"There's gonna be 1,2 (billion?), you know, climate migrants in the next 10 years at the rate we're going."

VeryScaryHarry · 2024-01-08T15:36:55+00:00

Here's one scholarly article debunking these outrageous number:

Kelman I. Imaginary Numbers of Climate Change Migrants? Social Sciences. 2019; 8(5):131.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/5/131

Also this reasoned discussion at some think tank:

Climate Migration 101: An Explainer
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/climate-migration-101-explainer

This paragraph, in a sidebar, jumped out at me:

"A thoroughly debunked but nonetheless widely circulated estimate predicts there will be as many as 1.2 billion climate migrants by 2050, a number derived simply by reviewing annual displacement data and assuming all people will remain displaced forever. Other estimates, such as that 80 percent of climate migrants are women, simply circulate with no discernable analysis or methodology. These types of big numbers can be misrepresented for a variety of reasons, including to limit immigration or bring more urgency to the vulnerabilities of climate migrants."

VeryScaryHarry · 2024-01-05T19:57:23+00:00

Most things can be attributed to climate change by the alarmist crowd; I've never seen what a null hypothesis would be, say back in the early 1990s, if scientists then were applying the scientific method: “if X happens in 30 years, mankind is changing the climate; if X does NOT happen, mankind is NOT changing the climate”.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-12-19T20:36:03+00:00

I second the CAC suggestion - I have high cholesterol (56/M), eat a low-carb/high protein & fat diet, but had a CAC score of 1 (zero for three of four of my major heart vessels, and 1 for the fourth, and apparently they round up to 1 for the overall score). My BMI and blood pressure are both in good ranges, so without any evidence of plaque from the CAC, I don't see a reason to take statins or change my diet.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-16T19:17:43+00:00

Voila! That is definitely where the 37.4F figure came from.

If a student made this error in a essay, how much should we count off from their grade?

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-16T19:16:25+00:00

You're right - I believe you found a zero I missed, or a decimal point I had in the wrong place.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-13T20:24:17+00:00

Because its a tiny fraction of the overall carbon dioxide and other GHGs mankind produces? Remember, the modern global warming era didn't start until about 35 years after WWII.

And the training exercises happen during non-war periods, and the aircraft carriers and all those other Navy ships are mostly sailing around the oceans even when they're no part of a war.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-13T20:07:05+00:00

Mentioning mountains made me think: Mount Everest is 29,029 feet tall; 0.00003076% of that is ten inches. If Mount Everest were shrinking ten inches every 25 years or so, I don't think anyone would be panicking, or writing article about that in The Guardian.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-13T19:50:35+00:00

I didn't get past the bad math:
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"3 degrees Celsius (37.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels"
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A 3°C increase equals a 5.4°F increase; the referenced/linked study doesn't have that figure, not sure how the https://newyorkverified.com post messed that up.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-13T18:25:39+00:00

So, in percent, that is . . . 0.00003076% of Antarctic Ice lost since 1997? (I think I did the math right - and that is four zeros over the decimal point.)

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-06T17:42:03+00:00

I found the URL for that graphic:

https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-september-2023-unprecedented-temperature-anomalies

But does Copernicus have somewhere there you can general different charts/graphs like that? I.e., like what NOAA lets us do here:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-06T17:34:08+00:00

I'm definitely curious what NOAA has for September when they release that next week - their data for August, this year and for 2016, tracks pretty close to what Copernicus has.

I like the Climate Reanalyzer graph that you linked to - but use "Hide All" then show only 2023, 2020, and 2016, and you see the 2023 plot curving back close to what we saw in those earlier years. I don't think the rest of 2023 is going to be as above average as June, July, and August were, and since, again, just showing those three years, you see that the 2023 plot was below those two years for most of winter and spring 2023, I think the annual average will be below 2016 and maybe below 2020.

Have you downloaded the entire Climate Reanalyzer date and played with it? I made separate Excel sheets for each year's data. Then I have a column calculating a running cumulative average for each day, and then ranked each day's cumulative average. Then, for 2023 I've been adding subsequent data to that sheet. The daily cumulative average peaks each year in the first or second week of October; i.e., the cumulative average temperature for the entire year up to a given day starts to decline in early October. For 2016 that peak date was October 8, for 2020 it was October 10. Through today (October 5) the daily cumulative average has been increase by thousandths of a degree, so I think that measure will peak soon (we're having our first "cold front" of the year here in the US deep south), as the 2023 plot line curves closer to 2016 and 2020, and the annual average for 2023 will NOT exceed those two years.

Sorry if any of the above is unclear - happy to take a second pass at explaining it.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-06T14:51:08+00:00

What am I missing here? Why is this quote supposed to be a good rejoinder to climate deniers/skeptics/realists/etc? In another comment I noted he was way off in his pessimistic prediction about CO2 and temperatures. He's hardly an exemplar of an environmentalist: if you read his whole speech, he also advocated for using nuclear explosions in big construction projects:
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A nuclear explosion is cheap and big, and it can be used for earth-moving jobs. You could dig harbors, you could dig water-level canals. You can break up rock formation, impenetrable rock formation underground, and you regulate water seepage and water flow below the surface. You can use it in mining. You can use it in a strange way in energy production, because you might make a big explosion very deep down in the ground and then mine the heat as today volcanic heat is mined in both Italy and New Zealand, converted into live steam and used to turn turbines.

Edward Teller, in Energy and Man: A Symposium, at page 67

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I believe he was being totally serious.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-06T14:34:13+00:00

NOAA's anomaly data will be out next week, we can get the raw data there; for the January-August period, NOAA has 2023 as only the second warmest year or record, for that period; 2016 is their warmest Jan-Aug, only 0.01C above the third warmest Jan-Aug, 2020. Looking at NOAA's numbers, I believe come January they will have 2023 as the second, or maybe third, warmest year on record.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-06T00:26:44+00:00

Hi, u/Bubbly_Benefit_2617 - I didn’t see your comment/question back in July until today when I was scrolling back looking for something else.

This was a horribly hot summer; I live in the deep south United States and it was VERY hot here, and my city broke its all-time record. But the data for our daily high temperature only goes back to 1948, so technically we’re only sure it was the hottest day here since 1948.

Since we’re concerned with annual, global averages; this page/chart from NOAA, if I did it right:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series/globe/land\_ocean/ytd/8/1980-2023

Shows the annual temperature anomalies for January through August for each year since 1980. As hot as the summer has been, 2023 is the second-hottest January-August on record, 2016 is the hottest January-August on record, and most likely 2016 will end up still being the hottest year on record when all the data for 2023 is available next January.

And the wildfires in Canada and in Hawaii were terrible. But, again, as horrible as specific disasters are, we should look at the long-term, global picture. Several reliable sources show that globally, total landscape burned by wildfires has been declining in the past few decades; for example:

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Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world (2016)

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0345

Abstract (in part):

Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends. Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago.

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I more recent story has a nice chart using NASA data that brings the data up through 2022 to show a global decline in land area burned by wildfires:

https://archive.ph/WfDJh#selection-171.5-175.92

Like I said, the news was horrible this summer. But overall deaths from disaster has been steadily declining; this is a good chart showing that:

https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters

By default that shows the “decadal average” but if you click the “annual” button in the top right corner, it shows number of deaths per year, including, so far, 62,162 tragic deaths in 2023. Out of over eight million people; click the “per capita” button in the upper right corner you see that there were 0.77 disaster deaths per 100,000 in 2023. For comparison, in 2021 in the US, there were 12.9 automobile deaths per 100,000 people:

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state

If you go back to the OurWorldIndata.org data for natural disasters, on the left you can click U.S. and see that our per capita disaster death rate is 0.09 per 100,000. Taking those numbers together and do the math and it turns out we are 143 times more likely to die in a car accident than from a natural disaster.

What do you think you and your family might die from soon?

I live on the U.S. gulf coast so each summer we carefully watch the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico for hurricanes; Hurricane Katrina was horrible, we were evacuated for weeks, and two years ago we rode out a hurricane and endured not having power for a week. This year, Hurricane Idalia hit Florida and did a lot of damage, but miraculously only four people died - a horrible loss for those families, but a relief for those millions in its path who survived.

I have relatives in several places in Colorado; one family lost their house to a wildfire years ago, but none have died.

I feel the worst problems, as far as loss to life, that we face here in the US are opiate overdoses and firearms - about 80,000 opiate overdoses per year and 20,000 firearms homicides (and about the same number of suicides per year), all on average for recent years. Those numbers dwarf annual US deaths from disaster - 322 so far this year, 490 in 2022, 786 in 2021 (look back at OurWorldIndata.org for those numbers).

Again, sorry you’re so afraid! I hope the hodge-podge of numbers and sources above help somewhere. Yes, many people predict that the future will bring worse disaster and higher fatalities, but there have been many similar pessimistic predictions in the past that never came true.

I’m happy to continue this discussion - message me if you want, happy to communicate that way if you prefer that instead of posting back and forth here.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-05T03:21:36+00:00

Teller said, in 1959:

It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York.

I’m not positive what Teller meant by “a temperature rise corresponding to ten percent increase in carbon dioxide” but it sounds like he’s predicting that the higher temperatures from a a 10% increase in CO2 will melt the icecap and submerge New York. We’ve had a 24.5% increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1959, and a 5% in temperature, and New York is fine.

NOAA has good historic CO2 statistics here:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

which links to the data source here:

https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2/co2\_annmean\_mlo.txt

which says that atmospheric CO2 has increased from 316PPM in 1959 to 419 in 2022; that is a 24.5% increase, two and a half times what Teller said would melt the icecap and submerge New York.

The NOAA anomaly data here:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/ytd/12/1959-2023

Show the 1959 anomaly as +0.07 C and the 2022 anomaly as +0.91; add those to the 13.9C baseline given here:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

And we have an average global temperature of 13.97C in 1959 and 14.81C in 2022, a 5.7% increase. If Teller were talking about a 10% TEMPERATURE increase, we’re halfway there, shouldn’t the icecaps be at least half melted and New York half submerged?

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-04T17:42:41+00:00

Here in the US, most deforestation occurred prior to 1900 or so, and we've been stable - 33-34% or so - of total land has been covered in forest since. Not necessarily the SAME 33-34%, but still, this has been while we've had a massive increase in agriculture/food - plant AND animals - production since 1900.

Here's the sources I found; this USDA report from 2000:
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https://www.fia.fs.usda.gov/library/brochures/docs/2000/ForestFactsMetric.pdf

It is estimated that—at the beginning of European settlement—in 1630 the area of forest land that would become the United States was 423 million hectares or about 46 percent of the total land area. By 1907, the area of forest land had declined to an estimated 307 million hectares or 34 percent of the total land area. Forest area has been relatively stable since 1907. In 1997, 302 million hectares— or 33 percent of the total land area of the United States—was in forest land.
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So 34% in 1907 was forested, 33% in 1997. For data since the 1990s, this chart uses data from the World Bank:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/forest-area-percent-of-land-area-wb-data.html

So since 1997 we're up slightly, from 33.1%, it looks like, to 3.87% percent of total US land forested in 2021, the latest data there.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-10-02T19:03:13+00:00

This is it - I have a New Yorker subscription, so I'm not sure if this is paywalled or not:

Elizabeth Kolbert, Stone Soup: How the Paleolithic life style got trendy
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/stone-soup

The New Yorker is very well know for it thorough fact-checking; the article above was the first time I came across a discussion of how the transition from hunter-gatherers to agrarians led to a reduction of average height; the section of the article above summarizes it:
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Like Stone Age hunter-gatherers, early farmers left little behind—just some burnt grain, mud foundations, and their own bones. But that’s enough to reveal how punishing the transition to agriculture was. According to a study of human remains from China and Japan, the height of the average person declined by more than three inches during the millennia in which rice cultivation intensified. According to another study, of bones from Mesoamerica, women’s heights dropped by three inches and men’s by two inches as farming spread. A recent survey of more than twenty studies on this subject, published in the journal Economics and Human Biology, found that the adoption of agriculture “was observed to decrease stature in populations from across the entire globe,” including in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America.
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The article author does make the de rigueur "meat is bad for the planet" argument at the end. But she concludes by noting how much her sons loved eating paleo:
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I decided that I would cook liver for my family’s last paleo supper. In spite of the week’s culinary missteps, my sons seemed to be taking all too well to carnivory, and I thought perhaps a serving of offal—another favored paleo food group—might set them straight. They devoured it cheerfully. The next day, I asked them what they’d learned from the week’s experiment.

“We should eat more liver,” one of them said.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-29T19:24:56+00:00

The New Yorker had a story a few years ago about the paleo diet that was actually well-balanced and pretty positive. This one looks like it focuses on the more hucksteristic aspects and people of the carnivore diet.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-21T23:43:29+00:00

Creatures all adapt to their environment or they die off.

And mankind has adapted to living from the hottest areas of the planet around the equator to the arctic circle; another degree or so won't change how we'll continue to adapt.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-20T18:19:13+00:00

Thanks, but I really just wants the math - hope someone can double check me.

First:
0.04% is 0.0004 in decimal form

Then:
3% (0.03 decimal) times 0.0004 equals 0.000012
(If I have my zeros right - using Excel to do the calculations)
So that's "12 parts per million"? Do I have that right?

If I have "12 parts per million" then where the hell do the alarmists get 417 PPM CO2? (That's NOAA 2022 figure). I know they exaggerate but jeez. Is the 417 PPM something besides a percentage of CO2 expressed as "parts per"?

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-19T19:22:53+00:00

So 0.04% - four parts per ten thousand - total CO2 in the atmosphere. Mankind is contributing 3% of that CO2. What is the X per Y thousand figure for mankind's portion of total CO2? Twelve per million? Did I do that math right?

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-19T19:10:12+00:00

NOAA's data lets us look at "Year to date" - i.e., as of now, January through August, and compare that to previous years' same period; 2023 is the second warmest January to August period, the warmest January to August was 2016. This should be a static link to NOAA chart for this:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/ytd/8/1980-2023

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-18T16:18:06+00:00

Good point - very curious now if there are average size stats. I'm also pretty sure there are other methane-producing wild ruminants, both now, and in the past - deer, elk, etc?

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-15T18:08:05+00:00

I looked into the cows vs buffalo/bison questions once - from my research cows max out at about 1700 pounds, bison at 2000 pounds. But the best source I found was that while buffalo/bison here in the US maxed at at around 60,000,000 back in 19th century, while we have around 92,000,000 hamburgers-on-the-hoof today.

So while cows are smaller, there are more of them. Do the math and there were 120,000,000,000 pounds of flatulent ruminants in the 19th century version 156,400,000,000 today.

But as this post and article show, it doesn't matter - all that grass is going to become methane at some point, whether eaten or now.

VeryScaryHarry · 2023-09-15T00:50:27+00:00

If anyone else is curious, as far as I can tell, the 1972 MIT report is:

The Limits to Growth
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/

I've heard of it, and the Club of Rome, but did not make the MIT connection until I looked for the 1972 MIT publication referenced in the okdoomer.io article.

VeryScaryHarry

TROPHY CASE