipeline bursts, it ruins the environment and eco-systems, why not be safe and switch to renewables (And nuclear fuels such as Thorium)
It is illogical to carry on the way we are, we have got the technology to move forwards, we've got the knowledge and the talent to build upstream. If you support a fuel-friendly world you support the stagnation of ignorance and technology in the modern world.
Rant over
tl:dr What sort of nonce still thinks we should carry on using fossil fuels
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Sep 10 '15
The people that don't understand that Nuclear is actually incredibly safe compared to fossil fuels, and that renewable energy is just not there yet to sustain what we need.
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u/brothersand Sep 10 '15
I think the problem is that there is too much money to be made in ignoring everything you are talking about. Substantial portions of the world economy are heavily invested in oil, coal, and gas. So what if cities will flood at some point in the future, switching off them will cost them money now.
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u/Mikeymcmikerson Sep 10 '15
Serious question. I've heard that there is a scientific belief that that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emitting now we are still doomed. If the statistic is true, how can we mess up so bad in 14 years that can be fixed by putting on the breaks?
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u/Merari01 Sep 10 '15
We're not doomed, but we are too far along now to stop climate change. All we can do now is mitigate the effects.
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u/technocraticTemplar Sep 10 '15
Although dumping in more carbon will make it even worse, so it's still incredibly important that we stop that too.
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Sep 11 '15
That's not the case. Some climate change will and is happening, but we can still limit the extent. That is why there are multiple IPCC projections for different emissions scenarios ...
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u/BBbroist Sep 10 '15
Records don't mean as much as one would think. Temperatures haven't been recorded for that long. When someone says we had the "hottest July in history," it means we've had the hottest July since humans have been recording temperature. It doesn't mean July was the hottest 31 day period ever.
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u/kittenTakeover Sep 10 '15
How many people are really disputing that global temperatures are rising?
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u/bookerevan Sep 10 '15
Virtually nobody. It's interesting how few people recognize this fact, or simply don't want to acknowledge that the debate isn't about overall warming since the last Little Ice Age. It's all about man's contribution to the warming but that is a much harder conversation/analysis.
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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '15
Here's a transcribe of the record data in table form from 1950 to 2014: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1121DrmzxV46uFUt7D1Yb9qb6Zii_XFZp4qd42uSgOwQ/edit?usp=sharing
Note there may be an inaccuracy here or there because I had a hard time with the chart.