
Reporting on the State of the Climate in 2018 - infodocket
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/reporting-state-climate-2018
======
LastZactionHero
I'm genuinely happy to see this depressing information on a .gov domain. I'd
assumed the official federal government climate policy is 'Hoax, everything's
fine.'

Were the folks at NOAA allowed to publish this? Did they have to clear it by
someone? Did anyone get fired?

~~~
floki999
If I recall well, Trump immediately undermined this report. 'cause he knows
best.

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HerrBertling
Does anyone think we can solve this? Or is all hope gone? By now I’m at a
point where I try to come up with a good explanation for my daughter once
she’s old enough about how/why we all didn’t give a shit about climate change
“back then”

~~~
throwaway5752
That's the incorrect framing. There is no "fixing" this short term. But we can
prevent a great deal of future damage by immediate, drastic action.

Don't come up with excuses for your daughter, just simply start acting in a
way where you do not have to make excuses.

~~~
jonbronson
Personal action alone will be insufficient to stem the tide. Without shutting
down fossil fuel development and use, we don't stand a chance.

~~~
throwaway5752
Yes. And you control one of them directly, so focus on that. Focus your
advocacy and votes on the other. This is one of those challenges that require
doing more than two things at once.

edit: Dr. Michael Mann agrees
[https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1160656713642631170](https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1160656713642631170)

~~~
throwaway5752
I wrote this in response to a reply comment (since deleted). But I spent
enough time that I wanted to post it:

You can make massively meaning differences every day with minor personal
decisions. If everyone in the US did them it would have a significant global
impact.

1\. Replace all bulbs with LEDs. 2. Set your AC warmer at home, in the
thermostat in your hotel rooms, and anywhere else you can 3. Eat as little
meat as you can 4. Replace your car with an EV or highly fuel efficient hybrid
5. Get the highest efficiency AC/Heater 6. Change vacation plans to avoid CO2
emission 7. Install Solar PV. 8 Lower your hot water temperature 9. Repair
instead of replace 10. Up the R value of your insulation...

You can make a huge dent (more than 50%) in your personal CO2 footprint.
PARTICULARLY as a member of an industrialized society. You can make more
impact than a dozen people in a developing country.

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tunesmith
I've been trying like the dickens to get a solid understanding of the numbers
behind this, but they all seem to vary so much depending on source.

A recent climate report indicated that as of 2011, the earth's atmosphere has
somewhere around 1900 gigatons of CO2 and that we'd need to stay below 2900
gigatons to stay below 2 degrees celsius of warming.

But other sources report carbon in terms of ppm, and this source says the
world is at 407.4 ppm.

One source I found says that 1 ppm = 7.81 gigatons of CO2, but that would mean
we're at 3181.8 gigatons of CO2 worldwide, which is much higher than any other
estimate I've seen - another estimate I saw said that the world is slated to
go above 2900 gigatons in the year 2036 if current emission rates hold steady,
but this one says we're already far over that.

Is there a source somewhere that tracks the latest state of the basic math?
Math that there is some general consensus on, based off of emissions of CO2
per country per year, emissions of CO2 of the world per year, ppm, gigatons,
and the generally-agreed-upon correlation between that and degrees of warming?
Because all these reports seem to disagree with each other.

(What's nice about having an upper limit like 2900, and a rate of emissions
per country, is that you can then calculate how much carbon each citizen needs
to offset and/or sequester.)

~~~
phaemon
The 1 ppm = 7.81Gt is correct, but the 2900Gt figure isn't atmospheric total,
it's total _emissions_. Not all emissions end up staying in the atmosphere, so
it doesn't translate exactly across.

~~~
tunesmith
Thanks - I didn't realize that this is actually one of arguments that skeptics
make - the matter of the correlation between CO2 in the atmosphere, and CO2
emissions.

I see some indications that the rule of thumb is that roughly 60% of emissions
stay in the atmosphere, which makes the current numbers make more sense again,
but so far I haven't found anything more authoritative. And I see some
estimates that 430 ppm corresponds to 1.5 degrees, while 450 ppm corresponds
to 2 degrees, but 60% doesn't work for the 2900gT = 2 degrees estimate.

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DataGata
One of the surprising facts in the article is this:

>Global fire activity was lowest on record.

The author explain why this is true a few sentences later- the change is being

>driven primarily by the conversion of frequently burning savannas to
agricultural areas.

I wonder if this is one of those "humans accidentally geoengineering a few
more years of habitability into the planet" things, like the global chilling
effect that our pollutants have when they're highly reflective of light. Only,
in this case, by preventing fires we're keeping more carbon locked into
plants. (This is obviously a gross simplification, but this could be a
possibility, right?)

~~~
throwaway5752
Holy crap, no. They are tilling over carbon sinks (grasslands) and ruining
them. I don't know that we know enough about soil biota (and the impact of the
various agricultural products that typically come along with this conversion)
to know how long, assuming it is even possible, to reestablish them. It's
horrible news.

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khawkins
The "highlights" section is very fishy to include in a scientific report. It's
very easy to misinterpret trends when you cherry-pick extrema out of data
affected by cyclical trends and stochastic processes with relatively high
variance. Further, saying that some place is reporting a 100-year high record
temperature sounds bad, but saying that the temperature was briefly about as
high as it was in the 1910s sounds like nothing to worry about.

Tony Heller has provided quite a bit of insightful context to climate
reporting which likes to highlight extremes and gloss over important
contextual data.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1/videos?view=0&sort=...](https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid)

~~~
hwillis
Yeah, Tony Heller- the guy who believes methane isn't a greenhouse gas and
cherry picks for cherry picking. What a quack

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jasonless
I read a report that wasn't sponsored by the gov. It suggested most of our
fears of climate changes are null. Mainly it suggested our current velocity of
technology advancement can propel us off of planet earth. I guess it's
suggesting as the climate heat increases its marginal bc we can simply leave
the planet and go to another. If we look at the work elon musk this isn't too
far away - the article claimed. I'll try to find the URL. So I guess
everything will be ok.

~~~
sachdevap
Edited for politeness: This comment make no sense to me. Earth is the only
planet we have for the foreseeable future (a couple of centuries at least).

~~~
dang
Please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread still worse. That
helps nothing. Instead, you can flag egregious comments, as described in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

~~~
sachdevap
I imagine that you had flagged my comment. I'd have appreciated the courtesy
of unflagging it after it follows the guidelines.

~~~
dang
Happy to. I only saw this by accident though. If you want us to see something,
it's best to send it to hn@ycombinator.com. (That's in the guidelines too!)

