
January 2020 warmest on record: EU climate service - perfunctory
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-january-warmest-eu-climate.html
======
seizethecheese
"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures
were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark".

This is outlier journalism. The actual data is more informative (from
December): [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-
mn...](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-
mntp/201912.png)

On average the globe is warming. In a splotch of northeastern europe very much
so. In other places, it's actually colder.

~~~
piva00
Even though this is still a weather variation event it is very strange to be
living in Stockholm and feeling like it's spring since December, the cherry
blossoms at Kungsträdsgården were blooming in early/mid-January. We had less
than 5-6 days of snow in total so far and for two weekends in a row there were
days over 8C. Even frost has been rare this winter so far...

It is pretty damn strange.

------
matthewwiese
I don't normally shill subreddits -- and advise everyone to use an ad blocker
while on that website -- but for those who find this news alarming and/or
shrug it off as media hysteria, I highly suggest popping over to /r/collapse.

The immediate reaction (as an ego defense mechanism) is to dismiss what you
will read as unproductive fear mongering. However, it is a far worse fate to
be surprised by the reality of the situation (both environmental and social)
when these processes hit their limit and begin affecting the neoliberal
institutions that govern our world. The best way to protect yourself and your
family is to stay informed, no matter how dire the truth may be.

The time for gradual change was decades ago; the only thing that will save us
now (and when I say save, I mean _allow modern civilization to continue_ ) is
radical action.

------
hivacruz
My parents who live in the South of France had 26°C two days ago. People were
swimming in the sea. Crazy.

------
Najtmare
There is unfortunately no stopping this as there is no or very little
political will.

~~~
crispinb
It's worse than that. There is very determined political will, across much of
the globe, to stoke global heating further for short-term benefit.

In my country (Australia) we had a federal election last year. The climate
issues were very clearly laid out, and most citizens here accept the science,
and have some understanding of the severity of the issue. Yet they voted very
decisively against any further action to reduce emissions.

Most of the electorate here simply will not countenance changes from business
as usual. Of the world's more significant population centres, Europe is the
most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly
make the necessary big decisions, the US is weighed down with a sclerotic
political system and a huge proportion of the population with dogmatically
anti-scientific attitudes, China is backpedalling due to economic worries, and
India has enough troubles of its own.

We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.

~~~
titzer
> We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.

Yeah, unfortunately you are more right than you know. Like, right all the way
to the bottom of the human soul. Climate change is both too fast and too slow
for us to deal with effectively. In the past, humankind was never united in a
global economy powered by fossil fuels and fed by financial markets driven by
AI. It could never grow at a very large exponent. Now, fueled by massive
population growth and even more massive economic growth, we've entered into a
very steep exponent indeed. Running on theories generated by thousands of
economic PhDs and underwritten by national monetary policies, the machine is
finally eating the world. Literally. Capital is flowing everywhere for
economic development, from vast palm oil plantations across southeast Asia, to
Lithium mines in South America, to cattle farms in Brazil, to vacation homes
in every picturesque spot on the planet, we're chopping it all down. And
that's just the sheer physical digestion of nature. We're pumping out our
waste products at record rates, and thirsty for more, we equate energy
consumption with quality of life.

And worst of all, we will not stop nor even let our foot off the gas. We're
locked in the patterns of international struggle for dominance even as we are
locked in interpersonal struggles for sexual competition. He who makes the
most money, touts the biggest consumer markets, the greatest exports or GDP or
most powerful weapons...that person is crowned king of a smouldering planet.

We cannot right this ship. We are just apes, ffs. We can't evolve past our
basal instincts and our antibiotics and satellites are no witness to the
betterment of the human soul. We reached the apex of better angels of our
nature and greed and corruption and the brutal mathematics of a game theoretic
dilemma where every last human stands more to gain from defecting than
cooperating.

We're gonna smash this motherfucker against the wall as hard as she will go.
And the greatest irony of it all is there written in the bibles that
evangelicals clutch to their chests as they gnash their teeth for more
prosperity as god promised. And that was the simple wise truth, that cuts to
the core of all that is today's sin: the love of money is the root of all
evil.

~~~
crispinb
You sound angry. I'd suggest defanging that by considering eventual collapse
as always having been our civilisation's trajectory.

Any creature that manages to escape, for a period, limits on its reproduction
is going to overrun its environment. That's just elementary ecology. It should
only be surprising to the religiously-minded who never truly believed humans
to be part of the physical world. This includes many atheists raised on a
superstitious belief in inevitable 'progress'.

If you think about it, the notion that the assemblage of cognitive, conative
and affective faculties that evolution installed on a primate for the purposes
of hunting and small group coordination were somehow magically going to be up
to the job of managing a whole planet was always pretty fanciful.

~~~
titzer
> You sound angry.

I am. I've been around and around this thing for decades, a misanthrope since
my teenage years. A lot of us who delved deep into tech and scifi absorbed
myths about the future of humans as a space-faring, enlightened and truly
advanced race. After the internet and the great advancements in computing, it
seemed maybe we were reaching into truths of the universe and would join God
in his great datacenter in the sky, cranking pure mathematical harmony and joy
in our ever-expanding understanding of scientific knowledge. But we weren't
climbing into heaven, or building a space elevator up there. We weren't even
making ivory towers or steel skyscrapers. It's still been our base primate
instincts at work. Greed. All of that striving after science and mathematics
and technology has never been any different than digging up the hills for gold
or slashing down the forests to plant our wheat. We're dwarves; we're diggers,
miners, destroyers, conquerors, killers, pyschopaths. And that guilt triggers
in me because I see the delicate things, the beautiful things, that we have
destroyed to get here. And the future just looks like one big highway littered
with McDonald's with powerlines strewn across, dusty and dilapidated. We
fucked Earth. You bet I am angry.

~~~
crispinb
Then (forgive me if I'm mistaken here) it seems like you are probably clinging
to the Enlightenment myths of human supremacy and inevitable 'progress'. To be
angry that humans aren't transcending physical and ecological reality implies
that you think it was possible to have done so. A bit like a lapsed Catholic
still feeling guilty in the face of accusations from a God that they claim to
no longer believe in.

~~~
titzer
Haha, there is some truth to what you say. I was indeed raised Catholic, but
I'm an atheist now. No, I think that there is a case to be made that wanton
destruction is morally bad and I think my values stem from that. We wouldn't
be in such a bad pickle if our population wasn't nearing 8 billion. How much
of that is really necessary to support one of the giant spires of our
technological thrust? A million? A hundred million? I don't think even a
billion humans would be necessary for all of the tech behind the computer
industry.

~~~
crispinb
I hear you. Coming from one of the rogue nationx when it comes to climate
change, I have my moments too.

Still, on reflection, I'm pretty sure our current trajectory was inevitable
the moment humans developed agriculture. We're the wildly pullulating
caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were going to be just what we are.
Just another species. Just another dead end in evolution's exploration of
ecological state space.

~~~
titzer
Yeah, I pretty much agree with you about agriculture, especially after reading
"Sapiens" by Hariri.

> We're the wildly pullulating caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were
> going to be just what we are.

It's really mind-blowing to think of us as a planetary-scale caterpillar.
Thanks for the analogy!

Cheers.

------
1propionyl
Well, I met an old man dying on a train. He told me: "no more destination, no
more pain."

(Note: this is intended as a very harsh condemnation.)

~~~
titzer
I say we kill our heroes and fly.

edit: downvotes for finishing the song lyric. Cheers, HN.

~~~
1propionyl
Never let your fear decide your fate.

------
ddmma
Comparison is the source of tragedy

------
throwaway5752
I've been wondering why TSLA has been trading the way it has. A normal short
squeeze doesn't adequately explain it. The volume today alone is more than 2x
the last reported shares short.

We all know something very, very bad is going on with the climate.

~~~
1propionyl
All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true
extent of the outcomes.

And we'll likely all die reasonably content knowing it's not our problem.
We're among the last generations that can expect to ride the current peak in
human success before the hard bounds kick in and things either become much
more difficult or more likely just completely collapse.

We all love to rest easy on the fallacious idea that (as Carlin put it) "the
earth will be fine, it's us who are fucked."

It sounds nice, but the reality is far worse. Beyond a certain temperature
bound, the entire biosphere collapses... completely.

"Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!"

And what do they feed on? Organic particulate matter that filters down to them
from the rest of the biosphere that depends on relatively tight temperature
bounds.

Natural selection can only keep up with a certain degree of change in the mean
of temperature before it just collapses.

If we generate the conditions for the collapse of human civilization, it's
more likely than not that we also take all life on Earth with us.

And statistically... that means the end of life, period. That our planet
happened to have the particular temperature bounds for long enough for life to
emerge is vanishingly unlikely.

~~~
gus_massa
> _" Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!"_

> _And what do they feed on?_

You are underestimating the diversity of metabolism in bacteria/archaea
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea#Metabolism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea#Metabolism)

As a weird example, there is an isolate cave in Romania, with a weird source
of energy [http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-
beasts-l...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-
living-in-romanias-poison-cave) . (If that's all life that all life that will
survive, it looks like a nightmary scenario. But killing _completely_ all the
biosphere is very hard.)

Also, Cyanobacteria will probably be fine. They almost killed accidently
everyone else in the past, but there are not hard feeling.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria)

~~~
1propionyl
Even if a handful of unusually adapted species survive, do you think they'll
survive for any meaningful amount of time in the absence of any other
meaningful biosphere?

And even if they do, why do you assume they (species adapted to environments
entirely distinct from 99.99% of Earth) will somehow exist long enough to
speciate into a robust planet's worth of species?

The species that exist today have largely survived because collectively they
exist in homestasis and regulate their environment. If every tree suddenly
disappeared the human race would be gone within hours. Similarly if every warm
blooded animal suddenly disappeared plants would start dying in droves within
a few days.

------
adj83
"Across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures
were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark, "

if you have that sort of deviation its hard to make meaningful statements
about the longer term changes, it seems to me

~~~
1propionyl
An increase in variation is by definition an extremely statistically
significant change in behavior. Most families of distributions have two
dimensions: mean and variance.

And not just under expectation but in general.

------
busymom0
They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless.

The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high
temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960.
There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3
decades out of 50 states:

[https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax)

Edit: I am getting quite a few downvotes even though I linked to scientific
data. Please let me know what the downvote is for, otherwise it’s
disappointing a scientific community doesn’t want to engage in poking holes in
the data.

~~~
toupeetape
> Please let me know what the downvote is for

It's for not knowing what the word "globally" means. That is a pretty big hole
in your own data.

Look at the equivalent data where it exists for South America, Europe, Africa
or Asia. The majority have records set in the last 30 years.

Of course, none of the Northern hemisphere countries set their all-time record
temperature in January so all-time records in the US are pretty irrelevant to
the article.

~~~
busymom0
My point is that a 30 year period is meaningless when majority of records we
see were broken much before that and the number of records being broken has
gone down significantly as per NOAA data.

~~~
toupeetape
The number of records being broken has not gone down if you include parts of
the world that are not the USA (they exist!)

The record was broken in 20 of the 50 countries in Europe in the last 10 years
alone. Only 12 still have records standing from more than 30 years ago.

About half of records in Africa were broken in the last 20 years.

The majority of records in Asia and South America were broken in the last 20
years.

Anyway, this article is about temperatures in January, which means that all-
time high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are irrelevant. Would it be
meaningless if California hit 130°F in January just because it was once
slightly hotter in July?

