Re: @[email protected]
It was an unbelievable year for global climate.
As data is released in the first two weeks of January, you are going to be hearing all about these new climate change records. Apologies for all my graphs in advance!! 😬
See the spiral animation produced by NASA at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/
We are in an El Nino year. That is skewing the data. Will be a few years before we figure out if this is El Nino, or even more accelerating climate change (though we know climate change is accelerating)
I mean, we’ve had El Niño’s before. Is there a reason this specific El Niño is skewing the data? I’m not a climate scientist, but I just don’t see how it really adds to anything other than higher than typical ocean temperatures and increased humidity. As a Californian I’m pretty well adjusted to the swings of El Niño and La Niña, but even this winter has been milder than I’ve ever experienced in my life (30 years isn’t a long monitor, but still).
There’s a lot of variation in weather, and different extremes. It’s just really hard to say concretely, this El Nino is worse bcz of climate change. Although, I was talking to my partner about this very thing (and she does climate adaptation work), and she said off record most climate scientists collectively will say that this El Nino has been worse bcz of climate change.
But, really, without data in a few years, we can’t definitely say.
Yeah, until the wolf bites you, you really don’t know what he’s going to do. Maybe he’s growing and snarling and running towards ya, but it’s not conclusive. It’s best to wait and gather more data.
That’s how science works dude. You can’t say something is for sure happening without conclusive data.
Just jumping in to caution: no, science rarely ends up with truly definitive, conclusive data. A ton of science, particularly climate science, is all about preponderance of evidence.
It may seem nitpicky, but it’s this precise misunderstanding that has led a lot of people to reject climate science, evolution, etc. “Well you can’t prove it so my crackpot theory is just as good as yours.”
So how much of what happened in 2023 is broader AGW and how much is El Nino? It’s hard to say. But we can absolutely say AGW has almost certainly made a strong El Nino year even more severe.
This is very true. Science is shades of grey, not concrete right/wrong answers.
I agree with you there. What I’m trying to say is that we, unfortunately, have to act in parallel to data gathering. Obviously this means we risk making bad choices, or making the data harder to read. That’s our lot in life though. If we just sit still and gather data all our lives we’ll get eaten by catastrophe.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t address climate change right now. Not even sort of, I am very alarmed by what’s happening, and what we already do know. The data gathering I’m talking about is for the science part, not for the action part.
We should be 330 million Americans in Washington DC right now (or wherever you live) demanding climate action right now. Unfortunately, that’s just not going to happen.
You can also see it the other way around, that the previous 5 years appeared somewhat colder than where climate change would put them, because they were in La Niña.
The global heating from climate change is so strong that La Niña is hardly a dip anymore. It’s pretty much just a plateau now, at temperatures slightly below the previous El Niño year:
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