Someone told me that Columbus is currently experiencing the coldest July on record. That may or may not be fact, but it is distinctly not hot around here. Lows in the 50s the last few nights. Anyone else experiencing similar bizarreness in their corner of the globe?
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Toronto, too. But since our weather is highly correlated, that's not such a surprise.
On the other hand, you may want to look at a recent post of Nate Silver's at 538 before being too quick to pronounce on historical chilliness.
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Indeed.
I wonder what it will be like in 10 years. Will the American public be outraged that the government kept them in the dark about the dangers of climate change? Will they cry "If only we had known"? Or will we still keep bitching about 'big government'?
I think the "God hugging us closer" adherents have mistaken affection for a smothering embrace.
But, maybe that's just because I'm in a bad mood.
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Well, Maine might actually benefit from this, that's one of the obvious bylines from that story. Florida, not so much...
By and large, the Red States are going to bear the grunt of global warming in the US. Places like New England or Minnesota won't be too damaged from global warming. Some might actually benefit from milder weather. Same for much of Eastern Canada.
The coastal southeastern US and the midwest are going to suffer on the other hand. Florida is going to become like Holland, it will take a massive dykes and levies network to keep significant parts of it over water decades from now. The midwest and southwest are going to experience severe water shortages.
In the very short term, look for a drier and milder winter in the northeast. Three years ago, when El Nino patterns prevailed (as they do this season), I remember swimming in a lake on (Canadian) thanksgiving and doing last-minute christmas shopping wearing a sweater.
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I'm a semi-regular on the Netweather forum, the most popular meteogeek forum in the UK. Talking about climate change there is a guaranteed blood pressure riser such is the amount of people "not believing it". Worse than Joe Public is the geek with some knowledge who thinks the Met Office haven't got a clue...
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Bruno wrote:
Someone told me that Columbus is currently experiencing the coldest July on record.
What (using computer simulations and all) was the weather like before the records? Were there no peaks and troughs? And if there were, were they caused by Medieval man chucking his slops into a ditch?
[ducks behind wall to avoid slops]
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Columbus, Ohio, yes (though hopefully only for another year or so).
erwin, no idea. Ohio became a state in 1803 (although this was only retroactively made the official date in 1953, when they discovered the tiny oversight that Congress had never actually passed a formal resolution back in the day).
The area has been inhabited since ~13000 BC, Wiki tells me, and only gives this on climate records:
The highest recorded temperature was 113 °F (45 °C), near Gallipolis on July 21, 1934. The lowest recorded temperature was -39 °F (-39 °C), at Milligan on February 10, 1899.
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erwin wrote:
What (using computer simulations and all) was the weather like before the records? Were there no peaks and troughs? And if there were, were they caused by Medieval man chucking his slops into a ditch?
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There probably were peaks and troughs, but that doesn't matter now, and it doesn't matter whose fault is was, nothing in history is going to cause so much devastation to human and animal life on the planet as climate change in the next 30 years or so - don't worry about the planet, it will be fine, but people will die of starvation as crops fail, and there will be pressure on water supplies, great displacements of communities, greatly increased conflict due to pressure on landspace and resources, and, and, and ... It will affect the developing/poorest nations first, especially those communities living closest to the sea, but the repercussions will affect us all.
So it's not a case of same old, same old.
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I wasn't trying to apportion blame. I was trying to think that this has all happened before, without the contribution of man, and his attempts to stall it might just be a fart in the wind.
Perhaps our time and efforts might be better employed by pre-empting all of those devastating effects you mention - not by trying to control climates that will happen anyway but by implementing social and logistical action on the ground to prevent or ease those effects.
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I was trying to think that this has all happened before, without the contribution of man, and his attempts to stall it might just be a fart in the wind.
Human civilisation has blossomed in the last few thousand years, a period known as the Holocene, which has been a very comfortable climate with relatively stable temperatures. The Pleistocene, which went before it, was a period of cold and unstable/shifting climate where humans lived in caves and threw spears about. Only when this period ended and the Holocene started, with its stable and comfortable climate, did civilisation as we know it start to evolve. Babylonians, Egyptians, that kind of thing. None of these civilisations would ever have come along if the climate was unstable.
If we don't fuck about with the Holocene climate, it could last for another 50,000 years before the way the Earth wobbles in its orbit around the sun causes it to end naturally. This stable climate period has basically created civilisation, so it would be silly to take it for granted.
Perhaps our time and efforts might be better employed by pre-empting all of those devastating effects you mention - not by trying to control climates that will happen anyway but by implementing social and logistical action on the ground to prevent or ease those effects.
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Bruno wrote:
The area has been inhabited since ~13000 BC, Wiki tells me, and only gives this on climate records:
The highest recorded temperature was 113 °F (45 °C), near Gallipolis on July 21, 1934. The lowest recorded temperature was -39 °F (-39 °C), at Milligan on February 10, 1899.
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erwin wrote:
Perhaps our time and efforts might be better employed by pre-empting all of those devastating effects you mention - not by trying to control climates that will happen anyway but by implementing social and logistical action on the ground to prevent or ease those effects.
That's in full recognition of the fact that the developed nations have caused and continue to cause the most damage ... China is developing and its emissions increasing rapidly, but we are effectively exporting our emissions to them by using them as our main manufacturer.
* through education and access to family planning, not coercion. The studies show that there is a huge, unmet need for contraception in the developing world.
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