Interesting graphs and charts department

[Gravdigr]

Fuck weather vs climate...

What does the goddamned chart indicate?

[xoxoxoBruce]

The climate is changing to warmer and that's not good.

[Gravdigr]

Fiukkit, Im too pissed to learn anything rfn.

[Clodfobble]

The "400 months" is that this is the 400th month in a row that overall world temperatures have been higher than average.

[Undertoad]

But IMO that's a silly way to look at the data, since the number would be higher than the 1951-1980 average for 400 months if it rose a teeny bit 400 months ago, and then stayed constant.

Also, the 1951-80 data is weaker and is missing large parts of the earth. And I believe it's land-only? I think, I dunno.

The best way to look at it, again IMO, is to consider only the post-1980 temperatures, as they are much more accurate than anything pre-1980, because that is when the satellites took over the job.

The best way to watch those temperatures is by following the UAH6.0 lower troposphere reported temps, a graph of which currently looks like this (an interesting graph, so it's pertinent to the thread):



That way you are only looking at satellite numbers and comparing them to satellite numbers. The satellites do make mistakes (they drift), and some of this data has been corrected for, but it's considered pretty accurate.

The "anomaly" here, the number being graphed, is the temp versus the 1980 average. So, in April 2018, the planet lower troposphere of the planet was considered to be 0.21 degrees C hotter than it was in 1980.

[Happy Monkey]

It looks like 1980 was a high point of a cycle, and the graph ends on a low point. So the low point of a roughly +/- 0.2 degree cycle now is 0.2 degrees over the high point of the cycle 40 years ago. It would be easier to see what's happening if there were a trendline plotted through the datapoints.


edit accuracy: high point of probably 1981 was closer to 0.1 than 0; current low point is 0.1 degrees higher than that.

[Gravdigr]

Well thar's m'prollum right thar!

[Undertoad]

It has to the "best" if it's the "only"

xkcd relies heavily on one particular study of temps (Marcott et al, 2013).

Marcott was the first attempt to reconstruct the temps of the last 11000 years. I think it's still the only one. Science depends on replication of findings, and one single study is not science yet. It's scientific, but it is not "the science".

The study has been criticized. There are plenty of climate scientists who believe the earth has been warmer than it is today. Particularly during the Late Glacial Interstitial, in which Europe and N. America unquestionably saw a period of a lot of warming. That period is not noticed on the xkcd graph, presumably because smoothing? Whatevs, it's one single study and so it gets a big "mmmmmmaybe".

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Particularly during the Late Glacial Interstitial, in which Europe and N. America unquestionably saw a period of a lot of warming. That period is not noticed on the xkcd graph, presumably because smoothing? Whatevs, it's one single study and so it gets a big "mmmmmmaybe".

Originally Posted by wiki

Late Glacial (13,000–10,000 years ago).

That period is indeed noticed on the xkcd chart. There's a noticeable hump. At 13000BC warming accelerates noticeably, then levels and falls back a bit by 10500BC, whereupon it resumes warming.

Relevant events on the graph:
- Glacial dams burst in Washington State
- Ice sheets withdraw from Chicago
- Floods of meltwater in the Atlantic cool Northern Hemisphere (Younger Dryas, as mentioned in the wiki page you provided)




ETA: Apologies; missed mention of Late Glacial Interstadial c.14,670 to c.12,890 in the wiki page. There is no hump there. I find it difficult to parse whathe wiki is trying to say about it, though - it says it is "the first pronounced warming since the end of the LGM", but the "LGM" ends at 13000BC. The previous uptick in temperature in xkcd before 13000 is a bit before 15000.

[Undertoad]

Interstadial, interstitial, these are hard words

I found an alternate to Marcott, a suggested timeline based on a number of different sources, so Marcott is no longer the only one. Some of this is based largely off an older study so take it with the appropriate grains.

https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/cl...t-18000-years/

The point is, all these proxies are not great measurements and so we are left with huge uncertainty. The uncertainty/error bars are left off the cartoon version... and also, left off every media report about this, ever.

[Happy Monkey]

Didn't mean to highlight your typo; that bolding was from the cut&paste.

[thomaslopez]

Thanks for the report! Clicking on that button is safe, right?

[xoxoxoBruce]

8.8 million lightning strikes...

[xoxoxoBruce]

Organic food business...

[Undertoad]

Behaviors that we evolved to deal with the world of 20,000 B.C. were still applied to this new world of 6,000 B.C... and broke it.

Now in our 2,000 A.D. world, these behaviors are still inside us.

Built very deeply into every single one of us is a sexist tribalism that causes us to go to war with the "other" -- literally, anyone not of our own family -- and to fight until the other side is entirely wiped out.

Well! Good luck to us all.