Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[Syt]

https://apnews.com/article/climate-global-temperatures-heat-earth-d7b4eda880b1dafd255a93591cfe4759

The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record

Earth simmered to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements.

And scientists say the exceptionally hot year is part of a long-term warming trend that shows hints of accelerating.

Two U.S. science agencies — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and a private measuring group released their calculations for last year's global temperature on Thursday, and all said it wasn't far behind ultra-hot 2016 and 2020.

Six different calculations found 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest year since the late 1800s. NASA said 2021 tied with 2018 for sixth warmest, while NOAA puts last year in sixth place by itself.

Scientists say a La Nina — natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns globally and brings chilly deep ocean water to the surface — dampened global temperatures just as its flip side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.

Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.

"So it's not quite as headline-dominating as being the warmest on record, but give it another few years and we'll see another one of those" records, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth monitoring group that also ranked 2021 the sixth hottest. "It's the long-term trend, and it's an indomitable march upward."

Gavin Schmidt, the climate scientist who heads NASA's temperature team, said "the long-term trend is very, very clear. And it's because of us. And it's not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record, NASA and NOAA data agree. Global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than 140 years ago, their data shows.

The other 2021 measurements came from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and satellite measurements by Copernicus Climate Change Service i n Europe and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

There was such a distinctive jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago that scientists have started looking at whether the rise in temperatures is speeding up. Both Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to that but it's hard to know for sure.

"If you just look at the last the last 10 years, how many of them are way above the trend line from the previous 10 years? Almost all of them," Schmidt said in an interview.

There's a 99% chance that 2022 will be among the 10 warmest years on record and a 10% chance it will be the hottest on record, said NOAA climate analysis chief Russell Vose in a Thursday press conference.

Vose said chances are 50-50 that at least one year in the 2020s will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times — the level of warming nations agreed to try to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

While that threshold is important, extreme weather from climate change is hurting people now in their daily lives with about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming, Vose and Schmidt said.

The global average temperature last year was 58.5 degrees (14.7 Celsius), according to NOAA. In 1988, NASA's then-chief climate scientist James Hansen grabbed headlines when he testified to Congress about global warming in a year that was the hottest on record at the time. Now, the 57.7 degrees (14.3 Celsius) of 1988 ranks as the 28th hottest year on record.

Last year, 1.8 billion people in 25 Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations had their hottest years on record, including China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Myanmar and South Korea, according to Berkeley Earth.

The deep ocean, where most heat is stored in the seas, also set a record for warmth in 2021, according to a separate new study.

"Ocean warming, aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations, ... is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive ... sea level rise if we don't act," said study co-author Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist.

The last time Earth had a cooler than normal year by NOAA or NASA calculations was 1976. That means 69% of the people on the planet — more than 5 billion people under age 45 — have never experienced such a year, based on United Nations data.

North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, 39, who wasn't part of the new reports but said they make sense, said, "I've only lived in a warming world and I wish that the younger generations did not have to say the same. It didn't have to be this way."

[Berkut]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

[Eddie Teach]

Man, Toby really is The Worst.

[Gaijin de Moscu]

One place I personally felt this most is Japan. It was always hot in Tokyo in August of course, but never like this.

Literally you feel it's getting hotter every summer. Took a picture the year before — 39 Celsius before 8 am in the morning...

[Josquius]

In Kofu

Yeah. That place got ungodly hot. Its a natural heat sink filled with a man made heat sink of sprawl.
No wonder I rarely went outside in daylight hours

[Gaijin de Moscu]

In Kofu

Yeah. That place got ungodly hot. Its a natural heat sink filled with a man made heat sink of sprawl.
No wonder I rarely went outside in daylight hours

In Tokyo it was 38 Celsius that morning

With their energy issues, they also don't cool public buildings that much anymore. So you no longer get that feeling of relief when you enter a shopping mall or a train station...

[Berkut]

One place I personally felt this most is Japan. It was always hot in Tokyo in August of course, but never like this.

Literally you feel it's getting hotter every summer. Took a picture the year before — 39 Celsius before 8 am in the morning...

The data you are citing is almost certainly all lies and propaganda though, so you can safely ignore it. The source is printed right on the graph, the "US something something or other" and you already said all western information is bullshit.

What does Russia Times say about global warming?

[Gaijin de Moscu]

The data you are citing is almost certainly all lies and propaganda though, so you can safely ignore it. The source is printed right on the graph, the "US something something or other" and you already said all western information is bullshit.

What does Russia Times say about global warming?

I searched for Russia Times but it doesn't seem to exist. There's Moscow Times though, where Michele A. Berdy is the Cultural Editor. Why don't you ask her?

@MicheleBerdy
[email protected]

[Berkut]

The data you are citing is almost certainly all lies and propaganda though, so you can safely ignore it. The source is printed right on the graph, the "US something something or other" and you already said all western information is bullshit.

What does Russia Times say about global warming?

I searched for Russia Times but it doesn't seem to exist. There's Moscow Times though, where Michele A. Berdy is the Cultural Editor. Why don't you ask her?

@MicheleBerdy
[email protected]

Why would I do that? I think the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a perfectly fine source.

[Gaijin de Moscu]

Why would I do that? I think the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a perfectly fine source.

I'm very happy for you.

Are you saying that either I or the Russian government deny the global warming? Just trying to understand your postings.

[Berkut]

Why would I do that? I think the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a perfectly fine source.

I'm very happy for you.

Are you saying that either I or the Russian government deny the global warming? Just trying to understand your postings.

You stated that you don't trust western information and media.

You can't pick and choose, and that is in fact the very problem with climate denial. If you attack the idea that there is objective sources of information so you can justify X, then the destruction of credibility applies to Y as well.

There is a reason an appreciable portion of the world thinks climate change is a bunch of bullshit invented for some nefarious reason to screw them over, and that we should just go on burning fossil fuels because global warming is all lies, and even if it is happening, why, humans have nothing to do with it anyway. The attack on the credibility of information and the idea that there isn't any real truth, so you might as well just believe whatever it is you *want* to believe.

[crazy canuck]

Berkut, get a room, or at least keep your fight to the thread where it originated.

[Gaijin de Moscu]

Why would I do that? I think the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a perfectly fine source.

I'm very happy for you.

Are you saying that either I or the Russian government deny the global warming? Just trying to understand your postings.

You stated that you don't trust western information and media.

You can't pick and choose, and that is in fact the very problem with climate denial. If you attack the idea that there is objective sources of information so you can justify X, then the destruction of credibility applies to Y as well.

There is a reason an appreciable portion of the world thinks climate change is a bunch of bullshit invented for some nefarious reason to screw them over, and that we should just go on burning fossil fuels because global warming is all lies, and even if it is happening, why, humans have nothing to do with it anyway. The attack on the credibility of information and the idea that there isn't any real truth, so you might as well just believe whatever it is you *want* to believe.

I don't trust any mass media, not just western. I tend to look at many different sources, without blindly trusting any of them.

On the climate change specifically, I said I've been personally observing how the Japanese summers have gradually become hotter. So far, I've experienced exactly 22 Japanese summers, and for me personally this trend is undeniable.

Incidentally, this observation is also confirmed by other observations, for example published here:

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/japan/climate-data-historical

[Berkut]

Congratulations on not "blindly trusting" the "mass media".

[grumbler]

The data you are citing is almost certainly all lies and propaganda though, so you can safely ignore it. The source is printed right on the graph, the "US something something or other" and you already said all western information is bullshit.

What does Russia Times say about global warming?

I searched for Russia Times but it doesn't seem to exist. There's Moscow Times though, where Michele A. Berdy is the Cultural Editor. Why don't you ask her?

@MicheleBerdy
[email protected]

Russia Times has relabeled itself RT (for "Russia Times").  It's an amusingly good imitation of a news source.  Check it out.