Re:What happened last time it was as warm as it’s going to g...
by perl4ever on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @12:25PM
(#17356832)
If there were no trend, then there would still be new records established over time, because the longer we keep records for, the more time there is for rare events to occur.
So I think that in order to argue that new records are evidence in favor of a trend, one needs to quantify the likelihood of it not being due to chance somehow.
Re:What happened last time it was as warm as it’s going to g...
by johnmaguire2013 on Monday June 18, 2018 @11:24AM
(#17338903)
I agree with most of what you stated however...
> If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades.
How long have we been tracking these records?
The models have consistently undershot the mark: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
As for climate disasters, we've had Katrina (2005) - 3rd most intense landfalling storm in the US in 100 years [1], Irma (2017) - the strongest observed in the Atlantic in terms of maximum sustained winds since Wilma [2], Wilma (2005) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere, after Hurricane Patricia in 2015 [3], Patricia (2015) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone on record worldwide [4], Harvey (2017) - tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record[5] - which also caused "500 year floods" (3rd time in 3 years [6]). And that's just a sampling.
For a while now, we've gotten a new "hottest month on record" every few months. And we've pretty consistently gotten "hottest year" on record every few years (increasingly every year or every other year). If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades. With those records have come any number of record breaking heatwaves, many of which have been very deadly. One of the most recent occurred in Pakistan and saw a temperature of 50.2C (122F) in the city of Nawabshah. [7] Seriously, just google the term "record breaking heatwave" and do some reading.
You may not have experienced the extreme effects over-exaggerating TV anchors talked about in your childhood, but the world is experiencing climate effects as bad as the models predicted, or worse. Please don't use your personal anecdotal experience to undercut the validity of climate models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houst... [7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city...