The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News

This website is making heavy use of IP range blocking. Here's an uncensored link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260713092155/https://www.lyreb...

Alternatively, since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890533

If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?

Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/

Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.

It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”

Start here: https://climatebase.org

the ignorance is a consequence of our societies system of incentives. everything keeps pointing back towards that each time theres an event like this. But if we aren't going to attach an economic price for emissions then it remains an externality and not a recognized reality to the economy. The current US administration is playing a leading role in keeping it that way. And voters keep voting for it. Incentives.

People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.

Lots of AI tells in this article. Ironic?

> It's not a forecast. It's not a simulation of what might happen decades from now. These are...

Tend to follow climate-related news closely. But even then: eyebrows raised.

Heh.. Maybe in future we'll see wars being fought not over access to fossil fuels, but over attempts to stop other countries from pumping more fossils out of the ground.

"What the planet is going to experience over the next 12 months is just a preview of the movie that’s coming. Godzilla is going to return, and return, and return and return … and as bad as the movie gets, we won’t be able to walk out of the theater."

That's the scary bit: no escape hatch. We're all in this together.

That's why international co-operation on climate change should NOT be opt-in. Your countries' freedom to emit greenhouse gasses ends where my countries' (future) safety is at stake.

Is there a graph starting from the 1950s?

https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-isn-t-an-...

This blog post is pure slop, stealing from this one: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real the submission should be updated to link to the original instead.

> The question is whether we're willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.

I think I can guess the answer to this. It's an easy extrapolation of the past.

You also need to ask what is the likelihood you get this move just by chance

Shouldn't the y-axis better be called "Standard DeviationS"?

According to one comment on the site, the 3.5 means "3.5 times the SD", which makes much more sense to me.

I initially tried to make sense of "SD being 3.5 on that day of the year", which seems to be a wrong interpretation.

The mean is created using 29 years of data. Why those particular 29 years? IDK.

But I tend to dismiss findings like this that don't explain why they chose a very specific dates as the baseline.

Looking at the graph left me wondering just what it means exactly. I'm not well versed in statistics so "the standard deviation is 3.5°C" doesn't mean much. Also, what's up with that other line going down to -3.5°C? And what do the colors mean? In the sense that I'm not sure whether a darker blue means closer to or further from today.

This graph shouldn't be front-page news. Why? Because it is a crappy graph that says nothing.

That there are deviations from the median is a normal statistical thing. Even deviations beyond 3 sigma. It happens. That's statistics. Those deviations might even be frequent more or less frequent than your statistics table says, because the data might not follow a gaussian normal distribution. See the graph, there is a -3.5 deviation in there...

What would be an interesting graph is: From 1982 to 2026 on the x-axis, plot the yearly maximum and minimum daily sigma and the median. Or just plot all the overlapping segments from the original graph as a continuous sequence. That way one could see periodicity, rising and falling of those values and the overall change over time. (Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890590 for much better graphs)

But that graph is useless to convey any information beyond "well this year the line goes up". The article also does nothing to really explain the statistical background. Quite the contrary.

The article shows things that the graph doesn't illustrate at all: Like "This is why graphs like this matter [...] What they show is that Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed.". Like fucking hell it doesn't! The graph starts in 1982! Modern human civilization started in 1982?

Like "The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.". Well, and why then does this graph start in 1982? Why can't you show that century?

Like "The red line is this year. It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.". No, it fucking doesn't!. Look at the graph, there is a line at -3.5 sigma! Well within range. And even so, it's statistics, outliers are to be expected.

What this article and this graph need is a permanent relocation to the trash can. And a lesson for the author in science. Real science, not misleading propaganda that hurts the cause more than it helps.

I believe this post was written with some heavy help of an LLM. I hope the irony is not lost on the author, nor the readers here.

I see a negative outlier equal in magnitude to the positive outlier the author is drawing our attention to. What should we make of that data point?

Apparently El Nino reduces Gulf of Mexico hurricanes.

So being in New Orleans is a mixed bag for me.

Conspicuous that the X axis is missing numbers ... weeks, days, or months ....

This happened a couple of El Niño cycles ago, in the 2015-2016 one:

> The City of Cape Town began experiencing a drought in 2015, the first of three consecutive years of dry winters brought on possibly by the El Niño weather pattern and perhaps by climate change

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis

It's quite possible that this one could worse.

In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?

What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)

The Forest of Fontainebleau, just 50 km south of Paris, is burning, with Canada it's on the scene trying to contain it. Nearby highways and trains - some of the busiest of France - are cut. It is a temperate European forest, oak trees and beech.

No AC is going to save European from that. In fact, it is American AC which is the main cause of it. They dumped all that energy and greenhouse gases and Europeans are the one impacted by these externalities.

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I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.

I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.

Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.

I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.

This "signal" too will pass.

i have seen this couple of times here and there. with eu melting looks concerning. i guess build more data centers

There are many thing people could do, eat less meat, smaller homes, electric cars, green energy, no flights etc. but the vast majority of people does exactly nothing.

“wahhhh this is bad” ok sure but how. what will the downstream effects be. how can we model increased ocean temperatures and how they will affect weather patterns or whatever? gives me no info on the implications, let alone info on the implications with rigor.