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In the first of the Big Boys to report, the Japan Meteorological Association finds July 2019 to be tied with July 2016 for the warmest July (and therefore the warmest month of any month), 1.05°C above the 1891-1920 baseline. Six of seven of this year's temperatures are above 1°C, using that baseline, and 3 of the last 4 years. NOAA reports tomorrow.
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A very interesting op-ed in the New York Times saying that if we live in a simulated world (and are simulations ourselves), we shouldn't do any experiments to try to discover this.
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Greta's influence: Swedes are flying less and taking more trains, even though it's more expensive and takes longer: "Passenger [train] numbers were up 10 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same time last year..... Meanwhile, the number of passengers at Swedish airports fell by 4.4 percent in the first three months of this year, the Swedish Transport Agency said."Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg will be taking a zero-emissions yacht to the UN Climate Summit in September.
She's also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. (I saw that coming.)
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A machine learning water model correctly predicted the melting point of ice. And more. I find that very impressive.
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Hockey stick confirmed again: The latest results from the PAGES 2k Consortium of the last 2000 years' average global temperature, using seven different statistical methods:
No global Medieval Warm Period. About -0.2°C cooling for a global Little Ice Age. They write, "A substantial portion of pre-industrial (1300–1800 ce) variability at multidecadal timescales is attributed to volcanic aerosol forcing."
I think that op-ed about the risks of testing if we live in a sumulation is somewhat silly. If the people running the simulation care, it will be trivial for them to detect any such experiment and fix the simulation so that it will give a negative result.
ReplyDeleteThomas: Yeah, I think that's a good point. I was thinking something like this but couldn't put it in these words. If we're in a simulation we could be infinitely many years behind those doing the simulating (define "infinity" as some number of years N > 10^9? 10^10?)
ReplyDeleteHow many years until we could do such simulations? 10^2? 10^3? 10^5 maybe?? Probably not much more than this... Which is still just an instant in time.