Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief | Hacker News Reader

Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

abc.net.au

257 pointshnuser0000177 comments

The current sea temperature anomaly is extreme. You can see it plotted since 1980 here: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ The dark black line that diverges in March is this year to date.

These anomalies will become more common and more extreme over the coming decades.

It will happen just slow enough for people to get used to it and not panic. And then it will be the new normal. Humans can adapt to terrible situations.

Honestly I'll ride it out but I do feel bad for people with kids.

>Honestly I'll ride it out but I do feel bad for people with kids.

Do you live near the coast? If so, "riding it out", might involve moving inland and paying insane property prices.

On what timeline do you believe this to be the case

You can't possibly be from the Southwestern US. We're used to particularly brutal summers here, but this year has just been insane, unlike anything I've ever experienced (and, of course, we've had many "record breaking years" over the past 10-20 years). I already have plans to move north. Phoenix has been one of the fastest growing cities in the US - I definitely believe a lot of people are going to think twice about moving there now.

There are parts of the world that are already hitting wet-bulb temperatures that are lethal to humans. And this is all just the beginning.

Next year will be worse, but after that should be much cooler.

The 90 year "Moctezuma" cycle (think dust bowl 1930's - much warmer than this year, 1840's, 1750's and conquistador records from 1660's) is combined with a peak 11 year solar cycle and an el nino, will subside.

overall warming will still increase, so 2110's will be brutal, but late 2020's should be awesome -- cooler summers and warmer winters, longer growing seasons, more snow, rain, skiing, cheaper food etc.

Do you have a single source for this idea?

The current short term (5 year) climate thinking is that conditions (land + ocean temps, storms, etc) will worsen for "a few years" and then lighten up a little with a slight reduction and general plateau for a few more years.

The ratcheting upward saw toothing is a feature of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern .. and the world is just now moving into the upturn phase.

Climate dynamics are akin to the tennis racket theorem - the uninterferred long term arc of the centre of gravity (gross parameters) is essentially deterministic, however the short term specific orientations of the tumblings along that arc resist exact prediction.

You can read more via:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/what-el-ni%...

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/e...

None of these sources describe this alleged "Moctezuma cycle" that was mentioned and a quick internet search also turns up nothing

Sometimes spelled as Montezuma, or Aztec cycle.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-climate-cycles-which...

None of those terms appear in the article you cited.

I guess we have a nickname for it.

Try this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunspot-cycle...

Indeed.

I'm sticking to the expected behaviour from climate scientists; sunspots and Aztec cycles aren't my department (see my peer comment on solar magnetic activity & climate quoting NASA scientists on their opinions re: .. )

I agree with the first sentence and disagree with the second, and the citations also disagree with the second sentence, because we are moving into a downturn phase. And I love the third sentence because I had to read it twice. :)

There are lots of disagreements about whether it will be 2024 or 2025 that the ENSO cycle gets cooler but there is zero disagreement that solar radiation will start decreasing next year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00199-z https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/e...

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/what-will-solar-cy...

The third sentence is kind of key to understanding the long term certainty of the AGW case against the difficulty in predicting short term weather and short(ish) term climate cell cycles.

> there is zero disagreement that solar radiation will start decreasing next year.

This is not supported by any of your three links; two are on ENSO, the third on solar magnetic activity (unrelated to the solar visible spectrum energy -> IR energy that drives climate change)

From the nasa solar link:

* “There is no indication that we are currently approaching a Maunder-type minimum in solar activity,”

( 'solar activity' referes to sunspots, flares, etc. NOT to radiant energy in the visible spectrum )

* But even if the Sun dropped into a grand minimum, there’s no reason to think Earth would undergo another Ice Age;

( NASA scientists do not believe that solar mag activity is related to climate changes )

* not only do scientists theorize that the Little Ice Age occurred for other reasons,

( again, the European "Little Ice Age" not related to sun spots )

* but in our contemporary world, greenhouse gases far surpass the Sun’s effects when it comes to changes in Earth’s climate.

Actual flucuations of the suns visible spectrum activity are very very small compared to other more dominant effects.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...]

This is a few years old, but: https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/screenhunt...

Often when I talk about climate cycles, it turns into I'm a climate change denier. I am not, I have been writing about climate change since the 90's. It's just not that this year, or next, are indicative of imminent disaster.

Within the next few hundred years the seas will rise around 100m. Nothing will stop that, nothing will save most island countries or coastal cities. We don't have the long term political will to stop that.

But that's centuries from now, not decades.

None of these sources describe this "Moctezuma cycle" you mentioned and a quick internet search also turns up nothing.

I read that if all of Antarctica melted it would raise 65m or so? And it seems unlikely Antartica would melt in a few hundred years?

Do you have a reference for 100m?

i read that the moctezuma cycle killed us all yesterday, what do you think of that?

// Honestly I'll ride it out but I do feel bad for people with kids.

When I came to the US in the 90s, one of my teachers was freaking out about peak oil and about how people shouldn't have kids because that would exacerbate the problem and those kids would have a bad life.

Joke's on him I guess. I suspect that at every single point of human history, someone was dismal about something and using it as a reason to not have kids.

If I had to bet, people having kids now are not going to regret it ever.

Of course, it is obviously inevitable that at some point the doomsayers will be correct (and, to note, there are also many times they've been right in the past - I wouldn't have wanted to be born in Europe just before the Black Death, or in Rome just before it fell, or in 510 or so just to be in prime age during what is often called "the worst year in history" in 536, ...)

Yup however you wouldn't be here today if someone.in your ancestry didn't live through that - assuming your family is from that part of the world

I’m sure it was deeply unpleasant for my ancestors and I’m currently thinking the world may be up being way more unpleasant for my descendants than it was for me.

The point this sub thread is that people always had reason to suspect this and at all previous time it was an error.

There were lots of doomsayers in history that weren’t wrong I’d the point, yes those of us talking have ancestors that got through terrible times (some of them predicted some not), that wiped out large swaths of people and survived but there are lots of other terrible outcomes that are terrible and unwelcome.

My grandfather lived through ww2 m, which was a HEAVILY predicted event filled with doomsaying right after WW1, and it was a point of debate.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience, lots of people didn’t make it and entire communities were destroyed, for them it was the end.

... the adjective "Pollyannaish" and the noun "Pollyannaism" became popular terms for a personality type characterised by irrepressible optimism evident in the face of even the most adverse or discouraging of circumstances. It is sometimes used pejoratively, referring to someone whose optimism is excessive to the point of naïveté or refusing to accept the facts of an unfortunate situation.

As a 90s kid a remember peak oil. It was taught every where except in one class - economics. The teacher was adamant we would never run out of oil because as the supply dwindled the cost would go up and new oil or other forms of energy would be found. Makes perfect sense now but at the time this was not the norm. Economics ended up being my favorite class. Slightly related he also predicted the internet bubble collapse as I was explaining how I as a teenager was making money on the internet doing nothing in 99 - and his response was that will end because you don’t get money for nothing forever.

"Someone will do something" isn't especially good economics. It's just wishful thinking.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. It's a bad idea to plan on it.

In this case it was predicted in a specific context though, and he was correct. Do you wish that he was thinking wishfully perhaps?

He didn't predict the specifics, like fracking. If he knew that it would become economical, good on him for knowing more. But that's a matter of geology and petroleum science; it couldn't be predicted purely from the economics.

I point it out only to say "somebody will do something to fix climate change, so don't worry about it" is not a sound position either. The economics predict there will be reactions, but they include a lot of suffering. Dealing with it sooner rather than later will reduce the suffering, and we've already lost a lot of time.

> I point it out only to say "somebody will do something to fix climate change, so don't worry about it" is not a sound position either.

That wasn't his position though. His comment had specific context, your critique did not.

Otherwise I absolutely agree with you, my thinking is that humans should try precision in communications (more popularly known as "pedantry", except when scientists do it) about these wicked problems because what we're doing now seems to cause more harm than help, and as you say time is of the essence.

Yes peak oil is a good example of predictions being wrong, it does not mean anything for other predictions of doom.

Dire warnings about things going on in Europe in the 1930s proved to be very true and incredibly costly and horrible for most everyone and from talking to people that had to deal with the aftermath.

What if we are wrong?! we made the world better for nothing!

I hopped on the comment on peak oil because it was something that I had not heard in long time and I remember the discussion being so out of left field that an alternative idea was never brought up - and it was done under a capitalistic economic model based on supply and demand. I’m not saying we should look at all predictions as potentially wrong. I personally believe in reducing consumption especially along the food chain like a reduction in meat and other animal products as well as ensuring seafood is done sustainably.

So based on a single datapoint you have concluded that an event can never happen? “It didn’t rain today, so it never will”.

No, I am saying that history is full of people saying "it's raining today, better not have kids so they don't die in the flood" and that has never been the right answer in retrospect.

There are multiple times that would have been the correct decision.

If your ancestors had made that "correct" decision, you'd be dead as in not existing.

So it sounds like they all made the right decision to procreate despite "reasons" not to.

That's what I used to think 10 years ago. Now I'm not so sure. Everything is happening way sooner and more dramatically than expected.

Can anyone find a sea temp plot before 1980? NASA likes to pull tricks such as start acreage burn around that time because it was a local minimum.

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

Take a few grains of salt. Even 1980 was long before we had great satellite data so a lot is inferred from tidal measurements in European cities

it may indeed be unprecedented - but this type of chart could do a better job of showing that. here's what I mean: we know that temperature has been increasing steadily for 140 years. So we expect each year can be higher than the previous one. And in an El Niño year, higher even. This chart shows that happening. What it doesn't show (clearly) is how high this year is vs. the previous year - and, importantly, whether that jump in temperature is the highest ever, or one of the highest ever, or whatever. maybe it is, but this type of chart doesn't highlight that fact because all of the years are jumbled together.

I agree it’s not great. However, you may have missed it but the key in interactive you can click on individual years and groups of years you see the trends. 2021 and 2022 are also quite distinctive lines. So it’s easy to see from the data how large an anomaly 2023 is.

Enabling individual years lines in sequence, 1998 was a major jump from what came before as was parts of 2015, and 2016. But 2023 is still a huge jump which going from past patters will settle down for a few years before becoming the new normal.

You’re assuming that the ocean temperature relative to the previous year is meaningful. I don’t think that’s true, absolute difference from normal is what matters for ocean ecology.

I had the same thought as the parent poster. It may not be the most meaningful metric scientifically, but it would be great for showing average people that climate change won't necessarily be a smooth, linear, predictable climb.

The black line is the current year, the orange line is the last year, in my opinion you can see very clearly the difference between the two. There are also three dotted lines: a mean (1982-2011) and a +-2sigma interval from the mean.

When you see a divergent year then you need to ask yourself did anything odd happen this year?

Or in past years, or in adjacent climate cells, etc.

Check the equations, there are lag terms .. heat transfers take time.

The factors here are increased insulation gases (CO2, methane, water vapor), decreased Saharan dust, decreased shading sulphates, changing swing of the ENSO cycle.

Just for tonga folks. I remember reading this yesterday and they calculated that the effect of tonga only make at best 0.1 degree C increase in temperature. However what human did is 1.x degree C. That is order of magnitude difference => tonga is almost irrelevant.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/summer-2023-extreme-heat-causes

edit: previous claimed 2.x is in degree F, here we global citizens use international standard unit degree C which convert to 1.x.

The worldwide anomaly in 2023 is about 0.9 degrees C from the mean since 1979, not 2.x. Furthermore, the 2023 anomaly from the last decade mean is about 0.3 degrees C. The 2023 anomaly from 2022 is 0.18 degrees, which is close to what they predicted the Tonga eruption would cause.

One of the best ways to fight climate change is to not make up numbers out of thin air. There has to be trust for people to begin to change, and exaggerating because you want people to feel as scared as you will not help.

My fault, USA's fault. Misread that degree F and totally missed the degree C came later.

> One of the best ways to fight climate change is to not make up numbers out of thin air

I can tell you one of the best ways to fight climate change is not to spend 0 time reading someone's source to see what's going on with their numbers and accusing them of purposefully exaggerating instead. That's just using the guise of Wikipedia expertise to be lazy and stop a conversation before it starts

From their article, the "2.x" clearly comes from the fahrenheit number given. They likely meant 1.2 degrees C, measured from the preindustrial era.

(and you're clearly willing to speculate based on nothing but your feelings[1], so I'm not sure you have much of a leg to stand on criticizing like that)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37002288

Not the poster you're replying to, but despite the fact that I think you're right, the mistake you've highlighted on is pretty reasonable given that there's people from many countries here and plenty of people default to C vs. F. No need to go on the attack to make a helpful correction. :)

I'll be over here cooking an egg on the sidewalk if you need me.

Tonga, not tonga. I thought you were talking about a climate phenomenon unknown to me, when in fact you were talking about the country of Tonga.

Just an interesting first person anecdote: In the south of Brazil (close to Argentina) we normally have well defined seasons, but almost like clockwork we always had a famous "mini-summer of May", an unusually warm week in an otherwise cold mid-autumn. Well in the last decade the new concepts of "mini-summer of June" and now "mini-summer of July" started entering the popular parlance, as this abnormally warm weeks during a cold season are becoming more numerous and coming later in the season (late Autumn and even Winter).

Interesting. In Rome we have a similar week in October, it's called "the roman October"

Is it Indian summer?

That's what I know it as in Canada.

Probably that’s a culturally insensitive term? But also that’s what we call it in Maine

Same in Greece for 10 days usually in January named after a bird (and a myth that this happens for this bird to stay with their eggs).

Veranillo de San Juan has been a thing since forever[0], and it usually was at the end of June. However, people have taken to call any hot spell this way, even if it's nowhere near St. John's date (June 24th). My anecdotal observations are similar to yours.

[0] It even has its own (poorly sourced) wikipedia article: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veranito_de_San_Juan

“This is between 10C and 20C above what is normal for this time of year in parts of Chile and Argentina”

Excuse the language, but it would appear that we are in a bit of a jam.

Up the proverbial river of excrement without a paddle, if you'll excuse my French

The lifespan of everyone reading this has decreased by several decades.

That's not true at all and not what anthropocene climate change implies.

We’ll make solar powered cities that migrate to the temperate parts of the earth?

I’m sure I’ve seen that in some book.

What is going to cause everyone reading this to die decades earlier?

Read up on 35 wet bulb night time temperatures.

Yeah, but, I’m reading this and that won’t be an issue where I live. So it must be something else that will kill everyone reading this decades earlier.

What about a war for the place where you live? Surely, people currently in places that will become uninhabitable got to live in one of those places where they can, like yours.

There is tons of room to build new houses where I live. But the jobs are all somewhere else. When companies start moving up here and the people follow, then I will know things are getting serious.

Starvation and war. And hubris, of course. Same as every other time human civilizations have collapsed.

Do you have access to a time machine? Do you know that climate change will cause human civilization to collapse?

Has there ever been a global civilization collapse? We seem a bit unprecedented.

I think that 50 years from now the global average life expectancy will be greater than now. Certainly not decades less than today’s average.

Perfectly happy to wager money through augur or some other wonky long bet system as this seems like a total easy win.

> Has there ever been a global civilization collapse?

First time for everything.

> this seems like a total easy win.

Of course that’s an easy win. Nobody will come to collect if they win.

I think the way it’s set up is that the wager automatically pays out to a beneficiary, so I would have it pay out to a charity.

Local or global, principle is the same:

Civilization collapse = whenever the way a civilization is run, can't be sustained any longer.

Often worsened by a ruling elite only looking after themselves, while ignoring their societies' bigger problems. And sometimes (unexpected?) external events.

The "unsustainable" is pretty much a given right now.

So 'the ship has to be turned', quick.

Otherwise civilization collapse will (logically, inevitably) follow. Just like in past collapses. Only this time, global scale.

I prefer "turn ship around, quick" option over "widespread crop failures, chaos, wars, famine & other disasters".

There are boomers here who will only die a few years early.

Hopefully you are joking and not intentionally committing a hate crime by using the "b**er" word to disparage against the chronologically challenged

Hey, my mom's a boomer, some of my greatest idols were boomers. It's not a term of disparagement, she's chronologically gifted! As long as we get her a good AC unit and keep it maintained, she'll probably live longer than average.

Well maybe stop using the short version of it, as it is mostly used in a negative manner online, and start using the full expression to reflect the cohort you're referring to: "baby boomer".

No thanks!

Hyperbole doesn't help anyone.

Are things worse than what the IPCC is letting on? Absolutely, yes, but saying everyone's gona die from it is ridiculous. Most reading this will merely be inconvenienced. Some will lose houses to wildfires or hurricanes, but most will swealter a bit more than they would have otherwise.

The only people who really have to worry are those in the tropics living with unreliable power grids and no ac.

The problem is not ACs, the problem is having water and growing food.

> Most reading this will merely be inconvenienced.

Except:

>The only people who really have to worry are those in the tropics living with unreliable power grids and no ac.

Which is where millions of people attempting to migrate to countries where living outside isn't a death sentence, and how do you think that will go after the amount of hatred we have seen for the comparatively minimal migration we have currently experienced?

Also, you can turn back relatively few migrants, many of whom is only there for a chance at a better life.

Good luck turning away orders of magnitude more, fighting for a chance at life.

Wondering how this would play out of the heat grows exponentially …

Part of this may have been due to the Hunga Tonga eruption which injected an tremendous amount of water vapor into the upper atmosphere

https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1685971656198545408

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/tonga-eruption-blasted-unpr...

From the NASA article: "The effect would dissipate when the extra water vapor cycles out of the stratosphere and would not be enough to noticeably exacerbate climate change effects."

I feel like there must be some other influence here, and the Tonga eruption is a good candidate. That's not to say this isn't already exacerbated by existing human-derived climate change, but the way the temperature leaps off the chart starting in April is not like the gradual upward trend we see with climate change. It makes utterly no sense from that perspective. Something external to climate change has to be influencing the system.

Unfortunately, it also seems like a lot of people are hesitant to even discuss this possibility for fear of being ostracized by the mob.

What is the mechanism for They ostracizing anonymous accounts on HN?

There's something called a tipping point, and it can result in exactly that sort of sudden rate of change increase entirely due to a certain threshold being breached.

Apparently warming is compounded by the eruption, low sulphur shipping fuel rules, low amounts of Saharan dust and changes by El Niño according to this:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...

It would seem then that this year is yet another early warning sign. Perhaps we got lucky to get a glimpse of what is coming and in a sane world, this would motivate us to finally take real and significant action. Unfortunately, the last few years have demonstrated that we clearly don't live in a sane world and of course, we'll ignore this warning too.

“ Unfortunately, it also seems like a lot of people are hesitant to even discuss this possibility for fear of being ostracized by the mob.”

This assessment is the same that a climate denier would make - it’s essentially climate gas lighting. Why do I say this?

Because the real reason it’s hard to discuss events with nuance is the highly vocal contingent of climate deniers that are looking for any single word or event that can be twisted to obfuscate the issue - first deny climate change, then to claim it’s not that bad etc etc.

That is the actual reason people are careful discussing climate, nothing to do with fear of ostracism. they’re rightly worried that the vocal anti-science people will twist their words.

The only people who fear getting ostracized are those doing the word twisting, the others are simply hesitant to give the Ron desantis types sounds bites to twist.

maybe a lot of people are tired of hearing people flog uniformed opinions and third-hand speculation. its not really a very productive discussion.

Humm that's curious

Also, the temperature anomalies seem to be close to the El Nino temperature changes (which is a big blob of hot water over the Pacific)

And its the first el nino year in a few years!

A much more compelling argument than your sibling arguing a mob is suppressing anonymous discussion lol.

also it's an El Niño year.

My issue the last few years with anything related to the topic of climate change and weather patterns is that it's to me the poster child of where science communication can make or break an issue (even one that is existential like this one). And in this case, it has failed miserably and continues to do so.

I am strongly in favor of moving to renewable sources just because they seem like the obvious next technical evolution (And all the CO2 reduction benefits, for sure). I'm also completely trusting that climatologists are doing their thing and that the models we have only keep getting better. I have nearly zero issues with the science or the scientific process as I understand it.

But can we just admit that communicating about warming the earth by 2 degrees always has, and will always be a major failure in getting through to the population? Whenever I see another article talking about "2 degrees by 2035" or something similar, I roll my eyes now because that is such heavy jargon that is meaningful to such a small amount of people. How can we better communicate exactly what that means on a day to day basis? Or connect that to solutions?

We have to find a better way to communicate this both at the macro level and at the micro level.

At the macro level, even someone like me who is fully onboard with the science and the phenomenon, has a hard time getting worked up about chatter about 2 degrees, 0.9 degrees, and measuring tons of carbon. As humans we just can't process this in a meaningful way.

And at a micro level, I'm also sick of us looking at the weather around us on individual days saying "look at this hot day, climate change" and ignoring other factors. But then when people joke about frigid winters, we are quick to correct them and say that it's still due to climate change (we seem to understand that systems are interrelated, cold fronts, warming water evaporating more and resulting in more snow for example), but in hot weather, we just use the "climate change!" sledgehammer and forget about undersea volcanoes, El Ninos, the intensity of the sun (all small factors but factors nonetheless).

The whole thing to me has long been a failure in public communication of science. And I think that should be given as much attention as all the other technical solutions.

„Parts of Italy reached temperatures up to 48C“

This has been debunked. The 48 degree reported was land surface temperature, not air temperature that is usually reported.

https://skepticalscience.com/land-air-difference.html

That was a lot of words to end up confirming that at least 46C was recorded as surface air temp (1.25m above ground) according to their own sources.

No, it was 48°C air temperature. The "Debunking" was a hoax and this explained in the article you linked.

That website feels like it is 20 years too late in the design department. Quite detrimental to the content.

But human lifes matter much more than the whole planet's ecosystem! No one likes to sacrifice their own comfort to keep the globe cool, so keep belief in infinite growth of economy and generate money from thin air!

Not dismissing Global Heating, I’d point out that Northern Argentina, Western Paraguay have both semi arid savannas and steppes to arid desert climates. It is not no stranger to high temperature anytime of year, neither to the sudden steep subtropics warm up midwinter known locally as ‘veranito' [little summer].

Here in SE SA plateau it's been a normal to cooler winter.

> have both semi arid savannas and steppes to arid desert climates. It is not no stranger to high temperature anytime of year, neither to the sudden steep subtropics warm up midwinter known locally as ‘veranito'

Yes, but similar record was last seen ~70 years ago for the peak in Chile and ~110 years ago in Buenos Aires. So, the matter is about "how frequently how much"

> Here in SE SA plateau it's been a normal to cooler winter

Yes but this is exactly the "stochastic" part of randomness, i.e. making it difficult to assess a phenomenon from a restricted perspective which is not the big picture.

I may not be an expert on this matter, but the reported 37°C anomaly in Coquimbo is nowhere seen in the general historical record https://weatherspark.com/h/s/25823/2023/3/Historical-Weather... . Although the climate warming is very real and serious, my opinion is that the article probably is too dramatic and exaggerates (if not manipulates) the facts.

>In the Coquimbo region, the mountain town of Vicuna reached a top of 37C, the Liceo Samuel Román Rojas weather station peaked at 35.4C and Monte Patricia reached 31.5C.

See the article didn't manipulate facts, you accidentally did. There's more than one weather sensor in the area.

Do I misunderstand their numbers? It looks like in Buenos Aires historical maximum for Aug is +35 degrees, right? And so far it got only up to 30 degrees?

Not to say the heat is not real ofc. Where I am the summer is super hot, in July it came within less than 1 degree of all time maximum on record for the month, though I don't think it broke the record after all... and this with up to 70% humidity, I nearly passed out walking. I guess almost the limit of my endurance.

I'm located near Buenos Aires. There was a similar hot spell several weeks ago, mid-July. Record high in July is (according to Wikipedia) 30.2C, and I don't have the data but this record could have been very well exceeded during those extremely warm days.

It looks like 23 July, one day. It got up to about 28 degrees. Between 10-20 July I see nothing hotter than 20 degrees. This is US GFS data. Maybe I'm wrong. Also looking only at BA, it was hotter to the north west

There's high altitude winds from too warm pacific tropic oceans to south america, that is probably involved in the process I think

Have there been any strange geological events recently like volcanic eruptions that could have caused this?

We broke the Earth

I thought YC/Hacker News is intended to help people build new and better companies.

How does this fit?

Successful companies surf the zeitgeist to unfathomable heights.

Regardless of your feelings, concern about climate change is very much the spirit of the age.

You can ride this wave to success, cynically or with good intentions (your choice), or you can watch history pass you by (again, your choice).

YC is a startup accelerator.

Hacker News is hacker news.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Hunga Tonga eruption or whatever it's called..

An interesting phenomenon drowned in a clickbait article.

I sometimes understand the lunatics of the "climate change is a hoax" movement.

ok - but the 400 page report does not get promoted, this broadcast TV piece does..

Yeah but this kind of clickbait actively destroys trust in climate science, because the lunatics think that they get sold a hoax. And actually, the kind of writing is extremely sketchy.

And it doesn't help that the lunatics are floating in a sea of hoaxes.

No, it doesn't. What destroys trust in climate science is coordinated attacks from conservative think thanks. You people who think its the fault of them not acting like perfect logicians are delusional. Its is propaganda (clickbait or otherwise) which actually makes things happen, not reasoned arguments. Conservatives understand this is and that is why they tend to win even when their goal are clearly bad.

Ah yes, climate deniers just haven't been talked to right!

Rather then them choosing to consume a media diet 100% filled with "liberal hoaxes THEY don't want YOU to know about!!!!!"

There’s no such thing as climate deniers.

There are people asking “Hey, maybe there are additional mechanisms in the climate that cause a hot summer that we don’t know about”? and then there are people running around with their head cut off, screaming about how air conditioning and cars and modern technology is the devil incarnate while offering no practical solutions.

in 2010 or so in our daily USA city newspaper online-edition, at least three times a week for the entire year, did I respond to "no there is no climate warming" posts -- straight denial.

No, there really are climate deniers. Paid for it otherwise.

The media often does a sensationalist job of presenting climate change. It's always in existential terms, then social media runs with that, and you have public figures talking about how we're all doomed if we don't do something drastic in the next 5-10 years. Instead of it being a range from less severe to more severe with risk factors and tradeoffs increasing, along with possible mitigation strategies from more mundane to more risky.

It becomes a binary of we're doomed or we do something drastic right now (massive degrowth, abandon capatalism, quit fossil fuel cold turkey, etc) with little in between.

You remember that time "The media" tried to communicate nuance, and it worked? The reason you don't is because you can't. People are not equipped to receive that.

The real issue here is industry is destroying our planet, and you nitpick the media because you can't handle the real problem. Bike shedding.

That's an extremely reductive take. Industry provides the economic activity for billions of people and our modern lifestyle. Clean energy will still be provided by industry, as will carbon capture and other mitigating solutions.

What do you propose, going back to a preindustrial lifestyle? Do you have something better than we do that or we all die message that I'm criticizing? Bike shedding my ass.

> Industry provides the economic activity for billions of people

Bullshit jobs 40-75%, transport & cars to those bullshit jobs, too much stuff produced we don't need, ...

> as will carbon capture

Not soon, no. Lookup how much is already in the air and how much is the technology able to capture. We'd need tens of thousands of such factories. We have the technology - we have trees.

> going back to a preindustrial lifestyle

Living sustainably != preindustrial lifestyle.

> something better than we do that or we all die

Doing what we've done before (= more of the bad stuff that got us where we are) will get us to the "we all die" part.

Explain how this is clickbait.

The climatologists aren't in actual disbelief, just in a metaphorical one. That makes it slightly click-baity.

They are metaphorically in disbelief, but in actuality they are not in disbelief? Yeah I guess I understand the climate deniers too.

EDIT: Be cause I wrote the above in anger

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for as long as I have lived. They have consistently used the most optimistic scenarios and we have constantly done worse than that. Climate Deniers want to deny because the reality is an inconvenience to their ways of life. The costs of climate denial are diffuse; they can't be directly traced back to me. The benefits are acute and wholly captured by me. Add on to this that contribution toward climate change is disproportionately done by wealthier people and you get the most powerful people, who benefit the most from climate denial, trying to get others to deny with them.

For the non-english speakers: "disbelief" has two meanings:

1. actually not believing something

2. astonishment/amazement

Climatologists believe the temperature anomaly, and are astonished by it.

Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

"I can’t believe you posted that comment!" That's metaphorical. Of course I believe you posted that comment, it's right in front of my eyes.

You're making distinctions without differences. This kind of metaphorical speaking is very common in English and is well-understood by people not looking for pedantic argumentation. I will grant that it may be a bit subtle to non-native English speakers, but it is not being used to deceive the reader either in fact or in severity.

Oh fun we are having a semantic debate now. I guess nobody wins.

I think a little dose of media literacy is needed here. Obviously scientists aren't literally "refusing to accept", "rejecting", or "don't believe" this data is accurate. Rather "disbelief" in this sense is a normal phrasing used in media to describe the sense of surprise or shock on the part of experts who didn't expect this to happen. One scientist said it was "unheard of".

Yes the article is replacing that with "disbelief" in the figurative sense, but we all know what that means. It's not clickbait.

My perception is that this figurative use makes for a sensationalist headline.

Sure:

- "Winter" in the headline makes it sound more extreme. It’s information-free, because winter and summer temperatures close to the equator are very similar.

- Numbers are given in absolutes when convenient to paint a picture and are without meaning without a proper reference.

- References are sketchy: "in winter as hot as Europe in summer". "This would be weird in New South Wales". Ok then.

- Color scheme of maps made to look extreme.

- Map on top and mid don’t match.

- Map on top apparently has "precipitation" selected?! Does the range on the right even show temperatures, especially since this map doesn’t match the second map?

- Cherry-picking most extreme ranges: 10-20°C in some areas. But Buenos Aires is only 5°C hotter. Btw. Germany where I live, is 5-7 degrees cooler than usually in August. Doesn’t matter though.

> winter and summer temperatures close to the equator are very similar.

Do you actually know where the equator is on that map?

> close to the equator

The peak anomaly was in Vicuña, Chile, at -30°Lat - i.e. Puerto Alegre, Maseru, Perth-Brisbane. Symmetrically, that would be Houston, Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai...

The tropic of Capricorn is at -23.4°Lat.

The peak anomaly is well below the tropic. And Buenos Aires (where the other biggest anomaly was) is several degrees further south.

Update:

> But Buenos Aires is only 5°C hotter

I think it refers to the previous highest record well over one century ago. It says,

> Buenos Aires set a daily record for the start of August with its high of 30.1C - more than 5 degrees above the previous daily record, and 12C warmer than its August average

(BTW: Wikipedia does not agree with those records in the "Climate data" table, but anyway.)

Well, if it isn’t click bait then it just means… that climatology can’t predict such events.

“Winter temperatures are above 35 in South America and it is exactly what climatologists predicted given our actions” — nice, they know what they are doing, they earn credibility.

“Winter temperatures above 35C in South America leave climatologists in disbelief” — so something extremely unlikely happened according to your models, maybe your understanding is wrong? Or it is really an “anomaly” and things are going to get back to normal soon?

The implication that something that no one has foreseen happened and, therefore, it proves that people who haven’t foreseen it were right is ridiculous.

Its filled with anxiety and emotions. I am completely turn off by this. Despite thet fact that I acknowledge climate change. Its approach is based on emotions and not clear well though actions.

Lots of crazy things in the weather this year. The obvious thing is to blame climate change. But these are pretty sudden and extremely unusual. I don’t think this is at all what is predicted.

I wonder how much the Hunga Tonga eruption of last year affected the weather this year. I think it injected some crazy amount of water into the atmosphere.

Climate change increases the likelyhood of such extreme events. That's part of the predictions.

In fairness, climate change does not increase volcanism...

I was referring to the weather extremes. The point is that you don’t need the Hunga Tonga eruption to explain those. Moreover, at this point it's pure conjecture that the eruption would constitute a major factor here.

Of course that climate change will increase volcanism. Is the most logical outcome.

Well, I'll self-correct myself: Replace "will increase" by "has been increasing".

Volcanism isn't caused by the climate, it's caused by magma seeping up from the Earth's core through cracks in the mantle.

> Volcanism isn't caused by the climate, it's caused by magma seeping up from the Earth's core through cracks in the mantle.

And this cracks (in the crust) are normally created by...

A redistribution in the equilibrium of the forces acting locally over crust and upper mantle called isostasy

And breaking the isostasy is directly related with...

The fact that the earth crust is floating in the mantle over a sea of magma

And how much it floats or sinks is directly linked with local gravity...

gravity that is a reflect of the thickness of the crust in that area. Or if we prefer of how much matter is accumulated in that local area.

The thicker, the heavier, so the crust will sink more by the force pointing down that come from its own weight and local gravity in the area will increase

...

Can you see yet where this is leading us, and why I'm 120% sure that climate change WILL come with an increase in volcanic eruptions?

> Can you see yet where this is leading us, and why I'm 120% sure that climate change WILL come with an increase in volcanic eruptions?

Melting of ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica causing land to rebound (called iso-something shock IIRC?) which is likely to cause all kinds of tectonic activity such as volcanism. Which is less weight on the crust there, and so a lower local gravity in those areas. Gravity isn't strong enough to do much to even the thinnest part of the crust (about 16km in part of Antarctica apparently) directly unless you just mean it as weight, which is a weird way of using the term.

Finally. Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a wall.

Gravity was introduced to talk about why we know that North and South Poles will behave in a different way, but you are right. Forget that part.

So there is a direct link between climate change and an increase in volcanoes activity and is easily observable. We can expect an early spring activity in the North Pole, adding forces than then will typically trigger a "ping-pong" chain of volcanoes around equator and in the opposite areas of the planet. Has been happening for a while yet

Nope! Just like the pandemic didn't increase earthquakes. But, when you're in the middle of one crisis, it makes a second crisis even more devastating.

> I don’t think this is at all what is predicted.

This is exactly what was predicted. Governments leaned on climate scientists to focus on the lower end of the impact scale in public, and leave the worst case scenario for those who care about the research themselves. But this has been a reported possible outcome for years now.

Unfortunately, not wanting to alarm people has caused many to ignore the problem at hand.

Wasn’t that about 146 million tons of water? It’s a lot in one go, but the atmosphere has about 2.5% water vapour, which is a total of ~ 1.3e17 kg.

The water was underground, in the volcano for aeons, and only emerged with this eruption.

As we all know, quantumly entangled particles behave differently. And these, are temporally linked with h2o from 1.8M years ago!

Thus, charged with the fortitude of their warmer, more energetically excited brethren, their effect is greater, this is scientific fact, and cannot be disputed, so don't try!

> Thus, charged with the fortitude of their warmer, more energetically excited brethren, their effect is greater, this is scientific fact, and cannot be disputed, so don't try!

It really feels like you're the one disputing the science but saying it shouldn't be disputed. Of course, science should be looked debated through every sort of lens but the extreme events happening year over year kind of point to one thing. Where there's proverbial smoke there's fire.

Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37001387 it's not just mass but elevation. The eruption was significant in the upper atmosphere.

Thanks for the link. Surprising, as all new (to me) knowledge is.

It was injected into the stratosphere. Apparently adding as much as 5%. It makes a big difference at what altitude the vapor resides in relation to warming or cooling effects.

Absolutely Hunga Tonga. Water vapor has an amplifying effect. See: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq2299 https://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/

https://www.space.com/tonga-eruption-water-vapor-warm-earth

It’s true that climate messaging can be counterproductive. Summer headlines saying “hot day proves climate change” set people up to believe winter headlines saying “cold day disproves climate change”.

The alarmist tone of this article inspires zero confidence in the reporting. For example:

> Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera went so far as to call it [35 C+ temperatures in winter] one of the most "extreme weather events the world has ever seen".

Assuming the quote is not taken out of context and Herrera did say it, I'm not sure the facts are on Herrera's side. The world likely saw more extreme "weather events," such as the one that happened at the end of the Pleistocene. That's when the half-mile-thick layer of ice sitting over the northeastern part of North America melted to expose the land beneath.

Anyone who is not a denier like yourself knows dam well he meant "recorded history".

> B-but what about when the earth was molten rock a few billion years ago? We _can't_ sacrifice next quarter's profits for this!

Moreover, there is now evidence that the recent years have been warmer not only than the years with meteorological records but than all the previous one thousand two hundred years, for instance:

"Fennoscandian tree-ring anatomy shows a warmer modern than medieval climate"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06176-4

I came across this hypothesis a few years ago and thought it was an interesting possibility, but that there wasn't any data that really supported it. In light of the data of the last few months I honestly can't think of a hypothesis that better explains what is going on with ocean temperature, especially in regions that should be in winter right now.

https://theethicalskeptic.com/2020/02/16/the-climate-change-...

It's a really long article and has been updated continuously for 3 years as new data has been coming in, but I think it really explains how this warming is being driven from the crust and bottom of the ocean up, and not via atmospheric warming. It also has an interesting proposal for the linkage between this observed warming and the variance of Earth's rotation, as well as the long observed weakening of the magnetic field.

Gave it about 5 minutes, left me with a strong crackpot energy, even with the disclaimer a little bit in.

The length seems to affect the authors ability to make a cohesive argument, even when I set my bias against length aside.

I closed the tab after I saw the claim its the only way to explain increased CO2 PPM during [March / April 2020].

Figure 1A is "substantial jump in carbon ppm each year from 15 Feb through 1 Apr when the sun increases its heat contribution"

It's horrendously long and bad. I tried to read it once. I don't get why people deny climate change, it's not like we're even doing anything to stop it for them to actually complain about...

i think it’s mostly out of fragility, fear and denial.

It’s so much easier to put your head in the sand.

Sure, I felt similarly when I read it 3 years ago. But the problem is that there is not a single atmospheric model that can explain the magnitude, rapidity, and localization of the current warming. This does all three and I don't see why the mechanism for it is impossible. The fact that Antarctic sea ice is plummeting when there hasn't been any significant atmospheric warming at the South Pole is remarkable and deserves a lot of scrutiny.

And figure 1A is referring to the heat contribution to the Northern hemisphere where the vast majority of seasonal CO2 landmass sequestration occurs. The author isn't saying the sun gets hotter in March.

Here's a summary by chatGPT:

The article on The Ethical Skeptic presents an alternative theory on climate change, called the "Exothermic (Cyclic) Core Theory of Climate Change". According to this theory, recent climate change may stem from structural and exothermic phase changes in the Earth's nickel-iron core, rather than primarily from human activity. The author suggests that changes in the core's structure release latent kinetic energy (heat), which flows to the Earth's asthenosphere and deep ocean depths, becoming the genesis of most observed climate change and its long-associated geomagnetic dipole phenomena.

The theory proposes that the Earth's core undergoes extreme exothermic change, releasing heat that eventually reaches the Earth's asthenosphere. This heat accelerates the release of volatile organic compounds and methane into the atmosphere. Additionally, deep ocean currents transport this heat to the ocean surface, leading to rapid melting of polar ice caps.

The author criticizes current climate models, arguing that they fail to accurately predict temperature and CO2 increases. He suggests that his theory offers a more comprehensive explanation of global observations.

It's important to note that the author does not deny anthropogenic climate change but proposes an additional theory that could help explain observed climate changes

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