Climate researchers have a problem. A degree or two of global warming simply isn’t scary. When Hollywood created “The Day After Tomorrow”, the cold snap allegedly triggered by global warming was by far the most deadly threat faced by the heroes.
So Ed Hawkins, a professor at University of Reading, has ditched boring old graphs, and created an animated graphic which attempts to maximise the emotional impact of global warming data.
Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation) https://t.co/YETC5HkmTr pic.twitter.com/Ypci717AHq
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 9, 2016
A good artistic effort – the scary spiral thing seems to leap straight out of the page at you. But is the choice of data range reasonable? I would suggest not – most people would be hard pressed to tell whether temperature in a room had changed by one or two degrees.
So how does it look when you represent temperature change on a more reasonable scale, say 10c, a magnitude of change which most people could actually feel?
It will look mostly like a little squiggly dot at that scale.
I wonder how low the middle class can slide before they start connecting the dots of the climate con job with societal outcomes.
What a silly article. One or two degrees change in global temperature is actually a lot. Only about five degrees separate the Last Glacial Maximum from the Holocene Climate Optimum, and the entire Holocene variability probably fits in less than 2 degrees. One degree below LIA temperatures probably means a return to glacial conditions. Ignorance is no excuse for comparing global average changes to temperature changes in a room.
Javier –
My specialty is unfortunately much more boring than that of a climateologist, I dabble in metrics and measurement theory. Mostly metrics. One of the things that’s always puzzled me as a metrics guy, is how anyone has been able to recover temperature measures from times before the thermometer with any real accuracy? Or measures of atmospheric carbon dioxide to “parts per million”. For that matter, how have periods of time been assigned to these data with resolution on the order of +/- 50 years?
All of my research so far has led to an understanding that temporal measures based on carbon dating of samples 5, 6 even 7 million years old are on the order of 1000 times less precise than contemporary instrument data (you know, stuff we collect from clocks, thermometers, gas analyzers) , yet they’ve been used to argue the increase in temperature and CO2 over the past 100 years is unprecedented, and to predict changes in temperature over the next 100 years. This astonishes me since we obviously have no data with 100 year resolution spanning even the past million years. How can this be?
I’m fairly certain that the uncertainty of atmospheric CO2 estimates based on an analysis of boron isotopes in the shells of fossilized foramanifera, or temperature estimates based on extrapolation from tree rings, completely eliminates them from a discussion of the possible effect of rising CO2 levels on temperature of the next 80 years. I’d go so far as to say I’m dead certain of that.
What are your thoughts?
Oh dear, so we have almost reached the IPCC’s catastrophic 1.5-2.0 degrees warming since pre-industrial times. And everyone can see how much worse off the world is – more crops, more population. And the world seems to cope very well with temperature fluctuations of 10 degrees in one day.
Interesting that Javier resorts to arguments about a return to glacial conditions rather then the implications of living in a hot house that is just 1 degree warmer.
Well considering that the maximum range of temperature on this day, the 13/May/2016, here in Cairns Queensland Australia, can range between 30C and 13C, while its average range for this day is 20c to 28c…..It has a 7 degree propensity of being cooler and only 2 degree propensity of being warmer judging by those figures….
1.5 degrees of supposed warming is neither here nor there in the scheme of things is it.
Not to mention the fact that the surface temperature data set is so “adjusted” and corrupted that it no longer represents science….. Whereas the 40 year Satellite temp data shows no significant warming. Indeed it shows a flat line for nearly 20 years.
You call that a good artistic effort? THIS is a good artistic effort-
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/screw_nature/
Either that or the touchy feely warmies are getting a tad sexually frustrated, although perhaps that’s a climatologist with the ipad getting his rocks off.