This is as graphic a demonstration of the impact of climate change as is possible- click on the link to go to an interactive where you input your hometown and the year you were born and it will compare what the temps were like when you were born versus now.
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Amir Khalid
By coincidence, I was listening to Bruce’s My Hometown when I saw this post. It seemed an encouraging sign, so I followed the link and entered Kuala Lumpur as my hometown and 1961 as my year of birth. Nothing happened. Hmm.
Ramalama
@Amir Khalid: Nice synchronicity. Alas, maybe this NYT interactive thingamajiggy is for North Americans? I noticed that they say this:
Most people in ‘Merica never consider Canada, especially Montreal because French. And why should theywe? Canada’s population is only slightly larger than that of California. And size matters, d’oh.
As for Kuala Lumpur, lots of Americans just blink and swipe right. So too NYT?
MomSense
Hmm, the data for my town is really off. It says we’ve had 0 days of 90 degree temps. My body and my electric bill say otherwise.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: Happy Independence Day! I don’t know much about Malaysian freedom struggle or the imperial rule there. But I am sure they were happy when the white man unloaded that burden.
p.a.
The science is improving all the time, but a few years ago I read that a bigger driver of AGW than daytime highs is that nighttime low temps are higher. If the earth could still cool to the temps of, say 1960, we could still be in position to control the GW effects, while now even if the political will were there, it’s likely too late.
It may seem like common sense that higher daytime temps = higher nighttime lows, but the article pointed out that historically this wasn’t necessarily the case before the CO tipping point.
debbie
I’ve increased from 12 days to 20 days. Personally, even one day is an insult.
p.a.
CO2
lahke
@Amir Khalid: You have to scroll down to see the changes. It’s hard to see on a phone, but I was able to view Singapore (not born there, just curious).
Old School
The data for my hometown is exactly the same now as when I was born.
That was underwhelming.
MomSense
@p.a.:
Apparently this summer has been record setting in Maine for the number of nights above 70 degrees. That used to be our daytime temperature.
Percysowner
Where I live has gone from 12 to 20 days. Where I was born has gone from 2 to 4 days. I wish I lived there again, since I hate the heat, but my daughter moved here and that means grandbaby is here, so here I stay.
MomSense
@Old School:
It may be wrong. The data for my hometown is way off.
OzarkHillbilly
NYT. Already used up my monthly allotment.
schrodingers_cat
@OzarkHillbilly: Delete all cookies, resstart the counter again.
Old School
@MomSense: It’s probably accurate. Wisconsin isn’t that warm of a state.
VOR
It says my birth town actually has fewer 90 degree days now than when I was born. Sure doesn’t feel like that to me.
OzarkHillbilly
@schrodingers_cat: I can’t, I already ate them.
Aleta
Yesterday I was talking to a fisherman and small buyer who buys lobsters from others in his town and ships them. He said the catch is down 40% this year and 20% in Nova Scotia. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest-warming large bodies of water in the world right now, the news said. Affecting Nova Scotia too, but still a little cooler there.
The catch is still up compared to before it began to boom in the late 80s (the boom might have been tied to the depletion of cod).
schrodingers_cat
But coal is going to save us, says the gigantic orange one in DC.
/end snark
schrodingers_cat
@VOR: Hillary’s server ate NYT’s climate data.
Cermet
@p.a.:Because its about CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2 now better traps heat at night; as does the extra water vapor the atmosphere now holds thanks to higher temps. It’s a vicious cycle and one that will, starting in thirty years or so, create night time temps (with humidity) that create conditions whereas the human body can not cool down at all. Result, human life becomes impossible in these regions. As we continue these regions get larger – within fifty years, most of India, southern China, much of the Middle East that borders the Indian Ocean, and parts of Africa, South America and even the Mississippi valley will suffer this fate. This is a disaster the likes of which we have never seen (humans) and will result in the forced migration of well over a billion people. Add the issues of growing droughts, farmland loss, famine, and liquids fuels becoming too expensive and the future really looks bleak.
The Moar You Know
Here’s what I get:
Bullshit.
The climate here was stable until 1995/96 and then took a pretty sudden and substantial change to far hotter summers (and yeah, that means over 90 unless you are literally living on the beach) and more importantly, became extremely humid during the summers.
These clowns need to do better work if they’re looking to prove their point.
Elizabelle
18 days over 90 degrees per year; up to 30 now. Alexandria VA.
OzarkHillbilly
@Cermet: Good thing I’ll be dead.
schrodingers_cat
@The Moar You Know: Looks like they are providing a tool for the fake news climate change denier brigade. After all her emailz were more important than being in bed with Putin’s cronies.
PhoenixRising
(ahem) Due to a family crisis, I have been in my hometown in July & August 3/4 of the past 4 summers.
There have been dozens of 90• days, and this summer was the worst of the 3. It’s hot. Damn hot.
Threatening me with what I have already personally observed if only I live 30 more years was…not impressive.
MomSense
@Aleta:
Just wait until the “conveyor belt” slows down. That’s should be interesting.
Yarrow
I tried a bunch of different years and several different cities. When I enter a data prior to 1960 it says the data set only goes back to 1960, at least for the cities I tried. Wonder why it only goes back that far. Didn’t people keep records before then?
OzarkHillbilly
@Yarrow: It’s the liberals fault. They all canceled their subscriptions so now the FTNYT don’t have the money to hire the researchers and programmers necessary.
pat
Two books I just found at the library and can recommend:
The Madhouse Effect, How climate denial is threatening our planet, destroying our politics, and driving us crazy, by Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, just released… Look for it in New Arrivals. Great cartoons by Toles.
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Dispatches from the Front Lines, by Michael E. Mann, 2011. Scary and infuriating what the fossil fuel industry and the denialists in Congress have done. A coordinated attack on every scientist, especially Mann, who works in the field of climate science.
Aleta
@MomSense: (Inadequate swearing.)
chris
“Halifax is not prone to 90 degree days.”
Used to be true but I guess they weren’t around the last couple of summers.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
He lies constantly. This is Wednesday in the Cleveland paper:
The President is pumping out propaganda to Americans every fucking day – a pack of lies. It’s horrifying to watch this happen. It’s state propaganda.
Immanentize
@MomSense: For the United Kingdom particularly.
chris
@Aleta: @MomSense: Three year old series from the Press Herald was shocking then, not so much now.
https://www.pressherald.com/2015/10/25/mayday-gulf-maine-distress-six-part-series-from-colin-woodard/
low-tech cyclist
@Elizabelle:
I was just gonna post that – I wasn’t born there, but we moved there in 1960, when I was six years old, so that was the year I used.
The Maryland town I live in now has gone from 16 90+ days a year in 1998, when we moved there, to 22 days now. (It’s on the Chesapeake Bay, which moderates its temperatures a bit more than the Potomac does for Alexandria. But still, that’s a pretty striking increase in just two decades.)
Kay
I know we don’t know who will win and that’s..risky but this could be a great race. It’s like good versus evil! :)
Let’s just have a huge fight and enjoy it. About time we just got it all out there and saw which side wins, right?
Immanentize
@Kay: DeSantis is already going hard racist. And he has more than two months to go. I’ve been wondering if the Parkland kids will get involved ….
raptusregaliter
Hey Cole: You need to stop posting unattributed links to FTFNYT. Cheap bastards like me get only 5 free articles a month (and seriously, who pays for a subscription to FTFNYT?), and I hate clicking on these links and discovering I’ve wasted another one.
Kay
@Immanentize:
I figured and that’s too bad but in a way don’t we need to have this fight? This is the issue. We’re not going to hug it out.
Gillum’s been elected locally. I’m sure he knew what he was in for. It would be NICE if it were exchanging issue papers and then debating them, but Trump has made it clear it’ll be flat-out racist all the time from now to 2020 so let’s just duke it out.
We could win! :)
gene108
@Ramalama:
They had the place of my birth, Bangalore, India, there. So, it is not just for NA.
Fair Economist
@Cermet: It’s not only human life, but virtually all mammalian life that becomes impossible in those “hot zones”. A lot of other things too. This will create some nightmarish ecologies.
MomSense
@chris:
I get the bulletins from the Bigelow Laboratory of Ocean Sciences. When you get the alarm about plankton levels it’s tempting to think it’s only a little plankton. Then you realize 60 – 75% of our OXYGEN comes from plankton.
gene108
@Ramalama:
Cali still has more people.
Link
chris
@MomSense: Yes we do and ocean dead zones keep expanding. But I’m sure it will all work out…//
Ohio Mom
I would have also liked a chart showing how much warmer winters have become. My impression is that there is a lot less snow to shovel in recent years, and many fewer frigid days.
Now I hate being cold and I hate driving in the snow. I can’t help but be pleased it is warmer for my own sake, even as I feel guilty for doing so. I can not bear to think about Ohio Son’s later years, when his Dad and I are gone and the world is in constant crisis.
Fair Economist
@chris: The dead zones are mostly from fertilizer pollution. It’s a much more controllable issue than global warming. Not that we are doing a good job controlling it, but we could.
chris
@Fair Economist: some nightmarish ecologies
One possible future, optimistic in my view.
Amir Khalid
Tried it again. 133 days of the year above 32°C in 1961, 270 days now. It will top 300 days by the time I’m 80. Yay.
Spanky
@Elizabelle: @low-tech cyclist:
And now, unsurprisingly …
chris
@Fair Economist:
Maybe. With concerted action by all parties we could do a lot of things. Any day now…
Uncle Cosmo
@MomSense: (sigh) For the 7,648th time, allow me to point out that the actual perceptible change in summer temperature over the past 50-60 years isn’t daytime highs – there has been no significant change in those – but nighttime lows.
My folks didn’t spring for an air conditioner until the 1970s when I was long gone. Back then, in a typical summer on the outskirts of the Baltimore heat island, there would be maybe 7-10 summer nights when open windows & fans weren’t sufficient to allow for restful sleep (>75 F, high humidity). These days (in the middle of that heat island about 5 miles from where I grew up) there are maybe 7-10 summer nights when the temperature doesn’t fall below the high 70s (again with oppressive humidity).
My poorly-informed guess is this owes to the increase in water vapor in the air (more heat => more evaporation). Deserts cool down so rapidly after dusk when they radiate accumulated heat through dry, clear air.into space; water vapor (most noticeably in the form of clouds) traps the radiation.
(In fact until the last couple of weeks the daytime highs here have not been consistently extreme – too many cloudy days [again a function of higher humidity] reflecting incident solar radiation back into space – but the nighttime lows have remained high.) FWIW
Heidi Mom
I entered Carlisle, PA — where I live now and forevermore, not where I was born in 1951. Data goes back to 1960. Then, 15 days; now, 18. GoT fans, I agree with Tormund’s observation about living in the frozen lands north of the Wall: “You can breathe up here!” Winter can’t come fast enough for me.
Immanentize
@Uncle Cosmo:
So, I’m unclear — are you saying daytime highs are the problem? ?
gvg
i am underwhelmed by this. When I was born in Florida it was 107 to 125 now. Frankly that seems like the variation from one year to the next. However, I already knew we weren’t where the changes would be dramatic. Due to being on an peninsula with an Ocean current running down one side and up the other, our temps are moderated. In fact we are warmer than our latitudes due to the Gulf Stream, and our climate has changed before. Historically going back about a century we have actually been getting colder until about 20 years ago. Our citrus industry used to be located n Jacksonville until the freezes of I think 1906. Then in the 1980’s another set of freezes drove it out of central Florida down to south Florida. I still remember the Christmas trip where we passed miles and miles of dead groves on the way to Grandma’s house. The records gong back to the Spanish show that the Gulf Stream shifts path from time to time and changes our climate. It also impacts England.
The higher night time temps have an impact on photosynthesis. There are plants that do ok with warm nights and those that don’t. Classes on that were a long time ago but I think it was something like group III and group IV. This was also why some plants never grew well here, but others from the north did. Changes in some areas may favor some plants over others but the web of life is real and lots of links will get broken. you need your food to survive for you to survive. And if things keep changing and don’t settle down, the web can’t get re established.
Elmo
@The Moar You Know: That’s the year that finally drove me out and I moved to Mammoth to escape summer.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
The Paris Agreement is completely inadequate
chris
OT: Daniel Dale strikes again!
Fair Economist
@Uncle Cosmo: That’s not poorly informed. Most of the direct heating from global warming is from increased water vapor. Small increases in temp fron CO2 lead to much larger temp increases from feedback with warmer temperatures raising water vapor raising temps etc.
Daytime temps have increases though, as reported in the link.
Immanentize
@Fair Economist:
So why not take average day temps as the metric? I guess the Times — probably rightly — feels like highs are more dramatic and impactful
Meanwhile, in every town I put I, it seems there was stability or cooling over the time period from 1960 to 1975 ish -+ any idea why?
Jess
@raptusregaliter: This.
tobie
@chris: I asked yesterday whether Trump was going to get his symbolic trade pledge by the Friday deadline. Guess not. Good.
chris
@Immanentize:
What happened after 1945? We made our own cloud cover with coal fires and leaded fuels as we rebuilt after the war. Remember smog? This chart from NASA shows pretty clearly the declining use of coal and the banning of leaded fuels.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
Well, glad you got it to work for you, I guess. But we all knew it was gong to be bad news, right? The graphic globe seemed to show that whole area suffering badly and repidly.
My home town went from 3 days over 90 to 9 days over 90… wish I still lived in that climate, or even higher into the mountains. So lessee, that’s a 200% increase, GREAT!!! Balls!!! of FIRE!!!
Here where I live now is quite a bit warmer… I wish they had some way to use the dataset to find a place that’s not going to be worst, but best, to hide in until I die, which will be much sooner than their forecast extends to. First time I’ve been glad about getting old and dying, truthfully.
TriassicSands
@MomSense:
I entered Boulder, CO (Not my home town, but where I used to live.) It claimed 2 days of 90 or above . According to Accuweather, Boulder had 40 days at or above 90 degrees this summer. That includes the forecast of 90 for today. I lived there in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s and it always had more than 2 days above 90. Fake news!
Uncle Cosmo
@raptusregaliter: Cosine, um, co-sign, from another cheap barstid. How about a title & a coupla paras as fair warning?
Immanentize
@chris: Thanks. Very helpful
Immanentize
@chris: Russia looks cooked on that time line
trollhattan
California wildfires have consumed 1,250,500 acres so far in 2018, that’s 1,954 square miles.
Rhode Island land area: 1,034 mi^2
Connecticut land area: 1,949 mi^2
So, we’ve burned up Connecticut already and are just now entering the historical peak fire season. Yeah, things are changed permanently. The Republican solution: clearcutting everything left standing. And saving coal.
sukabi
@Ramalama: pretty sure their graphic just sucks. Very incomplete data. If your home town isn’t in their data set it will return “your home town isn’t known for 90° days. Try entering in New Delhi, India or New York.”
I tried several washington cities from Seattle south and couldn’t get a response until I hit Portland Oregon. That’s a crock because we’d go from 1 or 2 90° + days when I was a kid to the last several years having a week in a row being 90° + a few days cooler and several more 90°.
Uncle Cosmo
@Immanentize: Jeez, where’d you pull that out of? IMO (based on 68 years living in the region) higher than normal daytime highs are NOT the problem. Using a cutoff of 90 F for daytime highs is BS – there’s not a lot of perceptible difference between 89 F and 91 F. I can recall days prior to 1975 when the highs hit 100 or above**.
Nighttime lows OTOH are PERCEPTIBLY higher. The difference between (say) 72 F with low humidity & 78 F with so much water in the air you can scoop it with your hands is the difference between comfortable sleep & night-long fever dreams.
Another qualitative difference from my not-half-misspent-enough yoot: It seems like we’re getting nasty afternoon thunderstorms more frequently, but probably not significantly so. What IS significant IMHO is that the storms of yesteryear would clear the air – after they passed it was perceptibly cooler AND less humid for at least an hour. These days it does get a bit cooler (I wonder how much again is due to clouds reflecting incoming light) but only for 10-15 minutes, and the humidity stays obscenely high. Ugly.
** One notable day in late June 1989, I had just returned from a bidniz trip to Idaho where temps hit 104 F & the locals complained about the awful humidity [~20%]. On the way home I’d thought, Well, it’ll be more humid but at least it won’t be as hot. Hah. High for the day, 104 F – with like 1,000,000% hum-a-ditty.
George
@trollhattan: One thing to keep in mind about total “burned” area is that it usually is the sum of the number of acres within the fire perimeters. Most of the fire perimeters contain pockets of unburned or lightly burned vegetation, which often is the source of seed for the areas that were burned more intensely. That is nature for you.
And of course, any GOPer who thinks harvesting timber is the answer really has no clue about the age classes of the forests/rangelands that do get burned. Or, for that matter, the fact that much of the timber that burned likely would not have been economical to harvest. No one wants to build miles of forest road just to get a few thousand board feet.
trollhattan
@George:
All good points, and the largest fire–Ranch Fire/Mendocino Complex–in state history is in coastal foothills largely comprising grassland, brush and oak.
Worth adding that the heat generated in forest fires has been increasing to levels that sterilize the soil. They’re busy studying what that means for recovery.
Uncle Cosmo
@J R in WV:
Five gets you ten the planetary plutocrats have already bought up all such places & are charging premium prices for the real estate. For all their obfuscation & foot-dragging & flimflamming the proles re climate change, the guys the most intelligent of them hire to review the scientific literature aren’t paid to blow smoke up their arses but to tell them the (highly secret, never to be admitted to outside these walls) truth – & they act on that.
(I am reminded of the report, some years back, that the Bush
crime cartelfamily had invested in a lot of dirt-cheap & seemingly worthless land in the back lots of Paraguay…which turned out to be sitting on one of the largest remaining untapped aquifers. With water likely to be the 21st century’s source of international conflict the way oil was in the 20th.Whtheer or not there was any substance to, I recall thinking that that’s the kind of long game only those with boocoo bux can play.)Uncle Cosmo
um, in #74 supra: “Whether or not there was”…
Joshua Norton
In San Francisco we’ve had a solid month of grey fog. We’ve been calling it “Fogust”. I know it’s not exactly a heatwave but it’s still a lot of weird ass weather brought on by the high inland temps meeting the cold Pacific Ocean.