The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:

"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."

Interestingly web.archive.org is blocked for me but TFA isn't.

> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble.

Lol

That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.

I thought it was quite effective. I read the whole thing in anticipation, and was still shocked by the graph.

You react to a serious article rightfully pointing at civilization-ending developments by nitpicking about design choices.

Your likely intent is to signal indifference and dismissiveness towards the actual content. To deflect from the actual topic and derail the conversation.

Your likely motivation is lack of a ready-made remedy compatible with your premise of leaving your lifestyle untouched.

Thanks. Those are much better than the graph trash in the original article.

Polar coordinates are such a nice way to visualise periodic data.

These are nice if you are scientifically literate but I suspect not so great for the lay

The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet.

The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.

That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.

Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.

Does any country care? Isnt China far worse thsn the US?

The article is crap as well as the graph. And the author made the planet simmer even more to produce this crap.

The site is apparently one of those AI generated bait traps. The link to the original article is in the (current) top comment.

A lot of people mistake basic literacy for AI. Don't forget that LLMs are trained on human texts and replicate patterns within them.

War is one of the biggest emitter of co2 though.

That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.

According to https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real, this is a 1 in 7000 years event (i.e. 3.5 sigmas).

Yes I was wondering the same. Why is the mean using a different set of years than the total data set? There also seems to be a year where the swing was equally as extreme in the other direction, what year was this? Would be worth mentioning at least in the post.

I think you are right.

The title of the figure is ambiguous about what "SD" really means but I guess it is plotting the number of standard deviations of the 1991-2020 data measured from the mean of that data and plotted per day for the 1982-2026 data.

Here's the link that I read off the figure.

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/json_2clim/oiss...

Going up the URL path I get redirected to here:

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2

That shows measured temperature and 2026 as very hot (surprise) and in fact is the hottest to date for June+July. The standard deviation of that data is not 3.5 C but something less than 1.0 C. It is plausible that current temperature is about 3.5 sigma from the selected mean.

It's worth recognizing that the analysis is applying a biased conclusion prior to making the plot. It singles out post 2020 data to compare to pre-2020 data. and then concluding the held out data is a significant deviation with a cause. It almost certainly is but this is not a proper way to analyze data (unless one is pushing an agenda, be that for good or bad).

I think the sst_daily plot stands on its own without crafting this SD plot to emphasize the point. Especially when the accompanying text doesn't even explain it. It's a disingenuous message.

No. The (standard) deviation is 3.5.

You can go to the source website https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand

I'm not an authority on this, but here's is my understanding - I'd appreciate if someone could correct my mistakes.

The baseline of 0.0 represents the average of all years. Anything above / below the baseline is a (standard) deviation from the average. The blue lines are the individual years since 1991 [1] while the red line is the year 2026.

If a line is above the baseline, then the sea-surface temperature was hotter on that day than average. If below, it was cooler than average.

The year 2026 is an outlier, dwarfing all the others starting around June / July. The Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature is significantly hotter than any previous year during that time. New record, I guess?

[1]: I'm confused about the two date ranges given: 1982-2026 and 1991-2020. I'm assuming this graph is based on measurements from 1982-2026 to calculate the average, but the lines shown are only from 1991-2020, for some statistical reason I don't understand.

> Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.

I had the same concerns and think the chart would benefit from color grading the individual years by age. If the other outlier in the opposite direction is equally likely then it should also be concerning (obviously it is not). My understanding is the deviation is from the 1991-2020 subset avg, so a warming trend would be indicated by relative drift towards positive in the std dev across years from 82-present

my layman understanding, a real statistician will surely intervene.

standard deviation is a measure that informs about the distribution. A high standard deviation means a "wide bell curve". A low standard deviation means that all values are closely clustered around the middle of the curve.

So if your value is 2 x standard deviation (for example) that means it is a relatively rare outlier, since 2 x standard deviation covers 95% of the bell curve. In particle physics I believe they require 5 standard deviations to confirm an observation.

Their daily shower used more energy than generating the article, it doesn’t invalidate the article.

I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.

It's one year, from left to right. The termination of the red line is in the middle because it's the middle of the year.

The range is provided in the title. Presumably it's just regularly sampled over that range.

It is labelled "Day of Year".

Note that anyone who suggested actions that would be both implementable by an individual and extremely effective would be rapidly banned from HN.

We could build out private solar farms though.

US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.

The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.

That’s tragic, I love Fontainebleau. But it’s industrial civilization as a whole, not American AC. Cement is a larger contributor, for example.

AC?

Shit, I missed that my home town was burning

Others have corrected your confusion between prediction and observation. Lets instead show what we have already seen, today, that was previously predicted.

Kiribati and Tuvalu have measurable loss of land due to rising sea levels that is impacting people today. About 80% of the Maldives Islands will likely be uninhabitable within the next 25 years. The Marshall Islands have lost 18 out of their average 200cm above mean sea level height - roughly 6% of its land.

We have seen massive glacial retreat even in just the past 10 years, let alone the past 50. This is happening the world over, and at a rate that is not previously seen in the geological record (happy to argue this, thats my background). We are seeing large ice loss and lack of matching accumulation over Antarctica and Greenland - two great places to observe large scale processes. We just saw the Arctic stay largely unlocked for sea ice/shipping last season. The sum of these will take a moment to kick in, but the failure of conveyor currents will kick us all in the arse quite significantly and likely within our lifetime, and we have already seen hiccups.

The red line is not a prediction, it is a measurement.

You seem to be deep in denial.

These are not projections. These are measurements.

These are known trends from the past century. The trend is accelerating in what seems to be an exponential pattern.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe, with temperatures in line with what a couple of decades ago would be expected in north Africa during the summer.

Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.

Glacier park had 150 glaciers in the mid 1800s. Today it has 26. No crisis to see: we still have nearly 20% of what we once had /s

"Eat less meat, smaller homes, no flights"? Sounds like an average person to me because of poverty, lol. Even my family, well above the threshold for poverty, has to do this.

"Electric cars" is less likely tho because having a car at all is a money drain.

Changing your own behavior is certainly not wrong but also not a solution.

Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.

> eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc.

How much % of the world's population would have to do those things, for the graph to show a reversal of the trend? 10%? 50%? Everyone?

Yes, I should recycle more. Meanwhile, it’s OK for politicians to invest in coal and build gas-powered datacenters, while the ultrabillionaires buy groceries in a private jet.

Don’t worry about that, just recycle more!

It is about time we stop blaming the individual at the bottom of the ladder for the problems of society. And let me preempt you: society isn’t made up of individuals, but it is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I agree that we should but rational individuals are not going to voluntarily lower their standard of living at any noticeable scale. Simply not going to happen.

That’s because those who (our countries that enforce it) eat less, have smaller properties, less productive cars and infrastructure etc, those are the countries that will have the short end of the stick in 10-20 years time - just look at Europe. The tragedy of the commons at a global scale.

Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.

Individual action is not the solution

> eat less meat

Eat less and different meat with a smaller footprint. Mostly poultry, eggs, also more organ meats, etc. Also combat fertiliser runoff, etc.

The methane output of a field of cattle isn't that dramatically different from a forest with deer, decomposing wood, etc. Methane is also a potent but temporary actor and tackling it primarily just buys us very little time which will be used as an excuse to keep pumping co2.

However we grow a good bhunch of the feed for that cattle and for ourselves with fossil fuel based fertilisers. We need to quit that. If we get rid of both that 8% co2 output for fertilisers and get rid of the manure as well because we ditch meat too much...

Well we'll solve a lot of related problems by drastically reducing the world's population with a gigantic famine.

It’s not spelled in nursery rhyme, but it literally does give info on the implications. As the article states, they are not as simple as A => B, so it provides general idea of the implications. The general idea being ecosystem destabilisation and intensification of extremes and their frequency.

> How they will affect weather patterns or whatever?

> This is why graphs like this matter. Not because they prove that catastrophe is inevitable, and not because they predict the precise sequence of events over coming years. Science rarely deals in absolutes. What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed. We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate.

Reading helps. Also it's pretty clear from the "waaaaah" that you are not asking a good faith question but rather dismissing the article, without bringing any information or sources to back whatever point you are trying to make - ironic.