Slight inaccuracy, the data only goes back to 1979 and has not yet been verified by NOAA which has data going back to 1880.
It’s also worth noting that this is based on the Climate Reanalyzer which is intended for forecasting temperatures, not record keeping.
It would be more accurate to say it was the hottest day ever recorded by the Climate Reanalyzer.
Source: https://time.com/6292103/worlds-hottest-day-preliminary-record/
This. It’s also not accurate to say it’s the warmest we’ve been in the past 10,000 years, it was likely warmer during the roman warm period, and potentially a couple of other points. So we can only really say it’s the warmest we’ve seen in the last couple hundred years.
That’s not to say this isn’t concerning, we’re on track to smash the roman warm periods average temperatures within our lifetimes and make the earth the hottest it’s been since the paleoscene, which would have massive ramifications. But we’re not there yet, the problem is that we will likely get there in the next few decades.
At least the “medieval warm period” which gets cited a lot, was a regional phenomenon and global temperatures are higher today. The Wikipedia page seems to suggest the same for the Roman warm period.
The Roman warm period was about 2 degrees F warmer than today when you’re measuring global average temperatures, not just in europe, although it was more pronounced in europe. At current rates though, we’ll break that bar in 40 years or so though
Imma need some sources for that claim.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last_2,000_years
in the next few decades.
I appreciate your optimism.
If you want some more optimism, we actually have slowed the rate of warming from what was predicted 20 years ago. The reality we are living in would have been considered an “optimistic prediction” at one point. We are still warming, things are still going in the wrong direction, but the changes that people have been making to mitigate global warming are making an impact. We might still be going over the cliff, but at least we’re doing it with our brakes on instead of full speed ahead. So yes, I do think it will be decades before we truly break temperature records that have been seen by humans, maybe even several decades. That doesn’t downplay the significance of the need to stop it though
From what I’ve heard about our current climate warming situation I’d downgrade the metaphor from using breaks to taking the foot off the pedal a bit.
You can slam the brakes on your Camry but there’s an oil tanker behind you and all they’re doing is laying on the horn and pointing at their green logo while shoving your car off the cliff.
That’s what the oil industry likes to think, but they’re actually with us in the Camry. There is only the Camry, we’re all on the Camry together, good and bad.
Yeah, but the mega rich oil execs have ejector seats and parachutes.
Too bad there’s a lag time of about 40 years on emissions. We’re only feeling the effects of what was emitted in the early 80s. Imagine how bad it’ll be in 20 years time.
Can you tell me more about this?
Sure. Essentially what happens is the ocean absorbs much of the CO2 that’s released by us. If you’ve ever heard the term “ocean acidification” that’s what causes it.
Water and the oceans change on a much more gradual scale than the atmosphere, so it takes decades for the CO2 to be released back into the air. For example, if you bring a pot of water to an open flame it still takes time for the water to reach the temperature to boil, it’s not instantaneous.
The ocean is far more massive than our atmosphere. It’ll take time for the changes to take effect, especially a noticeable one on our end. But if you take a look at the ph levels of the oceans over the last century it becomes abundantly clear we’re messing things up big time.
Oh that’s crazy I didnt know about that. Does the water just absorb the CO2 somehow or does it have to do with algea?
What about tipping points? I hear about ice cover, ocean currents, and other systems where once we get past a tipping point, additional warming is self sustaining. At that point it doesn’t matter if we have our brakes on, we’ve gone over the cliff right?
If we end up triggering a self-sustaining feedback loop, that’s how I understand it, yeah. We still do have some very high risk strategies we could implement, like solar shielding to reduce total light reaching the earth, or bioengineering plants that suck up carbon super efficiently, but it’s hard to say what the impacts of those would be
I wouldn’t consider solar shielding high risk, since it would be easy to design fail-safe, but I totally wouldn’t trust bioengineering methods, since life uhh… finds a way.
I don’t see either of those happening because there’s no short-term profit. Also, unintended consequences.
You act like you use the word Paleoscene like you know when it was.
I don’t.
I did however hear on the BBC News Podcast that Nerds are saying we should change the name of the period we’re in now to be the “Time of Man” and I realised that I have no idea what Epoch we are currently in.
So I thought I’d ask you. Then I’ll memorise your answer and be less dumb.
Please help.
Edit: I know how to use Google but this way is more fun sometimes.
If I were to pick one, I’d call it the Menocene. Seems apt.
I did Google it though, if you want the actual answer.
Holocene is the current geological time it cover from now to a out 11,000 years ago from the last glacial period… The Paleoscene was about 66-56 million years ago.
Paleocene was the time right around when the dinosaurs died, so about 65 million years ago. you’ve heard of Jurassic, and maybe you’ve even heard of cretaceous, this is the one that comes right after those two. Right now we’re in the Holocene. The reason I mentioned it though is because (as far as we can tell) it was the hottest period in earth’s history, with average temperatures 8 degrees Celsius higher than today (which is a ton, the fact that it’s an average makes it seem less insane than it actually is). we’re nowhere close to getting as warm as it was then, but even if we got half that hot in a relatively fast amount of time (like we are) it could still cause mass extinction.
Thanks. I have heard of all of these times I just had no idea where they are in relation to each other.
the data only goes back to 1979 and has not yet been verified by NOAA which has data going back to 1880.
There’s a whole hot world outside of America who don’t need to wait for its underfunded organizations to get around to validating the data.
But I get it. The news is dire. It’s neat to cling to uncertainty in times like this unless you lived in Lytton
Welcome to the coldest summer for the rest of your life :)
Why would you do that?
Thats a nice way to put it. Thank you.
😩
And just a week ago I was talking to these boomers that were explaining me how “we should all stop being so attached to climate fear” and that “everything will just sort itself out and we’ll live just fine”.
Yea, no shit boomer
They meant that they’ll live just fine. You see, they will be dead before climate change decimates our planet. 🤷♂️
Looks less likely every year, they’re running out of time quick
It won’t decimate the planet, but it will make the planet a lot less habitable for humans.
So yes depending on where they live they will be just fine, but a lot of people will die. Because of this there will be huge migrations and struggels with having enough resources…
And that is already happening in a small scale. All those natural disasters that are happening all over the world. And especially the poorer country’s on the south half of the globe are struggling with stuff like wood fires, smaller harvests because of the heat. And it’s all just going to get worse. I hate humanity.
but it will make the planet a lot less habitable for humans.
And, unfortunately, for a wide range of other species.
Boomers: “We had hot days in the 60’s and 70’s as well and you didn’t hear us complain”
My parents’ go-to is that everyone was freaking out about an incoming ice age in the 60s (they weren’t), and thus climate experts are all completely clueless and have no clue what they’re talking about.
And they wonder why I visit less than before.
OK, now point me to the place I can give money for the food that doesn’t pollute/throw it all away.
The company I work for makes power infrastructure for data centres and the like, 3 phase 400v conductors, the smallest we make is 1000 amp rated and we go up to 6000 amp rated, that is a hell of a lot of power and we run 24 hours a day 7 days a week pumping out miles of these to power the data centres that run the internet so we can be shitty to each other
bullshit, we should be ensure that the countries where a lot of childeren are being bourne, are being economicly lifted… you cannot tell people to have less childeren, if their future depends on it.
Gotta love them for giving us nice warm weather
So you’re saying it’s a cycle /s
Sure, it will cool down in a few million years. We’ll be fine.
Don’t worry all of this will soon be over.
I guess this is supposed to be taken as a bleak joke but it won’t be over soon. We all will likely experience a direct hit to our quality of life. If you’re poor, your survival will get harder. If you have or want children they will have fundamentally worse lives, compared to what we experienced so far. This can go on for decades or centuries, depending on how much we can stsill fix and what tipping points occur.
So yeah, hope that is some motivation to change something. Or at least shout at some people. :)
The solution is not to have children. Everything else is pissing in the wind.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
One thing to note is that if everyone stops having children, it will create a demographic crisis with a lot of older people / pensioners not able to work and not a lot of working age people to support the aging population. Good for environment ofc but quite bad for the remainder of population.
Fully agreed. But harder to sell unfortunately :(
There are other fulfilling things to do with your life besides having kids. People need to realize this.
Yes. But you are arguing against lots of social programming, cultural expectations and religious backgrounds. It’s hard.
Until we colonize other planets, downsizing is the only way humanity will survive.
Curious: how do they know that? Recorded history is like 5k years right?
Scientists use climate proxy records like coral skeletons, tree rings, glacial ice cores, and sediment layers. For example, the levels of oxygen 16 in a layer of ocean debris and fossils go up as temperatures rise. So a high level of oxygen 16 in sediment from one layer tells scientists that the planet was hot and watery when the sediment was laid down.
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It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).
Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.
Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place. For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C). Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.
Sources:
- IPCC WG1, figure2_1
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7
Also, about oxygen 16 and oxygen 18:
The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly higher concentration of heavy oxygen compared to the universal standard, and the ice develops a higher concentration of light oxygen. Thus, high concentrations of heavy oxygen in the ocean tell scientists that light oxygen was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios can show how much ice covered the Earth. Sources:
- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_OxygenBalance which is based on https://hal.science/hal-03334828/file/jgrD1994Jouzel25791.pdf
- You may also find this wikipedia article useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Δ18O#Extrapolation_of_temperature
The point is that they’ve established a relationship between o16 levels and temperature, so if you’ve got twice the o16 then say it was 25% warmer (made up ratio, I haven’t read the study).
This doesn’t tell us what the air temperature was, but it does tell us what it wasn’t (IE upper and lower bounds).
When you have several of these proxies it helps narrow down the temperature range (think how your god works better when you have more satellites).
Now if you know that the last seven days are the hottest on record and you know from your proxies that you are outside of temperatures of the past 100k years then it’s a pretty safe bet to state that we’re at the hottest time in the past 100k years.
There is no melodrama or lying in this fact, unfortunately.
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I think, as individuals; we all need to pick up our game and do our part in polluting and destroying the planet more. We can’t let the corporations do all the heavy lifting after all.
Edit: I don’t think I came across properly here, given the replies. This was sarcasm saying we need to fuck up the planet more to keep pace with the rate the corporations do.
I personally plan on returning my rechargeable AA batteries and going single use from now on. it’s the little things that help
Mine aren’t quite dead yet, but I’ve used them for over a day now. I should throw them out and buy some more just in case, I don’t know how accurate that little meter on the battery saying it’s still at 90% is.
Yes. Our 12% will really make a difference vs corporations’ 80%. And we can get to that 12% if so 8 billion of us work together. I’m doing my 0.0000001% part!
You know corporations build shit people buy, right? It’s not like they pollute for the fun of it. They pollute because we give them money to do it…
Kinda orthogonal but I will say it’s weird that we can still vote with our wallets.
But we are. According to the USDA, food waste makes up 22% of the food industries 26% CO2 emissions. And don’t forget the diseases food waste produces.
That food waste is largely due to arbitrary date labels and grocery stores throwing out literal tons of perfectly good food instead of donating it.
And believe it or not, part of this is because people don’t like to pick up the weird looking tomato, or the banana with a few peckles.
According to the USDA, again, the majority of food waste is at the household level.
Circling back to the arbitrary date labels
How can we sell more without an expiration date?!!! We need to please the profits and shorten expiration dates!
Honestly corporations are only producing what consume. We are using corporations as scapegoats. If we don’t realize this soon and don’t change it ways…
There are more efficient, greener ways to go about producing pretty much everything we use that doesn’t destroy the earth. Problem is is that it’s not as profitable for share holders.
For most categories, yes, but when it comes to something like meat production mentioned in the title here, that’s not really the case. Meat production is massively inefficient in its best case. We are going to have to reduce production which means having changes in consumption in one way or another
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
If it was so efficient, why are not everyone doing it and building it? If it was so efficient, why are energy prices increasing? If it is more efficient, then it would be also more profitable but you say the opposite.
It requires a front-loaded investment in infrastructure, which means lower returns for a few quarters.
Most companies wanted people to use horses for as long as possible because that meant they had to adapt, change, and invest. Why do something that’s difficult when you can just do the same thing? This works out when you don’t really have competition because the cost to enter the market is so high due to decades of mergers and acquisitions, consolidating all means of production and materials to a select-few companies.
If you haven’t seen it, The Good Place is a great show and they discuss this basically. Should we be responsible for tracking the output of every company before we buy any product?
(The answer is: of course not. We don’t have enough time in the world for that. The correct solution is regulation and taxing for negative externalities during the production process. If the cost of negative externalities is built into the cost of the product, then it will be less benificial to purchase a product with a dirty supply chain.)
How do you tax Saudi Arabia corporations? How do you tax Russian corporations? They just make up the difference we don’t produce. Is it wise to send all that money to those countries because we won’t stop consuming? How is taxing our corporations helping them be competitive on the world market? We give everyone else a free pass but bill our corporations.
Not sure how to edit a post but will add this. I agree with you. We absolutely should be adding the cost of externalities. The only way to do this effectively is to add that cost at the consumption level. We should pay twice the cost for conventional fuel at the pumps. Heating your home should be far more expensive. Something that would also encourage people to take on roommates and fix housing issues. Taxing only or corporations simply means Russia or Saudia Arabia will increase their output while they laugh at us.
Well, we kind of have to get basic necessities, so often buying stuff from corporations is necessary. Yes, we shouldn’t buy useless shit, but why are we making useless shit in the first place?
I do agree that we as inviduals should take some responsibility, such as not littering and trying to minimise our waste, but we have to hold corporations accountable for their actions.
Also there are a lot of more ethical and responsible ways for corporations to produce their goods, but they choose to not to. Why? Because it would take more money, and they don’t give a shit about anything else than their money.
We can break this record, do like me, burn tires !
One of the three is not like the other, in the way that it can never be eliminated. Let’s play guess…
Shipping can certainly be made much less impactful, if that’s what you are thinking. A lot of shipping is overland trucking, and a lot of overland trucking can be replaced with trains, and a lot of trains can be replaced with electrified trains. That would make quite a bit of difference
Vermont just had flooding that was on par with Hurricane Irene.
They’re calling it a 1000 year rarity. It happened 12 years ago. Only this time there was no hurricane.
There are ocean temperatures in the fucking 90s.
This hurricane season is gonna be batshit crazy, y’all.
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