
Average Global Temperatures since 1850 - helenakyso
https://kyso.io/KyleOS/temperature
======
lubonay
I think humans are generally bad at prevention of and good at reaction to
catastrophes.

The next 50 years are going to be interesting... let's hope we leave the world
in a manageable state for future generations.

~~~
alecmg
Adapting to catastrophes has literally evolved for millions of years. Species
that couldn't adapt to change - died. The ones that survived didn't survive
because they successfully prevented a catastrophe.

~~~
mathgeek
Would you say there has been any other species we know of that was able to
cause, perceive, predict, prevent, and react to catastrophes before? We seem
to be unique in that we can prevent and react to catastrophes, even ignoring
that we can also cause them.

~~~
read_if_gay_
I am not sure whether this is true but aren’t people saying that dogs and
other animals can sense incoming earthquakes etc. and will get anxious/try to
GTFO?

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Isn't that simply because they can hear very low sound frequencies which often
come shortly before an earthquake? The technology we have now is far superior
at predicting such events using geological vibrations and weather data etc
(which still gives quite short warning times, but still).

------
MrGilbert
Looking at the raw data, I wonder how accurate it is for the early days? Was
it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in
accuracy?

I'm not questioning the data per se, as you can tell from looking at 2000 up
to today that the median is rising.

I'm just a bit surprised by the accuracy in the late 19th century. I expected
less.

~~~
southern_cross
> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit
> in accuracy?

No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if
that.

This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer
attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little
digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the
name of it) that allows you to do things like this (derive a higher level of
accuracy than the data would otherwise allow) if you know for a fact that the
associated errors pretty much all cancel out. But you have to _know_ this,
from prior sampling or whatever; you can't just _assume_ it. But that's what
these folks are doing - waving their hands and just _assuming_ that the errors
mostly cancel out.

To add insult to injury, for other portions of the data they state that they
have the right to make routine, automated adjustments because of systematic
errors in the data. But you can't have it both ways - assuming that the errors
mostly cancel out on the one hand, while on the other hand claiming you have
the right to make adjustments because, you know, those errors don't actually
cancel each other out after all.

> I'm not questioning the data per se

You should be! Most of the "data" here is either of remarkably low quality, or
just pretty much made up.

~~~
gameswithgo
I'm familiar with the blog posts you have been reading on this topic, but its
really not so easy to dismiss the data. The hypothesis you would need to
accept, to believe the surface temperature record is not accurate, would be
the systematic error is consistently measuring things a little bit warmer over
time. If you wanted to prove that point you could try to find some mechanism
that would explain it.

But the problem is many _other_ measurements confirm the surface temperature
results. Air temps agree with ocean temps, various proxies agree with those
(ice extent and mass for example, are declining as would be expected with a
warming trend)

Now, does 1800s temperature data have large errors? Yes, and those are
reflected in surface temperature reconstructions by large error bars.

You are not the first person to be convinced that climate data is bad, some
very smart people have felt that, and got funded by the koch brothers to do it
right, and they did an excellent job, but got the same answers NASA, NOAA, and
other groups did:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-
of...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-
change-skeptic.html)

~~~
skrowl
It's not so much that the surface temperature record isn't accurate, it's that
it's been systematically tampered with / adjusted.

[https://realclimatescience.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/20...](https://realclimatescience.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/2018_03_20_05_20_11.png)

Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to
be warmer.

You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the
adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter
is indisputable.

Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016
[https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/NASA_Fig._A_2001vs2016.gif)

1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with
everything in between.

~~~
gameswithgo
There are over 5 different groups that have done temperature reconstructions,
including a climate skeptic funded by the Koch brothers. (Berkeley Earth) They
all get the same trend. You would be suggesting that all of these groups,
including the Koch brother's funded one, are all making the same fraudulent
adjustments. That seems unlikely. This would included three groups from the
USA (Nasa, NOAA, Berkely), one from the UK, one from Japan, and possibly
others.

As well, the fraudulent activity would be going on with satellite based
reconstruction, deep sea temperature measurements, ice extent and mass
measurements, all being done by other groups in various ways.

If you _really_ feel that this is what is going on, it is possible to do your
own reconstruction from raw data. The raw data, unadjusted, is freely
available. If you pick a time frame to look at, where you have a few hundred
stations randomly distributed around the globe, that are not changing during
that time period, then you don't have to do any adjustments to the data at
all. I've done this before, pulling raw data into MySql and analyzing it. You
get limited to smaller chunks of time, but I got the same trends all of the
professional groups got in that time period. This was something I did years
ago, to try to cut through all of the rhetoric that one can read on the
internet.

~~~
southern_cross
I probably wouldn't call it fraud (others might, though) as much as I would
call it scientific incompetence in general (it appears that many "scientists"
these days, across a number of different fields, are actually quite bad at
doing science; this probably isn't a new phenomenon, though, there's just a
lot more of it these days), mixed with generally crap data, mixed with bad
statistical methods (there's been a lot of talk about problems with this
lately), mixed with an overwhelming need to get your papers published _by
doing whatever it takes_.

Having read scientific journals myself on and off for several decades now, one
of the things I've noticed is that once a paper gets published in a reputable
peer-reviewed journal, then that opens the floodgates for other related papers
to get published using related data and related methods. And that's true even
if the original paper used _highly questionable data_ and _highly questionable
methods_ , as so many do these days.

The reality of scientific publishing today is that scientists need something -
anything - of theirs to get published in order to build and maintain their
professional reputations. And journals need something - anything - to publish;
usually something provocative, too, otherwise nobody would bother paying the
high fees that they charge. So a lot of what they publish is just their
version of clickbait.

Funny you should mention Japan: Back when I did my deep dive, one of the
cities in Japan (Tokyo, I think it was) was being held up as a worst case
example for warming. And if you looked at the raw temperature data, the
warming there was kind of scary enough as it was, but in the adjusted data it
was just horrific. And I thought to myself that one of two things was going on
here: Either the level of warming that was being claimed to have occurred
there didn't actually occur, or that it puts lie to the notion that humans and
flora and fauna can't readily adapt to such warming. After all, it's not like
Tokyo is an apocalyptic dead zone or anything, now is it?

As to the raw data itself, the last time I checked the raw HadCRUT3 data that
I used in my deep dive was no longer available (I kept running into broken
links and such), and this data had only been provided under duress in the
first place. I didn't really strain any muscles trying to look for it again,
though. Nor did I originally have much luck trying to find similar data for
HadCRUT4 (again I didn't look too hard), but I have seen passing references to
it being out there somewhere.

And by "raw" I mean the data as it originally came in from the various
temperature stations, without being manipulated in any way except maybe to get
it all in a common format for easy processing. But apparently what I call
"raw" and what some other folks call "raw" can be quite different things.

And unlike your situation, when I looked at the HadCRUT3 data (at least the
version that existed at the time; I know they made some changes to it
afterwards) what I found there was appalling. So either massive fraud was
going on at the time, or (more likely) they had just allowed their computer
algorithms to run amok on it without really quality checking the final
results.

As to stations "not changing during that time period", I forget the details
but you should be aware that some folks (not me) have gone so far as to track
down a few such stations (those which were well-documented and well-
maintained, but with no documented moves or changes), only to find that the
algorithms had made adjustments to them anyway! As for the local station that
I used, the adjustments were such that it made it look like this station had
shifted from condition A to condition B (that it had moved or whatever), then
shifted back to condition A, then back to condition B, and so on, and that it
shifted by exactly the same amount every time, too. Then rinse and repeat,
every few years, which is hardly a realistic scenario.

BTW, all of those changes were _warming_ changes, too. There was never a
cooling change that I saw, at least not for my local station nor the handful
of other stations that I also checked. The most that I saw was those periodic
shifts back from the "adjusted" (warmer) data to the "raw" (cooler) data.

I did that deep dive about ten years ago, BTW, and the local data set I used
went back to about 1870 or so - a solid 130+ years of data. I know a lot has
changed in those ten years, but I don't know that much has really changed for
the better concerning the data or the algorithms being used to process it.

------
helenakyso
The increasing of the global temperature is really dangerous and humanity
seems to do nothing.

It is like a human body if its temperature changes a few Celsius degree from
its normal temperature, it is the fever. If the person has a fever and it
increases a few degrees, it might mean the death of the person. We are killing
The Planet, it is a Climate Crisis.

~~~
PhilWright
It is obviously not the case that 'humanity seems to do nothing'.

The United Nations have the IPCC working on the issue and their reports
influence national policy in many countries. There are the Kyoto and Paris
agreements that are based on the details from the IPCC reports. Is the world
doing enough? No, I don't think countries are doing enough, but to say
humanity seems to do nothing is patently ridiculous.

~~~
wrong_variable
The problem is that is too little too late.

If I get sick, I cant just solve my problem with some ibuprofen.

Solving climate change requires a major overhaul in culture, lifestyle,
expectation, technology and politics.

We did it before, mostly in War situations, I do not understand why this is
different.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal
with this problem. I agree with you though. I don’t think we’re willing to do
what is necessary to avoid serious catastrophe. We’ve done a good job
demonstrating that for 50+ years so far.

~~~
roenxi
> People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to
> deal with this problem.

We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem.

1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the
power system is switching over to them naturally.

2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear
activist would have to admit that the risks from nuclear power are localised
and that the raw volume of pollution rounds to 0 compared to what we do now.

It would take a couple of breakthroughs in battery technology to solve the
transport problem and the whole thing might get solved in the background
without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.

~~~
BigJono
You'd be surprised how much anti-nuclear activists would disagree with your
second point. I'm sure I know a couple that would rather watch the world burn
than vote for someone that will build a single reactor.

I think once an issue like that becomes a left/right black/white thing all
logic just goes straight out the window. You can't even say the word nuclear
without hearing a cacophony of statements about the price of nuclear vs
renewables, as if those claims don't need any actual numbers to go along with
them.

~~~
Ygg2
When you break it down, for California (a relatively sunny place) it would
take more than $3.63 trillion dollars to be 100% renewable.

[1][https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY?t=709](https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY?t=709)

~~~
phaemon
No it wouldn't. The assumptions made in that video are ridiculous.

You don't need to have storage for all your solar; you turn other sources off
when you have excess supply. Or you can switch them off simply by _covering
them_. Batteries are not the only form of storage. Hydro exists and is in use
already. You are allowed to import electricity. There are other renewables
besides solar and wind. etc etc etc...

~~~
Ygg2
I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic. You kinda need
battery storage for your solar/wind.

Other sources can be hard/impossible to stop.

Batteries are the only form of storage that's scalable. Hydro exist, but you
can't expect to just add another hydroelectric dam, whenever your solar
overwhelms your current capacity. Hell even storing gravitational energy
probably requires frankly massive amounts of development.

You are allowed to import/export electricity, but the assumption is others
will have similar power sources, no? When there is the excess sun in one area,
it's either going to be excess in nearby areas (because day happens nearby at
the same time). Sure, you want to export to countries without sun, but the
loses are probably going to be huge (loses mean infrastructure is stressed
additionally).

What other renewable resources?

\- Hydro? Destructive for the environment kills migrating fish, ruins
ecosystems and not available everywhere.

\- Geothermal? Only available at a few places can possibly lead to
earthquakes.

\- Bioenergy? Causes horrible air pollution.

~~~
phaemon
> I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic.

Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.

> You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.

You kinda don't. Here in Scotland, we've gone from around 15% renewables in
2007 to 70% in 2017. We closed our last coal station in 2016. Guess how many
battery storage facilities we have? None. There are plans to build _one_ in
the near future. And yet we have a perfectly fine and consistent electricity
supply. When reality disagrees with your theory, it's your theory that's
wrong.

The other obvious renewable in California would be tidal.

Oh, and you can get rid of all your hydro when you no longer have any need for
water. I swear sometimes people forget what dams are actually used for.

~~~
Ygg2
> Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.

Or, your premises are different. From what I see Scotland derives like 90% of
its power from Wind, which is possible its unique property. Another thing to
take into consideration is that California has a larger population than
Scotland.

But overall I get what you are saying. I still suspect going 100% renewable
won't be feasible for most countries.

------
helenakyso
Any ideas of What, WE, the individuals can do to make politician and countries
change?

~~~
tomtomtom777
Stop buying stuff without thought.

I know that a lot of people feel helpless because it's the big corporations
that are emitting, but companies only emit CO2 if consumers pay them to do so.

Buying everything consciously, whether its food, appliances, housing, or a
ticket to some performance, _will_ make the world better.

~~~
reallydontask
This is a pretty good idea but it needs a lot of people doing it.

We're in the process of moving home and putting everything into boxes makes
one realize how much crap one has bought unnecessarily.

We're on a relatively special case in that we've only recently moved (18
months ago) so we actually have stuff that has never been used in our current
house. A lot of this stuff has been donated to charity and some tossed but
still my gf wants to take some stuff that hasn't been used in at least 18
months to the new house.

I am excluding Tools and camping gear from the list. The former for obvious
reasons, the latter due to having recently had a baby we've not been camping
for a bit, YMMV

~~~
lm28469
> This is a pretty good idea but it needs a lot of people doing it.

There is no way out of this that doesn't involve a "lot of people doing"
something. Our lifestyles are just not sustainable.

------
xwdv
If it ever gets really bad, the Earth can easily be cooled surprisingly
quickly by detonating massive bombs in the right places. We’re talking nuclear
scale.

------
lanevorockz
Please, let's not go back to a debunked theory. Global Warming models did not
work and we phased them out a long time ago. The real term for the past decade
on climate science is Climate Change and Extreme Environment. There is a lot
more data on this graph if you cross fossil data and ice sheet research.

Science is the only thing that everyone can agree with. I feel that it is our
job to be accurate and not just do lazy one dimensional research. We might
solve the wrong problem and just damage the environment on the process.

~~~
dsjoerg
Can you offer a link to a light introduction to the topic and/or its data?
This was my first search and I'm clearly not doing it right:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Climate+Change+and+Extreme+E...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Climate+Change+and+Extreme+Environment&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYkvaRwInjAhXaLc0KHQQ9DjgQ_AUIESgC&biw=1440&bih=797)

------
tomohawk
Only going back to 1850 is exactly the kind of thing someone would do if they
wanted to cherry pick their data to suit a case. You have to go back much
further. It is known that at that time we were coming out of a period of much
cooler temperatures. See for example the year without a summer (1816).

There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now. For
example, during the Viking expansion, and during the Roman expansion. Then
things cooled off - for example the Viking and Roman contraction.

If you go to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, you can see the remains of
the only known Viking settlement in the new world. The buildings were made
with logs from trees that do not exist there today because it is cooler now
and does not support the tree growth required.

~~~
stinos
_See for example the year without a summer (1816)._

As far as cherry-picking goes to suit a case, this also sounds like a pristine
example. Even worse then what you are countering, since it is only one single
year.

 _There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now._

Well, yes, but what does that prove?

 _The buildings were made with logs from trees that do not exist there today
because it is cooler now_

You make this sound as evidence of something, but what? That the people
shipped trees there from somewhere else? That those trees grew there but now
are extinct due to some disease or bug?

Don't get me wrong, I'm open to whatever evidence provided, but if you're
going to go against something at least come up with quality arguments. None of
what you wrote supports a solid case against the anomalies presented.

~~~
fnordsensei
I'm guessing it's some variation of "we know of climate change in the past
that was not caused by humans, therefore no climate change is caused by
humans".

For the record, we do know of at least one instance of positive climate change
in the past caused by humans. Genghis Khan famously went on a huge murderous
rampage (some estimate that he directly and indirectly caused the death of
~10% of the world population), causing massive forest regrowth in previously
populated areas, which in turn scrubbed CO2 out of the atmosphere.

[https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match-
defores...](https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match-
deforestation-driving-co2-buildup)

~~~
stinos
Thanks, first time I hear about this. Interesting!

------
southern_cross
"The data are a mix of the CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature dataset and
the HadSST3 sea-surface temperature (SST) dataset. The HadCRUT4 data are
neither interpolated nor variance adjusted."

This is your typical half-truth (lie of omission). Even if the HadCRUT4 folks
themselves don't make these kinds of adjustments, the folks who provide the
data sets which HadCRUT4 is based on most certainly do.

~~~
serpix
so are you implying someone is methodically rigging up the data to show an
anomaly for shits and giggles?

~~~
southern_cross
That's exactly what they've been doing! Or, perhaps more correctly, they've
let their "algorithms" run amok without doing any quality control on the final
results, thereby turning modest warming into "scary" warming. Whether this was
intentional or not is debatable (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)),
but it certainly looked that way to me at the time.

About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorrect statements about local
heat levels made by the folks at NOAA or wherever, and then repeated (but very
quickly retracted) by our own local weather folk, I went to the trouble of
doing a bit of a deep dive on the HadCrut3 data sets. And what I found there
was appalling. Other folks did more comprehensive deep dives and found far
more problems with it than I had.

I could only do what I did at the time because some authority (I forget who)
had finally forced the entire data set to be released to the public, over the
strenuous objections of the folks who administer that data. Much of that data
has since been hidden again, though, from what I can tell.

That was the older HadCRUT3 data set. The newest one is HadCRUT4, but I
haven't done any kind of deep dive on that. (Without digging further into the
matter I don't even know if there is enough data publicly available to do the
kind of analysis on it that I did on the earlier set.) But other people have,
and have noted serious problems with it, and have even written entire books
about that. The short version, though, is that there is an awful lot of "data"
out there which they're using that is mostly just made up, and what is genuine
has been adjusted so much that it can no longer really be considered "data" at
all.

~~~
viraptor
> Much of that data has since been hidden again

You mean the datasets here?
[https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/](https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/)
with the data used to generate it available here?
[https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station-
data/](https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station-data/)

What do you think has been hidden?

~~~
southern_cross
At the time I went back later to look at the data again, almost none of the
various links on the relevant web pages still worked. Some working links
claimed to link to both raw and adjusted data but then didn't actually have
the raw data. Some still had things like precipitation data but the
temperature data itself was now missing. Some claimed to have "raw" data but
it wasn't the data I was actually looking for and had accessed in the past.
And so on. I know that I saw at least one statement which seemed to indicate
that the data I was looking for was no longer available for legal reasons.

"Legal reasons" was the cover they used to not make this data available to
begin with, but some authority or another finally forced their hand here. It
wouldn't surprise me to find that they still don't want it out there, and so
it may only be available on an on-again, off-again basis, maybe only after
somebody complains about not being able to get it. Nor would I be surprised to
find that the data itself mysteriously changes over time, as many have
claimed. I believe that they have even admitted to such - that they routinely
"correct" various data sets, meaning that what you see today may be different
from what you see tomorrow.

In any case, I didn't expend a lot of effort the second time around, and the
first time around I was mostly interested in what the "official", final data
sets were claiming about temperatures (at least at first), because that was
what was being put out to the public. And after finding issues with local
temps, I ultimately went out and got local data from local sources, completely
bypassing the official sources. And one of the first things I discovered was
that there was an awful lot of data - both old and new - that was ultimately
marked as "missing" in the official records but was sitting there plain as day
in the local records. I never did quite figure out what was going on there
either, but I have my suspicions.

The whole process just left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and so I don't
generally trust anything other than the original station data from the
original sources. The HadCRUT4 stuff may be a bit better; I haven't really
looked into it but others have and they say it can't really be trusted either.

