
Temperature changes around the world – 1901-2018 - NeedMoreTea
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48678196
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Waterluvian
Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people.
It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?"

I think what we need to be using when we talk about climate change are things
like projected coastline and population displacement maps.

One of the most powerful facts I've seen recently in Canada was an insurer
talking about how some houses simply aren't insurable anymore because they
will be flooded again every few years. I want to show people a map of
"communities that will be uninsurable by 2050"

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ianai
The book “uninhabitable earth” is good for this. As is his talk on the Chris
Hayes podcast. Some key points:

2C means genocide. Entire island nations under water and lost. Every minor
increase means exponentially higher costs - many more dead, large swaths of
the earth uninhabitable. 4C is something like Hong Kong/Shanghai, and many
other parts of th world uninhabitable. Going outside would be fatal within
minutes.

Here’s a map someone put together for 4C: [https://mymodernmet.com/parag-
khanna-global-warming-map/](https://mymodernmet.com/parag-khanna-global-
warming-map/)

At 8C of warming, clouds may be unable to form.

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NeedMoreTea
The thing with that map is it's absurdly optimistic, as it implies a world
entirely happy to have entire populations of other countries and continents to
move into yours.

The amount of migration, displacement, rebuilding and major wars that would
actually get us to that point is unimaginable.

Uninhabitable Earth is terrifying, and convincing. I thought I had a
pessimistic outlook on climate until I read that.

~~~
ianai
I took it as “this is what would have to happen for the least of us to die”.
So yes, optimistic. I also think their projected coastlines are optimistic. I
don’t remember seeing so much of the US labeled uninhabitable in other
discussions.

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cagenut
imho the ipcc made this the first chart in their latest report for good
reasons:
[https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1...](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1_figure-
final-e1541758557589.png)

its time to move past slam-dunking on the creationists/anti-vaxers/flat-
earthers/climate-deniers and focus on the much harder part: engineering for
zero by 2040.

that is within the realm of your next mortgage. your utilities and larger
institutions are already financing infrastructure that will be around then.

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martincollignon
Reading these headlines is pretty depressing. If you want to do something
about it, a paper called Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning[0] just
came out, and under Tools for Individuals a startup called Tomorrow[1] is
mentioned. They're actively looking for help to get more integrations to their
app to calculate people's personal CO2 emissions.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433)

[1] [https://www.tmrow.com/](https://www.tmrow.com/)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
edit: If you want to do something about it, vote for elected officials with
credible plans to address our climate crisis.

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dragonwriter
> vote for elected officials who are promising to address our climate crisis.

Vote for ones with credible plans, instead.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
right on.

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_Microft
I found a surprising way to reduce my carbon footprint: I downloaded the music
and am playing it locally now instead of streaming it over and over again.

I was listening to music on Youtube pretty much all the time and that amounted
to about 35GB of traffic per month in average.

That's 420GB per year and with 7kWh/GB and emissions of approximately 500g/kWh
that's a surprising total of roughly _1.5t_ of CO_2 emissions per year. And a
downside is almost non-existant.

Edit: my playlist consists of a small number of songs, so I actually get
savings. That would not work when listening to a list that does not actually
repeat of course.

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yongjik
There is no way 7kWh/GB is an accurate figure. For example, AWS Oregon region
charges you $0.05/GB after the first 150 TB.[1] This page[2] says the current
electricity rate of Oregon is 9.8¢/kWh. Assuming AWS is getting electricity at
half the price (and making no profit), it can burn 1.02 kWh/GB.

The actual number is most likely lower: AWS has to make some profit, and it's
not known for being cheap.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)
[2]
[https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/](https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/)

~~~
hn23
It really does not matter how much they pay because the market price does not
include the actual costs a company imposes on the environment. There is no CO2
Tax, is there?

Ask yourself: How can it be more efficient to stream the same stuff over and
over again, wasting CPU cycles on couple of fat machines etc. instead of
playing it from a local cache (hard drive, ...). IMHO it cannot be more
efficient. It is convenient and it appears to be cheap.

~~~
yongjik
You are right that these companies don't pay the "actual costs" on
environmental damage, but that's a separate issue, and not really relevant to
the initial claim. If you claim that someone is using 7 kWh or electricity,
you had better be prepared to show they actually do. (Besides, consumers don't
pay for the environmental cost of building and shipping an SSD from Taiwan,
either.)

Companies like Amazon may not care about environment, but they care a lot
about saving money, and modern computers can handle a surprising amount of
connections simultaneously: it's not like those beefy AWS instances are
serving _just_ your music.

~~~
hn23
The 7kWh figure was not mine. However, I see what the intend of the Thread
starter was and I think he is right. Streaming video/music on top of 'AI' (to
sell more stuff), security theater and Ad campaigns is just a waste of
resources.

/s I would bet Bezos and folks can buy fresh air when it comes to this point.
But at least we all could watch Game of Thrones when we wanted to.

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gmuslera
1 dot per country, regardless of its size or shape, may not be very fair.

Maybe data availability will rig the chart, but perhaps something similar, not
grouping countries and continents but similar sized areas by latitude could
show a more definite trend.

It ss not the same kind of chart, but
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/glo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/global_warming_at_different_latitudes_x_axis_is/)
seems to show that.

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pepijndevos
Are you telling me that every country in the 1900 recorded their yearly
temperature?

I'm not saying it's fake, but I'd like to know where the data comes from, and
how reliable it is.

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wolfram74
Even without read-the-thermometer records, tree corings and lake bed sediment
samples and a number of other go-out-and-look methods can get pretty useful
atmospheric data from the past. I don't know what the resolution would be, but
it might fill in some gaps.

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danielbigham
One challenge with using things like trees to estimate long-ago temperatures
is that you have to build a complex mathematical model to map to temperature,
and I'm aware of at least one famous study that got the math wrong, to the
point of being potentially suspicious. (But I haven't studied this stuff
enough to know whether or not other proper studies exist)

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dragonwriter
> One challenge with using things like trees to estimate long-ago temperatures
> is that you have to build a complex mathematical model to map to temperature

As it turns out, that's what you have to do with fairly recent temperatures
measured with thermometers that aren't located in the same places, too.

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cheschire
I find it interesting how the warm years in the rest of the world seem to
correspond to cold years in europe. The strange deep cold of early WW2 in
Europe is also interesting.

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imeron
Very interesting indeed. WW2 cold: It would be interesting to know if this was
a result of the increased dust in the air because of the war or just pure
randomness.

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AlbertoGP
The article mentions it at the end:

 _This is quite a well-studied period that was probably linked to a large El
Niño event - the climate cycle associated with shifting pressure patterns and
a weakening of the trade winds in the Pacific._

 _The world warmed, apart from Europe which had a deep cold spell. And it
probably had an impact on the outcome of WWII. The harsh winters at the time
frustrated Hitler 's armies as they invaded the Soviet Union._

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ForHackernews
If you want to help, pressure your political representatives:

[https://www.sunrisemovement.org/](https://www.sunrisemovement.org/)

[https://rebellion.earth/](https://rebellion.earth/)

There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope
is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international
level.

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your-nanny
I've used a similar compartment plot as a way of evaluating fMRI quality, and
how different preprocessing routines affect it. Compartments determined by
structural masks, eg white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid, etc.

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seaghost
Nature will take care of it by killing us until we start to do things
differently.

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admiralspoo
Very manipulative, and definitely misleading to show only land surface
temperatures, and only for the last 100 years.

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boybd
Seems particularly manipulative to only show the last 100 years. How about the
last 1000 or 2000 years instead?

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epistasis
But if they just show 2000 years, why would they cut off there? Seems
manipulative too, we should definitely go back to at least 10,000 years.

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mikeash
To avoid cherry-picking, it should go back to the formation of the Earth.

