WolfStock1

3 hours ago, chubbs said:

You aren't looking at the whole energy picture. China's use of existing coal plants is dropping. The next few years will tell the tale. Which will slow first in China, new coal or renewable construction?  In any case China's energy strategy is much more realistic than ours.  They have less fossil fuel and renewable resources than we do, yet their energy is abundant and cheap. We are in energy denial, betting on a horse that is falling further and further behind every day. 

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-china-and-india-for-first-time-in-52-years-after-clean-energy-records/

In general China is doubling-up their energy production - new fossil plants *and* new renewable (and nuclear) - because they can afford to.  They can afford to because they pay their workers roughly 1/3 what US workers are paid, and because they generally don't worry about NIMBY or environmental impact like we do here in the US; e.g. their Medog Hydro project in Tibet.   The US hasn't built a significant new dam in 50 years, let alone one close to the size of Medog or Three Gorges.   (by comparison our largest - Grand Coulee - is about 1/8 the size of Medog and 1/3 the size of Three Gorges).

It's not some kind of anti-renewable / pro=fossil policy that's holding back the US - it's a combination of higher regulation and environmental protection, NIMBYism, the fact that China is less prosperous than the US, and also simple geography.

I like the idea, though when presenting I wouldn't be so specific.   It wouldn't just be for millennials of course; it would be interesting for us Gen Xers as well  (thus allow for longer-term data if you can).   Also I wouldn't state "look to find a location hundreds of miles south" - that makes it look like you're purposely biasing the data; instead perhaps just "look to find a location that most closely matches the location of childhood" and the the user come to their own conclusions (typically they would find it some distance north/south; depending on whether looking back to childhood from a given location or looking forward to present from a given childhood location).

24 minutes ago, TheClimateChanger said:

So I've been working on a new concept I call "climate analog pairs" and basically it looks to pair a location's current climate with a late 20th century climate of another location hundreds of miles south. I actually think it's more intuitive going in the opposite direction. As a millennial, you may want to determine where you can locate the climate of your childhood. Unfortunately, it's no longer going to be in your hometown but rather hundreds of miles north of your hometown. I think this is a better way of looking at climate change - rather than saying its warmed a couple of degrees, one could say instead it's warmed so much that the local climate has been replaced with the late 20th century climate conditions 200 miles south of here. Here's the thread where I explain the concept and then address a couple of anticipated objections.

Any thoughts?

 

From the way you describe it seems like your premise is that the climate (temperature in this case) is just a straight north-south gradient (?) and without seasonality.    There are lots of places of course where the climate gets colder as you go south (e.g. into mountains); also it depends on the season - in many areas it gets hotter as you go north in the summer, but colder when you follow the same path in the winter.   This is typical for instance as you move away from oceanside areas.

E.g. Tampa's average peak high is 91 degrees, but if you go north to Tallahassee the average peak high is 93 degrees.    But Tallahassee gets a lot colder than Tampa in the winter.   So when shifting via warming the climate analog not only shifts around from season to season, but could even flip north/south depending on the location.

That said -  you could certain find some "pairs" of similar locations to do what you said.   It just wouldn't work for a lot of locations.

6 hours ago, chubbs said:

http://www.ocean.iap.ac.cn/pages/dataService/dataService.html?languageType=en&navAnchor=dataService

Thanks.

4 hours ago, Brewbeer said:

Lies.

It's not "constant" as the 5-year old image in the post claims, both the frequency and intensity have been increasing, and the rate of change is accelerating. 

I imagine if you aren't being personally affected, it's easier to internally justify "nothing to see here"

hot take

this pretty clearly indicates you have a political agenda, and because of that, your postings on this topic can be summarily dismissed 

Talk about political agenda - you love twisting everything that doesn't fit your narrative, don't you?

There is no claim that there hasn't been an increase in the frequency of flooding in Miami.   The "constant" just refers to the fact that Miami has experienced flooding all along - i.e. it's not something new to them; and therefore people who live there have to know how to deal with it.   

(As a tangible example of this - I recently rented a house on a Florida island that had recently experienced some hurricane flooding.  The owner had recently done a couple of things - installed 2' stainless steel flood barriers in the doorways, and raised the output of the dryer from 6" off the ground to 4' off the ground.   The barriers were already in place before the flooding; the dryer output thing got done after the flooding; apparently water got in there, though generally the house was fine.)

It's noteworthy that you ignored the actual point and data presented, in your dismissal of my information based on my "political agenda".    That's pretty typical of doomers I suppose - put your hands over your ears, shut your eyes, and ignore anything that doesn't fit your narrative, rather than presenting a counter-argument.

32 minutes ago, chubbs said:

Large increase in 0-2000m ocean heat content last year. NOAA data through mid-year also shows a large increase.

Request - whenever providing data like this, please provide a link to the source.

Funny the Florida example should come up.  U-Haul just came out with their annual migration index the other day:

https://www.uhaul.com/About/Migration/

Florida is the #2 growth state, with 8 of the top 10 and 12 of the top 25 growth metros.

Lots of people committing suicide, I guess.

(in case anyone's wondering - Texas is the #1 state and California is #50)

20 hours ago, Brewbeer said:

The "sky is falling" people want you to have a word with the "sea level is rising" people, below. 

 

Funny thing about Miami flooding - it's not a new thing:

https://www.biscaynetimes.com/viewpoint/flooding-has-been-a-miami-constant-from-time-immemorial/

Here's another thing - Miami/Dade population:

2000: 2.259M

2010:  2.507M

2020: 2.696M

2024: 2.838M 

Funny how people seem to want to move *to* this area that supposedly has all these flood problems.   They apparently haven't gotten the news about the sky falling.

(BTW - I used to live in the area, and visit Florida regularly - I know what it's like.   The sky is not falling.)

I wouldn't propose that flooding won't be more frequent there - it will.   I'm just saying it's not some kind of life-threatening - or even lifestyle-threatening - thing.  It just means that over time (we're talking centuries here, not years or even decades) new things need to be built on slightly higher ground and/or with more sea walls in low-lying historic areas.   It's not that hard.   Dealing with it will certainly be a lot less disruptive than the sudden worldwide loss of fossil fuels required to prevent it.

5 hours ago, tacoman25 said:

Lame cop out. Who here has "denied" climate change is happening?

Some of you think that if people aren't freaking out and claiming the world is ending due to climate change, they're deniers. It's not that binary, that's not reality.

"Oh no, someone pointed out that it's not record heat everywhere, all the time - they are a clearly a DENIER! Burn them at the stake."

This.

I don't think the "sky is falling" people realize just how foolish they look when anyone who doesn't toe the sky-is-falling line must be a denier; and as a result how counter-productive it is to their cause.

3 hours ago, chubbs said:

... EV performance, which is already matching combustion vehicles... 

 

Not yet.

Sorry - could not let that slide.

"Performance" is a multifaceted thing, including speed, driving distance, fueling convenience, costs, build quality, etc. etc.   If the performance of the average EV and the average combustion vehicle in the US (what most of us care about) matched, their sales would be roughly equal, but they very much aren't; even before the recent subsidy removal.

Question for those in the know:

Since urban heat island is a thing - has there been a concerted effort to place sensors specifically in non-urban areas?   If not - it seems like there should be.

Of course some areas could transition from non-urban to urban over the course of decades, but such an effort/project would presumably account for this - putting sensors in areas that are protected and would never becomes urban (national parks, wildlife refuges, etc.) and/or just remove any sensors that have become urbanized from the data sets.

As it is - it seems like threads like this one - "XXX city sees record warmth", are of questionable veracity; to me what would be more meaningful would be "Badlands NP sees record warmth" or the like.   (at first I started using Yellowstone as example but then realized it has its own non-urban heat island)

Much as I like such things - this stunk for me.  I've been working on installing windows in a sunroom - was halfway through installing one but hadn't secured it completely yet.  Woke this morning to tons of shattered glass.

Oh well.  Lesson learned.

I see it gusted up to 35 mph here.

1 hour ago, bluewave said:

Record low sea ice thickness this year near the North Pole due to how much warmer than normal it has been there.

https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

 

 

Yeah this is one of the things I point to for anyone that doesn't believe the planet is warming (e.g. people that try to use heat islands to explain away temperature increase measurements).   This plus glacier loss makes it pretty incontrovertible.

23 hours ago, tacoman25 said:

Yeah, but all you see from the alarmists in this thread is examples of extreme warmth. Because...well, it makes more sense.

Just reading this, you would have no idea that it's actually been quite cold throughout large parts of North America over the past month. This can and does still happen, despite AGW.

And this map doesn't even include Alaska, where Juneau and Fairbanks are running -13 and -16 anomalies this month respectively.

Weather vs Climate.

When looking at climate looking at single month, or even a single year, is meaningless - it's noise.   You have to look at multi-year or even multi-decade averages to determine what's really going on.

7 hours ago, Brewbeer said:

we get it - you have plenty to eat

just like I said, well off westerners aren’t going hungry any time soon

doesn’t mean others won’t - or aren’t

Indeed - as has been the case for all of human history, and will continue to be the case for all of the rest of human history.

The difference is that increasingly the primary reason for people going hungry isn't food production issues (or climate change), it's political instability.  (e.g. see https://agecon.unl.edu/violent-conflict-drives-world-hunger-and-food-insecurity/)

If anything attempts to *prevent* climate change will bring about a higher level of food insecurity, as less and less prosperity is available to poor areas, due to increasing pressure to avoid using fossil fuels, e.g. for things like farm equipment, more-abundant electricity to power food processing facilities and transportation, etc.

Tugging on "going hungry" heart strings is nice, but one has to also use one's brain.   That includes realization that the use of fossil fuels is a big enabler of prosperity; and that prosperity helps bring about - among other things - an abundance of food.

3 hours ago, Brewbeer said:

go ahead and "mock" it

it won't be you and your family running out of food

Worldwide food production has increased *four-fold* since 1960.  

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production

If MMGW was a significant problem for food production I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be the case.

I wouldn't propose that there will be zero impact on food production - however it is clear to anyone who knows how things work that any such impact will be vastly smaller in scale that mankind's ability to adapt and will more than offset any such negative impact (if there was to be one), such as happened after the big "Population Bomb" food-shortage scaremongering of the late 60's.   Such scaremongering has been proven wrong time and again, and as such deserves to to be mocked.

(World population grew by 2.7x during this period; thus food production increase outpaced - and continues to outpace - population growth, especially as population growth continues slowing.)

On 12/20/2025 at 11:21 AM, TheClimateChanger said:

 

Some people aren't very good students of history, it appears.   How many times do predictions of things like "food insecurity" have to be wrong in order for people to learn?   

Sorry but alarmism like this deservers to be mocked.   It certainly doesn't help the cause any.

2 hours ago, ChescoWx said:

Our cyclical climate change is doing it's thing! United States snow cover is now the highest it’s been in 20 years on Dec 5th! The Dec 5th snow coverage is 45.4%. The only higher year on record (since 2003) was 45.7% on December 4, 2005. 

Weather vs climate.

If a football team is down 50-0 and then scores a touchdown - you can't really say that they've turned it around and are suddenly the better team.

33 minutes ago, Terpeast said:

Popping in, at the hospital now. Just waiting for them to get the baby out. 

They did not treat the roads, so I drove us through the snow. Already had 1” on the ground and the roads were completely covered, and was coming down at a moderate clip. Everything was white. But we made it, and so did the surgeon.

As soon as the WWA was cancelled over Loudoun county, that band came up and just sat over us.

Best wishes!   Good you were able to get into the hospital OK.   You'll have quite the memorable story.  Hope the birth goes well.

LCPS now closed.   Coming down pretty good.

1 minute ago, JenkinsJinkies said:

So looks like the closing/delay list has taken its final form then? I’m wondering how many students are going to suddenly feel sick today?

Gotta figure many places will cancel.  LoCo is on 2-hour delay but said "stay tuned".   Based on history I bet they'll cancel.    Haven't looked at the roads yet but there's lots on the ground and it's snowing now, and it's cold enough the roads won't melt easy.

1 hour ago, chubbs said:

Below are a press release and a Q+A on the retracted paper. The problems with the original paper have been addressed and a new paper has been submitted.

How do the results in the corrected version compare to the original:

"The revisions did not significantly alter the central estimates, but did increase the uncertainty range they sat within.

Correcting the underlying data for Uzbekistan and introducing additional controls to make the model more robust to outlier data and anomalies resulting from the transition between data sources changed the global median income loss from 19% (18.8%) to 17% (17.4%).

Accounting for spatial correlation using ‘Conley standard errors’ did not affect the median, but did increase the uncertainty ranges, with the likely range of damages by mid-century increasing from 11-29% to 6-31%."

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/authors-retract-nature-study-on-economic-damages-from-climate-change-will-resubmit-for-peer-review

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/questions-and-answers-nature-study

Thought this bit was kind of odd:

"The revised analysis shows economic damages from climate change till mid-century are substantial and outweigh the costs of mitigation"

It seems the relationship of the costs shouldn't necessarily be 1:1 or anything like that.    Every dollar spent on mitigation doesn't lessen the costs of CC by a dollar - it may be much less or it may be much more; and you may actually want one or the other.

E.g. say the costs due to CC (generally storms - wind and flooding) end up being $500 billion in a given area over the next 25 years, if no mitigation was done.    You could spend say twice that - say $1 trillion - on sea walls, stricter building codes, river flood mitigation (drainage and walls), and lessen the resulting damage costs from $500B to say $300B.    Was it bad to spend the $1 trillion, since the net loss is $700B?   Maybe, but maybe not if you consider that there are also lives involved; presumably less lives lost in the do-mitigate case.

Looking from a strictly financial standpoint - it seems like you generally would *want* your mitigation costs to be less than the damage costs, right?   This is due to the unpredictable nature of storms.   If you spend more money to mitigate then the delta between the two is by definition wasted money - generally.   That said - there's probably some low-hanging fruit that is worthwhile.   E.g. the US built a series of flood-control dams after the big Ohio river flood in 1937; this likely ended up saving money in the long run, so that might be a case where the cost of mitigation reduced the likely cost of non-mitigation damages.   Same is true for flood walls in various places - usually it's money well spent.   But it's rarely a 1:1 tradeoff though; so comparing the two sets of figures seems odd.

A pretty devastating article in WSJ today on the negative effects of the renewable energy push on the European economy:

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/europes-green-energy-rush-slashed-emissionsand-crippled-the-economy-e65a1a07

While the existence of warming is undeniable (e.g. see new record low Arctic ice extent in other thread), this illustrates how hard of a problem this is to solve.

52 minutes ago, frontranger8 said:

Should be noted that the first graph posted is only a small part of the Arctic.

Indeed - seems a bit misleading to present a subset of the data (the area around Canada) and discuss it as if it was the full set (the Arctic).   That's the kind of thing that causes finger-pointing.

29 minutes ago, chubbs said:

The chart I posted has global numbers. The US is lagging. We have large import duties on solar, and EVs from China making our costs higher than the rest of the world.

Import duties on Chinese EVs are irrelevant - they are not legal to drive in the US.

Electricity prices in the US are amongst the lowest in the world, so it's not that.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/?srsltid=AfmBOoqfk-WgVGYRIpGDuUwvfazUcrDxpPwXNEyFvUDUiI8qOR-Dq7J8

China does indeed have lower electricity prices; with many factors including that allowing them to have continued growth in EV sales (though it appears to be slowing there some as well).   Amongst that is that they don't have as much low-hanging fruit of fossil as we do (oil), extremely low wages (about 1/3 of US), and a regime that generally doesn't care about environmental or social conditions; instead with a "build at all costs" policy.   Do we really want that in the US?

Germany is probably a good example of policy gone bad, with their aggressive push towards solar and wind.   This has resulted in extremely high electricity prices, and stalled EV sales (though there appears to be an uptick this year at least).

Gemany generally has about 2.8M car sales per year, so they've topped out at roughly 30% being electric.   They've picked the low-hanging fruit.

Keep in mind that these to-date numbers are in a policy regime where EV sales have been heavily subsidized.   (that includes China BTW)