
Map: These are the cities that climate change will hit first - stevekinney
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/map-these-are-the-cities-that-climate-change-will-hit-first/
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jliechti1
Didn't see this in the article - the paper is entitled "The projected timing
of climate departure from recent variability".

Direct link:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/pdf/nature12...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/pdf/nature12540.pdf)

From the methods summary section:

They used the projections of seven climate variables: near-surface air
temperature, sea surface temperature, precipitation, evaporation,
transpiration, surface sensible heat flux, and ocean surface pH.

"For each model and variable, we used the period 1860-2005 from the historical
experiment (the longest time span common to all models), to establish the
historical bounds of climate variability. The projections...[were used] to
simulate the period 2006-2100...to identify the year at which mean annual
values of a given variable would exceed historical bounds."

"In total, for all variables and experiments, we processed 89,712 years of
data comprising 1,076,544 monthly global maps, interpolated to an equal-area
grid with a resolution of 100 km."

I think the 9 in 1960-2005 must be a typo. Everything is 1860 in the study.

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joshuahedlund
We can't even accurately project the lower bounds of average global
temperature variation more than a couple decades out[0], but we can determine
the lower bounds of individual cities several decades out?

[0][http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/2157446...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-
emissions)

~~~
zalew
Yes, there is this special method of determining future ecological
catastrophes, it's called: bullshit propaganda.

~~~
kenrikm
We can't forecast the weather two weeks out yet we claim to be able to do it
30 years out? Clearly the models are wrong however which direction they are
wrong in is the crapshoot that gets people fighting on "global warming is
fake/real" I don't know why they can't present it like hey guys it's not a
good idea to screwup the environment lets work on fixing it instead of scare
tactics and denial that both sides end up fighting over.

~~~
zalew
> I don't know why they can't present it like hey guys it's not a good idea

Because there is a huge-ass economy hidden under 'green' politics and without
the drama nobody would vote for governments that impose penalties on people
using old equipment. Haven't you noticed that most 'fixes' on climate rely on
buying new shit (German automotive market as the easiest example) and favor
developped economies over the troubled ones?

~~~
kalleboo
And that doesn't even begin to touch the amounts of cash big banks will make
on carbon credit trade.

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vanderZwan
This title is very misleading, in a way. It's not like there will be some
magical treshold after which a city is magically "hit" by climate change. All
the date indicates is the following:

> _A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest
> year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of
> its hottest year between 1960 and 2005._

It's a gradual change that is already happening, and there's plenty of other
side-effects of climate change that will be notable long before this
artificially defined tipping point is reached.

~~~
hyperbovine
All true, but the image of being hit by something is oh-so much more arresting
than that of gradual, inevitable change ending life as we know it. Decades of
dire warnings have done nothing to capture the public's mind on this important
issue. If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not?

~~~
300bps
_If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not?_

Because you turn away people. I'm a conservationist that just happens to think
regardless of climate change that it just makes sense to preserve finite
resources like fossil fuels and clean air. When you start to use bullshit to
further our similar cause, then you hurt our cause when the bullshit is
exposed.

I actually saw the headline and excitedly clicked on it. I was excited because
with all the talk of climate change I feel like I never see anything other
than abstract predictions of "x degree C raise in global temperature". I
thought FINALLY tell me when coastal regions of New Jersey are going to be
permanently underwater. No such luck - more abstract bullshit masquerading as
something it's not. You have no idea how much this hurts people's belief in
climate issues.

~~~
hyperbovine
Well, "abstract bullshit" is a bit strong; real scientific effort went into
the paper and those models certainly have _some_ predictive power. (Contrary
to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to
publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) If anything they are guilty of framing
their results in the most arresting manner possible, but hey, welcome to
science in the 21st century.

Plus, something tells me that this episode has not truly shaken your belief in
climate change :-) If this paper leads a few thousand skeptics to finally
embrace science, I view that as a win.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Bullshit does drive thinking people away. The assorted levels of BS I've seen
did convince me to be far more skeptical of climate change. I assigned a high
probability to the AGW hypothesis when I started grad school, but was well
below 95% confident when I graduated, and have become even more skeptical
since then.

Bits of shadiness that have pushed me away:

\- When I started reading papers on climate simulation (I was also solving
wave equations numerically), I started seeing wildly unjustified assumptions
in climate modelling papers. In spite of the obvious flaws, the models are
portrayed as highly accurate rather than merely the best than can be done on
current hardware [1]. This reduced my confidence by a bit.

\- Odd claims about the validity of the models. GCM models + economic analysis
suggests that the cheapest method of mitigating climate change is
geoengineering (specifically, using human engineered pinatubo-style forcings).
Yet geoengineering is dismissed as wildly unpredictable. Either GCM is an
effective model, or it's not. If not, we have no counterfactual to compare to
the historical record.

\- Climategate. That's not how science is done. Yet rather than cleaning
house, double checking everything and forcing the perpetrators out in
disgrace, everyone rallied around them. That feels more like politics than
science.

This paper is just using models and getting headlines. It's not a big deal.
But throwing nonsense at people in an effort to get them to accept your claims
is a bad idea, particularly when the primary argument is an argument from
authority.

[1] Making unrealistic assumptions and doing the best you can is just a part
of science. I object only to portraying toy models as the real world.

------
mikeash
It's quite amazing and sad to see the deniers come out in droves in these
comments. The political forces against climate science have done _such_ a good
job at spreading disinformation, it really is impressive.

I wonder if this is what it was like in the mid-1900s when the science for the
dangers of tobacco was starting to really solidify and the tobacco companies
were running full-bore to discredit it.

~~~
rubidium
On the other side of the coin, one could wonder what it was like for those
advocating craniometry to realize their pseudo-science racism was doing more
harm than good. (No flame war intended: I say this only to counter your
analogy.)

Those who have reasonable, scientific grounds for being skeptical of
anthropomorphic climate change (and there are people smarter than you or I in
that boat) don't like the shrill, political-based "deniers" much. They do,
however, think it's good to scientifically examine the assumptions of papers
such as the one that came out in Nature today. Climate modeling is quite hard,
and the conclusions climate scientists come to are open to skeptical
investigation.

It's certainly become a weirder field of study since politics became its main
audience.

~~~
martythemaniak
The problem isn't that there's no room for disagreement. It's that the quality
of the disagreements and critiques are so low, it's impossible to believe
there's no alternative motive at work.

Your post is a great example of this type of trash. You start off comparing
one of the most researched fields, involving decades of effort spread amongst
thousands of researchers around the world with a small number of people who
did not even have an understanding of the mechanisms (genetics, embryology,
etc) with which they were dealing. The GP's analogy works quite well, our
certainty of cigarettes causing lunch cancer is about the same as the IPCC's
certainty of anthropomorphic climate change.

Second, apart from the normal peer-review of specific papers, there have been
several large-scale attempts to "review" all of climate change. A great
example is the "Climategate" fiasco, which after a review by a sceptic funded
the oil industry, turned out to have been nothing but an attempted hit job on
the scientists involved.

Third, there _is_ actual review and revision going on within the IPCC. One of
the major differences between the 2007 and 2014 IPCC reports is the narrowing
of the predicted temperature ranges. Deniers however don't seem to have the
evidence to work within the normal scientific process, so instead they must
engage of various types of deception and PR work to get their points across.

So no, it certainly has not become a weirder field of study. It's just that
people threatened by facts are trying to apply political tactics to a non-
political field, much like creationist attempts to revise or silence
evolution.

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jasonkester
The nice thing about computer models is that you get to keep changing them to
move out the point where the world is definitely going to end this time for
real. Surely at least one of those cities was scheduled for "climate
departure" before 2013, back in the 90s when we decided to start panicking
about this.

Somebody bookmark this so that we can refer back to it in 2025, when the same
model predicts the same thing to start happening in 2040.

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swamp40
The spot where I am sitting (near Chicago) has been under 100+ feet of glacial
ice at least four times in the past - most recently less than 20,000 years
ago.

As a reasonable thinking person, I see no reason not to expect that to happen
again some day.

The possibility of another ice age scares me _much_ more than any effects from
AGW.

Here's what the US and Canada looked like 20,000 years ago:
[http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagoge...](http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagogeo/imagesCG/glacxt.gif)

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nmeofthestate
The interesting thing here is how 'if the world can substantially bring down
carbon dioxide emissions', the result will be a quite minor change in outcomes
(at least using this unusual departure 'milestone').

For example, highlighted in the article: Washington DC's 2069 climate if we do
nothing will be the same as Washington DC's 2071 climate if we 'substantially
bring down carbon dioxide emissions'.

According to the article this result is "significantly mitigat[ing] the
effects of climate change".

The expenditure that moves that date 2 years is going to be astronomical. I
WANT to be convinced that these measures make sense, but so far it all seems
very flaky (not climate change - what we're doing about it).

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SeanDav
It used to be "Global Warming", but when that label didn't fit very well with
the observed results, the label somehow became "Climate Change".

This is a clever bit of public manipulation because who can argue against the
fact that climate is changing....

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Global warming gives the impression that you will have warming everywhere all
the time. In humanly understandable terms it is better to talk about climate
change, as global warming give a number of other effects. Such as wider
variability of weather (stronger storms, longer dry spells, more precipitation
etc). So climate change is a better description of what people can expect to
see around them.

~~~
SeanDav
Throughout the entire history of our planet the climate has been changing. It
was changing before Man and will be changing long afterwards. To call it
"Climate Change" is utterly useless and serves only to put up a convenient
label that is completely impossible to disprove, because everyone agrees - the
climate is changing.

What is not agreed, is the degree of change, its manifestation and the effect,
if any, that Man is having on said climate change.

~~~
gwright
I'd add to that is that there is certainly no agreement on what to do about
the effects of climate change. In particular I rarely if ever see a comparison
between the costs of adjusting to a warmer climate (e.g. relocating low-lying
communities if you think the sea level will rise) vs. the costs of radically
changing our energy systems (production & usage).

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mipapage
"The projected timing of climate departure":
[http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Data....](http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/PublicationsCopyRighted/Data.html)

Found via the Nature article. More data, less hype.

------
colanderman
_A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest
year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of
its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. [...] Put another way, every single
year after 2047 will be hotter than D.C.'s hottest year on record from 1860 to
2005. It's the moment when the old "normal" is really gone._

Well, which is it, 1960-2005 or 1860-2005?

~~~
GeneralMayhem
It doesn't excuse the author's inconsistency, but the reality is that it
doesn't matter - the difference between 1860 and 1960 is trivial compared to
the difference after that. The hottest year on record between 1860 and 2005 is
probably after 1990 in most cities.

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graycat
Yes, yes, yes, the solution is from the Mayans -- kill people to pour their
blood on a rock to keep the planet from getting too hot.

Right: WaPo is continuing to flog this old horse, trying to keep it going as a
long list of stories easy to write for nearly automatic eyeballs and easy ad
revenue.

------
rayiner
I love how a discussion of climate change brings out all the armchair
scientists. Who knew HN had so many lurking PhD's?

~~~
IanDrake
The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP.

This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm not
going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they have a
PhD and a model that proclaims doom.

~~~
rayiner
> The problem with your line of thinking is that Climate Change isn't N vs NP.

Neither is say high-speed aerodynamics. We can't predict where a particular
air molecule will go in a turbulent flow. We have only approximate closed-form
models, and do most work in simulation and by fitting empirical data to
simplified approximate equations and tweeking constants until things come out
right. Yet airplanes still fly and people don't get on the internet armchair
talking about how Boeing's aerodynamicists are wrong.

> This stops being a scientific problem when it becomes a political one. I'm
> not going to let someone tell me what I can and can't do just because they
> have a PhD and a model that proclaims doom.

Deniers live in a world where people _can_ tell them what they can and cannot
do.[1] Deniers know this, so they attack the scientific conclusions because
they know that the public will, quite rationally,[2] tell them what you can
and cannot do if they believe there is even a substantial chance that the
climate scientists are correct.

[1] That's the quid pro quo isn't it? The public tells big strong guys that
they can't go around killing and eating people, and consequently reserves the
right to tell other people what they can and cannot do.

[2] It is of course eminently rational to take even very expensive corrective
action in the face of a low probability but extremely high cost negative
scenario.

~~~
IanDrake
I can't really make heads or tails of what you wrote, but I assume from
footnote 2 that your currently wearing a bullet proof vest because there's a
small probability that you could get shot.

