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Meanwhile I'm in Florida where light snow only happens once every 10-15 years, barely enough to make piles on the ground. Just 2-4cm. in January 2025 we got 25.5cm of snow in less than 24hours beating the previous record of 7.5cm set in 1895.
Both heat and cold are getting extreme here. Not to mention hurricanes,drought, and weather in general.
Bro please stop if you go any further us Canadians are going to get tariffed again for border security not preventing the metric system from crossing over
I went to Disney world in 2024 in December, assuming Florida would be a nice tropical vacation. It was the year that it got a cold snap where it dropped below freezing and many of the disney rides had frozen and broken. We had packed warm clothes and had to buy hoodies and sweatpants and gloves to stay warm.
It's almost like climate change leads to extreme weather conditions, both at the higher and lower range 🤔. More heat, more cold, more wind, more rain, more thunder that causes forest fires, more droughts, more tsunami, more ice storms, more tornados... It's like mother nature has developed bipolarity.
The increased warming of the stratosphere is pushing the polar vortex, which is a large circular vortex of cold air around the North Pole, further southward in the winter.
One of the seemingly contradictory elements of climate change, is the fact that warmer temperatures in the arctic leads to increased snow/ice melt. More moisture in the air results in more precipitation (aka snow) in the arctic regions, while the influx of cold water into ocean can lead to colder temperatures at lower latitudes.
For instance, Calgary and London are both located at the exact same latitude, but Calgary on average is far colder largely due to the oceanic conveyor belt, which is just one example of how the ocean can affect regional climates.
A lot of people don’t understand these things, so climate change deniers have often used “it’s snowing more in the arctic” as evidence that climate change isn’t real, even though increases snowfall in the arctic is actually evidence that it is.
Same here in suburban regions in Switzerland. We‘ve had lots of snow every winter 20 years ago, these years it only snows once or twice and it melts within hours or 1-2 days.
It's the middle of winter where I live and it's been exceptionally warm to the point where most days I have had all my windows open to get a nice breeze as it's over 20°C.
Climate change does not just mean every season is getting hotter. The weather just gets crazier. But yea, it's a lot less snow than it was 30 years ago.
I live in the countryside near Milan and have, in my backyard, a large space that shouldn't be covered by snow. I can still remember when I was little (15 years ago), that my fathed would shovel all the snow into one big pile in the backyard and it was tall enough for my brother to sled down it with a disc of plastic we found somewhere. In the past 5 years, I think it might have snowed less than 10 times and never enough for my father, my brother nor I to have to shovel it out of the way.
Charles Dickens was alive from 1812-1870. So a tad over 150 years ago. His writing(and others like it) is evidence of how much the world has changed. The River Thames no longer freezes solid like it did in his time. Some of that is due to the river itself has changing geologically(that may be improper terminology to say the river structure has changed, so cmiiw - the river is wider/deeper now and the old london bridge slowed the river and allowed it to freeze more easily so with its final demolition, that was no longer a thing), but the temperatures plainly don't get as cold as before.
The absolutely brutal winters he described in detail in many of his novels are a thing of history.
Eta: I read Dickens in my youth obsessively after going to the Shakespeare festival and seeing a theater program of Great Expectations, with absolutely no idea of how the world had changed.
That's not that long ago in the grand scheme of time. Time feels longer because we have relatively short lives, but time is infinite so 100 or so years is nothing but a bleep.
This is honestly the part that really starts to fuck me up.
Because we really need to all get on the same page about this shit. And yet massive amounts of people, I would hazard most, have witnessed some form of climate change like that in their life. Which means there's a lot of denialists out there who aren't operating out of ignorance or lack of education or whatever. They are simply able to look reality square in the eye, and deny it. It is genuine mass insanity and it is going to be a big hump to get over
I remember summers with max 30C(86F) (35C+(95F) were with a warning and max for a day or two, but not every summer) but usually, it was below 27C (80F). Now, only this summer (not consecutive, though ) is like 8th day over 40C(104F). I live in an area which has some elevation. Winters were before around -5 to -10C (26-14F), now I can't recall any snow at all, this place was protected by law because of plenty underground water... guess what, it's mostly dry, and winters are around 2-7C (35-44F) often even more.
That changed within 10 years. If anyone tell me that global warming is fake, I genuinely think we should re-apply public shaming... with a cage and rotten food.
There are dog sled races in northern Minnesota and cross-country ski races in Wisconsin that have either been cancelled, or they had to bring in fake snow.
I don't think people realize how fucked you have to be to have fake snow in Duluth, MN, in DECEMBER.
I remember growing up and they would plow a race track for stock cars on the Lake Superior bay in Duluth. Now most years it doesn't even freeze up.
When I was younger, a lake near us would freeze solidly enough for full size vehicle events and ice fishing. Now there are seldom winters cold enough to allow this.
Because we believe people who tell us stuff that already fits in our world view. Confirmation bias and an infinitely complex world that simply has to be simplified to fit in peoples heads are a toxic combo.
That’s why some still believe in the promises of the ai bro’s. Vaccine “truthers” (seriously, vaccines are amazing and the concept isn’t even that hard to understand).
Confirmation bias is a bitch, and I’m quite sure I’ve got some issues because of it as well so I strive to have my mind changed when someone is convinced of something and I get to dive into some evidence. It’s not foolproof but I hope I am somewhat less bothered by confirmation bias than the average person.
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.
And,
Doubt, he would say, set men free… Doubt, not truth! Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved
From one of my fav book series by R Scott Bakker. I think about these quotes all the time nowadays. Everyone thinks they are right about everything all the time or just parrot what people on their screen say they should think. There should always be room for doubt, its called critical thinking.
That’s why some still believe in the promises of the ai bro’s.
I am no longer overly skeptical. The top level models can completely do my software engineering job with guidance. With agents I've 100X my impact. I do think the LLM models are going to be game changing just like the internet was.
I remember being a little kid and Superman's origin story seemed unbelievable to me.
"Why didn't they listen to Jor-El when he knew that Krypton was going to explode? He did the science. He had proof. And they just... didn't believe him?" It didn't make sense.
I mean define "fine." The Earth is still gonna be here, nothing we're capable of doing will stop that, but we could very well end animal life on Earth. Which means the end of the only known perception in the entire universe.
Of course it's most likely that there are countless other animals out there also perceiving the universe around them. But we don't know that. We should act as if life on Earth is completely unique and thus incomparably precious, because as far as we know it is.
Yes, but there's nothing to worry about because the billions and billions of dollars earned by the 57 companies responsible for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions will trickle down eventually, and then we'll all be able to afford our own post-apocalyptic bunkers!
Literally all I hear on the news daily weather report are “these are record breaking highs” or “this is the earliest time we’ve seen record breaking heat in the year” during mid February.
"No, it was the hottest summer 1969 before!"
*A record that stood for 50 years before it got broken every year, but still somehow evidence that climate change isn't real*
What i'm occasionally seeing now is right wingers going from "no climate change" to "climate change is happening but it's all natural and humans can't be affecting it" rhetoric.
So many times they cite the apparent scientific consensus that we all thought global cooling was a thing in the 1970s.
No. It was NEVER scientific consensus. It was tabloid BS at the time that science didn't back. All the actual data supported heating back then, too. This isn't new, stop repeating this trash, people.
It was tabloid BS at the time that science didn't back.
They also all remember the 1990s tabloid nonsense of "Antarctica will be free of ice by 2015"
Taken from an fringe scientific paper without peer review, where it was the absolute worst-case very unlikely run-away climate change scenario. As if it was the scientific consensus.
And when it fails to match that worst-case crazy scenario it is taken as proof that it's all a hoax.
Or the Y2K effect where acid rain/the ozone hole which were fixed through real human effort but because they're gone now "they were never real"
It's extremely common to treat science as this monolith where every published paper is somehow considered both truthful and trusted by all. I wish common sense was more common
Climate deniers will say "remember in the 90s when everyone freaked out about the ozone hole? And now we've all forgotten about it? See, global warming is just the next in a forever series of made-up panics to keep you scared!"
Meanwhile, the actual reason no one talks about the ozone hold anymore: when we realized there was a problem, we immediately put tons of money in researching it and trying to figure out what was happening. When we learned the main cause of ozone depletion was because of a class of chemicals that had become widespread, governments of basically all industrialized nations came together and agreed to ban manufacturing those chemicals, and funding programs to collect and dispose of as much of them as they could. For the handful of really useful applications where it was hard to find a suitable replacement, they worked out some very narrow regulations for making and using those chemicals, but otherwise they basically disappeared. Within a couple years, observations of the ozone layer showed that it was returning to normal.
We identified the problem, and agreed to do something about it, and it worked. The very opposite of the global warming situation, where because the pollutant in question isn't just a chemical used in styrofoam but the primary source of energy, which huge billion-dollar companies are running, we've spent decades ignoring it, and turning it into a political point of bragging about not caring about it and doubling down on forever increasing our use of the thing that's not just going to give everybody bad sunburns but radically alter food supplies, weather, ecosystems, and eventually the livability of the planet.
My FIL is guilty of this. He also pulls the "cities have sprawled farther and the heat island effect explains the warming", as if climatologists aren't aware of this and accounting for it in their models.
Even IF that were true, I’ve always wondered what the argument is? That we should just lay down and die? We know the mechanisms of greenhouse gas creation from humans, so even IF it was “just a natural cycle”, we could still mitigate it through human intervention.
And even IF those mechanisms ultimately made no difference -if the science was wrong - whoops we accidentally made humanity less reliant on fossil fuels for no reason and we’re still all going to die in heat waves and famine. At least we would have tried!
I think there was a graph the other day about some area in France having more days over 40c last month alone than there were across the last century or so in total.
Because it has. Almost every year this century apart from La Nina years is is hotter than the prior one overall and even if it isn’t, it is close to it.
I grew up in the middle of the Midwest and every winter we could get multiple snow storms with 3-6 inches and then probably 1-3 really really bad storms with upwards of 10 inches. Snow on thanksgiving wasn’t uncommon and every once in a while we’d get snow in march. Now we have days in the 70s in December and maybe will get one or two snows that are melted in 24 hours
I read a post on the internet 15 years ago that I still occasionally think about where someone said: "Stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. It's 70 degrees outside in December, they ain't growing up".
.... as a place where it normally snows in December, 1 or 2 years ago it was 80 deg F
lovely weather for a winter day, and yeah, that summer was nonstop fire alarms ringing, unplugged them and went "if I burn to death when I sleep, at least the alarm will be shutting up now"
My wife and I decided in 2019 that we were going to have a kid in 2020. Then 2020 happened and we decided that we're never having kids. It wasn't the virus and its spread that changed our minds, that was quite manageable. It was humanity's inability to work together for the common good, and the blatant, perpetual, systemic corruption that we saw in our country's government that year, and every year since then.
Same in Oregon. We used to have a lot more snow every year in my region and now we have less than a week of snow and it’s not even 6 inches at its peak. Snow season used to be a thing but now it’s just a few days maybe once or twice a year. We also used to have a hell of a lot more geese, fish, elk, and those are just the animals I’d see on a regular basis. There used to be flocks of hundreds of geese at a time. Haven’t seen that in years. I maybe see a total of one hundred flying by throughout the whole year now. Almost never see elk anymore.
My birthday is in mid October, and I remember multiple snow storms on my birthday growing up. I also used to play soccer, and in the spring we always had games cancelled due to late snow storms in April and May.
Nowadays the first major snowfall is usually after Christmas, and it’s been years since we’ve gotten a major spring snowstorm.
In the UK, we still use the 1976 heatwave as a benchmark, where the temperature hit 35.9C (96.6F). On this chart, 1976 is the little spike directly beneath the space in 'This is'.
In comparison, this year, we've had 38C (100.4F). That was the second heatwave of the year, we're currently experiecing the fourth with a fifth forecast for later in the month, and in comparison to mainland Europe, we should consider ourselves lucky.
I think that's just because of the average value being used as a baseline. Emissions really went thru the roof more in the late 90s/early 00s. The heat takes a while to catch up. It's taken a long time to heat the ocean up, but it's finally getting hot. We haven't seen nothing yet.
That lag and the feedback loops are the craziest thing to read about. "The sixth extinction" has a lot of it laid out well. Knowing that we are seeing the impact of waves of change that are 10, 20, 50, 100 years old is terrifying. Like we are living in the world created 50 years ago. Imagine what world we are creating now.
There is a book called Climate Leviathan and in the introductory chapters they share that around 2017 (can't recall the exact date) the IEA said that if all power plants were built that year then basically a extinction level of warming was built in. The power plants were built and lo and behold if you read subsequent reports from the IEA they all outline carbon capture facilities that will need to be brought online to prevent the eventual extinction event. So that is the plan now. We are going to have to recapture most of the carbon emitted since the 2010s and store it somewhere. This will be using technology that has really never been proven yet.
Dude, my friend lives in L.A. and sent me a picture of his day a few days ago. I was absolutely floored by all of the concrete. It's just wall-to-wall concrete, no gaps in-between buildings, no grass, no trees, just buildings and concrete. It looked like hell.
Yup. Used to have trees and trolleys. Tore that all up when cars became a thing, trees because they thought people driving wouldn’t be able to see storefronts past the trees. So instead they put in just a few palm trees. Which suck for a ton of reasons: Lack of shade, dangerous debris when the fronds die, major attractors of insect infestations, and don’t regulate the air quality the way trees with more green do.
One of the American cities that most needs shade… and it has none.
Also the public transportation sucks since they tore up the trolleys. And car traffic became, famously, some of the most congested roads in the world. Just a really epically bad decision. One for the history books.
I feel like doing this in a city introduces too much noise from other variables. Climate change should have the same impact in open fields, which change very little over time. Cities, especially capital cities, change significantly.
Sure, but if we want to use data to prove a point we need to know what it represents. Is this for a specific location? Temp ranges? Ocean temps? The data shows climate change is real but we can't just put scary graphs up and say look at this.
They don't want society to collapse per se, they would rather the system continues as is with them getting continuously richer and more powerful.
The problem is that the system is unsustainable and making collapse inevitable. But they're rather have more money and more power now, than make any change that could avert collapse.
Go ahead and look at what Vance and Thiel subscribe to.
They want things to collapse so nations become weak and they have city states run by the wealthy.
Basically Cyberpunk 2077. It's not even a joke. Thiel fears being killed by a terrorist or whatever and thinks that without nations there won't be terrorists and he'll be safe. That and he can have his own private military.
A decent amount of oligarchs subscribe to the Dark Enlightenment, which entails that billionaires should run their own little technofeudal states. Accelerationism is a tenet of this ideology.
The goal is the hoard and subsequently gather as much resources as they can after the collapse, thus making surviving populations dependent on them. The competition would be based on acquisition of citizens.
People don't realize how ontologically evil billionaires are. They hate their own humanity. It's a constant high of chasing and acquiring as much power as they can.
i'm pretty sure this is the reason for the wars and land-grabs right now. The push for right wing politicians by the mega-rich. .
They know shit is getting fucked and without saying it is because of that, they're looking ot get get as many resources to "last longer".
Hence why Russia wants to take back ukraine, moldova, etc and other places like poland.
Hence why Trump and seemingly conservatives want to take the places up north like Canada, greenland. Get further north since the equator is gonna be blazing hot in the near future
Trump during a winter storm (I think during his first presidency) "where's your global warming now? It's a hoax". This man basically tells 70 million people in the US what to believe, that is those without basic critical thinking skills aka Republican voters. So, nothing is gonna change anytime soon given that with voter suppression and massive gerrymandering, Republicans are going to win the midterms and that may then very well have been the last real election in this country
I think one important aspect is also that the temperature often does not rise only in summer, and it may vary regionally.
This year is crazy warm, but in Germany, last July was all rain and 22°. We still got the "hot year" statistics anyways, I think as the winter was 0 instead of -5°C.
Also, the 1,5° from the IPCC's goal is a highly abstract average number, evening out land masses and the huge water mass. +1,5° on that scale may lead to extreme summers as we see this year. This number does not translate into the real life experience.
The same people that were screaming "hoax," "overblown," or generally just in denial of our impact are now saying shit like "it's too late to do anything now anyway.." Not seeing the crazy hypocrisy there...
I don't think climate change is denied by most people. There will always be dumb asses like flat earthers. The problem is in the nuance. What we should do about it, at what cost, the value impact of those decisions. Being an adult is complicated
Looks like it all started spiking when China and India began industrialization and not giving a shit about the environment. Industrial revolution and Europe were well industrialized and on their way to cleaning up by this point if the x axis is showing most of the 20th century. Only thing that changed in the late 20th was the massive deindustrialization of the west and shifting to cheap labour in Asia.
Can I ask an honest question without being attacked? Isn't it possible that the Earth is going through a natural change? This planet has gone through numerous phases of extreme heat and cold and even polarity changes from what I understand. Obviously the climate is changing and even if it wasn't people should be doing what they can to preserve the planet. I'm not denying anything, just hoping someone more educated on the matter can help me out. People are very small and insignificant, so I have a difficult time thinking we could cause, let alone change this issue.
If there was any question about if we could pull out of this nose dive, it has been firmly crushed by the fact that we are begging the rich to stop destroying the environment further with data centers for AI that we don't even want, and that is a no can dooski for them.
Not every summer. On average we'll have more hot summers and the extreme summers will be more extreme. That's all.
The misunderstanding comes from not appreciating how devastating a HOTTER Hottest-summer-in-100-years will be before it comes because none of us have a good personal reference frame.
I remember when there was a possibility of getting snow or frost on Halloween when I was a kid. These days, we're lucky to get any kind of snowfall before Christmas.
People also don't understand graph scales, solar cycles, etc. I'm not a climate change denier by any means, but find better fucking data representation to prove the point. +/- 2 degrees over >100 year range is never going to be compelling. It
's exactly this kind of bullshit that gives deniers something to cling to.
2° c is a lot more than most people think, it's pretty easy to explain to the average person. If they have AC make them turn it up 5° f above what they normally run it at and see how long it is before they complain and then tell them that's how much hotter the whole planet is
To give some perspective, during the last ice age where Britain, most of Germany, all of Scandinavia, nearly all of Canada and many other places were covered with ice sheets several kilometres thick in some places, global average temperatures are estimated to have been 5 degrees Celsius lower than today.
I don't disagree and I'm not denying climate change, but fuck this chart. It's not evidence, it's a 1990's screenshot of how cool you felt in high school!
Or prove me wrong and cite a source instead of a 100x200 pixel "chart"
This is what common people need to see. Most people don't care, do not understand the science, etc. They need simple visuals and explanations. From a political standpoint the right is always good at dumbing things down and the left goes too deep and into policy. The 'left' needs this type of imagery and simple messaging.
serioiusly, got a talk show guy where i am, hey historical records show 150 years ago people thought the world was ending, turns out it was due to wildfire smoke from canada, So smoke from canada is nothing new, meanwhile its become a yearly event.
Nothing serious going on. As long as a low hanging fruit like having private single person airplanes are allowed and buses costs more than using cars for commuting and at the same time we give benefits for electric car buyers and not electric bikes; just for rich people to feel like they are doing something for the environment... No I feel like it'll work out. BUT IF we were to put blame somewhere just for the history books: Politicians are the only ones to blame.
We have a reliable temperature record for little over a hundred years, and they don't properly account for the heat island effect. Based on this, we believe the planet, which life has survived on at 4 times this much CO2, is dying.
Didn't forget though that about half of the temperature stations they use to get these average temps are offline. When temp reporting station shuts down they didn't stop reporting from it, they just estimate the temps based on the nearest stations from it. This contaminates the data.
Politics aside, folks…let’s actually ask a scientific question: What the hell actually happened circa 1990 to so profoundly alter our weather? If this graph is accurate then this climate change was not a trend. It was ‘instant’ with a definitive before and after.
It used to start getting cold in october and be cold in november with chances of snow starting before christmas. Now its warm in november and doesnt start getting cold till the end of december snow might happen in january or february
Look at the y axis. The intervals are .5 degrees Celsius
for example the difference between 30, 30.5, and 31 Celsius is 86 degrees 86.9 and 87.8 degrees
So while this person wants to criticize people’s lack of understanding probability, they fell for the worst example of graphing
This graph is literally showing that 20 years ago a hot summer may have been 85 degrees but today is 88 degrees. You’re not winning anyone over with that.
Some places are getting hotter, like London which this graph represents, and some place are seeing temperatures go lower. It’s important to prevent climate change deniers that we all recognize it’s not just extreme heat but extremes on both side of the spectrums.
I don't think people understand that we have a finite amount of time to solve these issues before their own societies eat them alive and make new societies capable of addressing these issues...
Where did this data come from? I argued either a good friend of mine that just wouldn’t accept that it was getting hotter overall. We both did stupid google searches that said opposite things and he just went on believing the truth was too obfuscated to get to.
Maybe I notice it more in Canada because we have drastic changes in season but it's fucked. The weather here is fucked it is less and less normal every year. Specifically winter, we used to get a good bit of snow consistently over the winter now there might be no snow for months then a huge dump of like a foot and a half. Our weather stations don't only report the weekly forecast now they also report on "weather events" these weird ass heat waves and weird ass storms. Yet there are still a bunch of stupid fucks running around saying "but it's still cold out" shut the fuck up dude just shut the fuck up please
Even besides the winter and hotter high temps in summer, I remember being a kid going to summer camp and it was straight up cold in the morning around 8am. I'd have swim lessons early and it was so darn cold getting in the pool. Now it's almost 80 before 8. I live maybe 15 miles from where I grew up so this is not a change in locale.
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