> Temperature categories are determined by the normal distribution, so that a third of temperatures fall in each of the main three categories: hot, cold and normal for 1951 to 1980. Summer temperatures for each subsequent 11-year period are compared to the 1951 to 1980 baseline.
It's not so stupid. It essentially drives home the point that a day that in the 1951-1980 period would be considered "hot", today would fall inside the "normal" range.
That is, your normal distribution of temperatures has shifted a bit to the right.
First off, your observation of the ridiculous x-axis labels. Really, "Extremely Hot" Is that supposed to scare me or something?
Second, what does this mean...
"...compared actual summer temperatures for each decade since the 1980s to a fixed baseline average." Did you sample at the same location each summer? Did you sample at the same point in the summer? Did you account for any changes in winter/spring/fall temperatures?
And finally...did they happen to point out the time periods are not all of the same length?
These are average summer temperatures for a network of land based temperature sensors across the entire Northern hemisphere. Please read the source link at the bottom of the article before you ask such frivolous questions. Do you think this work was done by some lone guy in his garage? It's the results of a global dataset that dozens of scientists work on and mantain...
Conveying scientific research just feels impossible when this is the kind of response you can get even on a more educated place forum like HN. Depressing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
or Nasa:
or by now, just inspecting the measured global temperature by eye
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Of course, these are introductory texts, so you should expect that there are some simplifications. You can of course just read the IPCC report,
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
however be advised that they are on the cold side of the estimates. (Really if you would read the IPCC report with the same critical eye you are trying to nitpick the NY times, you would see that each and every scenario includes at least a plateau in emissions, they just don't have a scenario were emissions just rise like in the last 100 years.)
> First off, your observation of the ridiculous x-axis labels. Really, "Extremely Hot" Is that supposed to scare me or something?
You could of course inspect the linked paper, "Extremely hot" refers to summers that were once in thirty years hot in the time period from 1951 to 1980. It is just an accurate label.
The average reader gets no meaningful understanding from "Global average temperatures are up 0.5 degrees Celsius.
But looking at a graph like what's presented here, you can realize that a person in 1950, if asked what the weather was like on one of those red days, would tell you "It's goddamn hot, I can't remember it ever being this hot here." and now we get those temperatures all the time.
If you want raw data and absolute comparisons, there are plenty of places to get it. This is an NYT article written to help people understand in concrete terms that things have changed.
If your concern is lack of rigor in a pop science article, go to the primary documents instead. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
There is no current term, both describe different things
You're just nitpicking at a short interactive widget, simplified for a general audience, as if it were the core argument of a paper in an academic journal - which it isn't.
You're not doing science; you are role-playing a character on the internet, and offering your intellectual laziness or lack of comprehension (idk which) as if it were a counter-argument - which it isn't.
It's true that this article solicits your interest in a phenomenon and does not walk through the full detail of everything, but provides only a short summary and a reference to sources. It'd be great if it were a fully-developed explainer that you could navigate through like a science documentary on one particular subject or a deep dive into Wikipedia. Maybe in a few years we';; be able to produce such elaborate tutorials on the fly using AI, and by asking astute questions you'll be able to interactively broaden your education or even make valuable suggestions from left field, and then you will indeed be a lay scientist. But in the meantime, you're LARPing.
Do you think that no reviewers ever think of these things?
The hottest I've been in was in Sep. 2006 in Waco Tx [0]. Mainly due to a hurricane in the gulf that pulled the humidity out of the air, but it wasn't so bad. Road my motorcycle to work that day. Summer 2007 was even stranger, rained almost every other day and temps never made it above 100 that year. Now I'm farther south. I was going to replace my A/C unit in 2015 because it couldn't keep up in the 104+ summer that year. But for the last two summers, it hasn't gotten above 101 and the A/C has been working fine, so here I sit.
That's a valid reason to respond as you did. It was my assumption that you were targeting that towards the parent which was in error.
> I was trying to engage with readers, by fighting this kind of nonsense simply by calling it out as such.
That works well for getting people who agree with you to take notice. Unfortunately, if you don't use that to make a new argument to those that already agree with you, you're just preaching to the choir. I don't really have a problem with that, and I wouldn't have called it out if I interpreted it as that, but I also don't think it's all that productive (that's not really meant to be a critique, I'm just explaining my personal point of view on this at this point).
> His claim itself is so vague and unsupported that it's more of an emotional feeling than an opinion that can be criticized. Perhaps someone better than me should try.
When I can summon the strength myself to engage, I find that asking for more details and asking people to actually explain in more detail their belief works well. Often I find that what initially seems like an opinion completely unfounded in facts has some basis, but people are reluctant to go into them because of dismissive responses.
I'm sure we all have a few opinions like that, where we would love to have a good discussion on it, but it's become decisive enough that trying to start a substantive conversation and keep it one track is hard when people make large assumptions about the details of your opinion without actually asking. For example, try starting a conversation on actual differences in how the brain functions between the sexes, and whether that does or does not lead to specific advantages or disadvantages for one sec in certain types of thinking, and whether that advantage if it exists is completely subsumed by environmental factors. I suspect that conversation will quickly approach uselessness if it gets any traction. Some discussions still have far too much cultural and social baggage to happen fruitfully in public, even here, where I'm sure a larger than normal percentage of people would identify as rational intellectuals.
To actually address your point, however. There is both a breadth and depth of scientific literature, which goes much beyond this nonsense of only "pretty charts". Even reading the linked article in the above nytimes article gives the detail the poster asked for.
Scientists work hard on this. They're not "making it up". They're not lazy. They're not just trying to get rich. Have you spent the last 10 years studying climate change? Have you read all the literature on the subject? From people who have claimed that it was human-driven or not, from scientists across the world and political spectrum. Scientists have. Their entire job is to stay up to date on the current research everywhere in their field.
When you have a problem you don't understand, or don't have enough information about, or don't have a good solution for, what do you do? You ask the expert. The scientists are the experts, and the scientists have a consistent, well-explained consensus on their positions (read the IPCC report for this exact thing). People's resistance to this consensus comes because of two reasons and two reasons alone. 1.) People don't understand climate change because it moves slowly, imperceptibly, and then violently. Climate is far away from an intuitive thing to study, and people's expectations for what's 'logical' in this case is in fact, not always 'logical'. 2.) People's preexisting political affiliations or preconceptions have colored their view. They believe that any position taken by Democrats must be a conspiracy, or ascribe to whataboutism and "moderation". "They're so adamant about this position! But both sides are wrong, so they must be wrong somehow!"
It's nonsense. The fact that so called "intelligent" programmers so easily fall for this garbage is sickening. People claim to be skeptical or logical, but it's all the same stuff with a different lens. Programmers are just as flawed, make their decisions on the same mindless emotional feelings, and don't question anything.
Reading the comments on this post made me lose faith that we will ever address any difficult political and societal challenges. We'll just argue for decades about whether they "actually exist".
I'm just sad the the first response wasn't something along the lines of: "Why? What does the graphic being a cartoon have to do with how accurate the data and the point it's trying to express is? Why are your experiences in a specific region supposed to map directly towards the overall global scenario? Why are you using hottest days in summer in your observation instead of total hot days, which is actually what's being discussed, since it's possible for the average to be much hotter, even if the largest outlier isn't as high for that year, right?"
It is not the responsibility of sensible people to persuade every last person in existence of the wisdom of a course of action; that's a recipe for paralysis.
What we have here is someone who expressed an aggressively ignorant counterfactual position and rebuffed polite encouragement to consult primary sources. Perhaps the person is trolling, perhaps they're just a fool, but either way people who make objections in bad faith do little other than waste time, and making endless excuses for them is a further waste of time.
This is why I said elsewhere on the thread that it's time to just move on without the buy-in of that part of the population that rejects the reality principle.
I will try to engage with you. Here is a typical paper from Nature Climate Change this week. Can you explain exactly why you think the text has not enough substance and is overly reliant upon figures?
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/n...
I would say the pretty charts and "cartoon graphics" are in direct response to people not actually examining the numbers, and discounting the way it's expressed/reported in the media. To be fair, getting to what a paper is really saying in a media announcement is sometimes an exercise in dissecting the Pr to do away with the hyperbole, but these graphics are actually a way to combat that. As long as they are built using the core data, it's another way to express what's going on, and hopefully in a way that captures people's attention better than the headlines they are already dubious of do.
Let's turn the premise around. Assuming the conclusions are correct and summers are getting hotter, how would you communicate that to someone like you who is rejecting that based on their personal experience, and has (presumably) already discounted the headline, the graphics meant to convey the same idea, and the underlying data they are presented from (whether through actual distrust of the data or distrust of the summarization to the point of not bothering to check it). If it's true, and we have data to show it, how should it be presented?
They could have just used this:
Why not put it in numbers? It's not like we are strangers to numbers in degrees celsius or fahrenheit. Only a fool would do axes like that.