We often look at monthly or annual climate datasets, but daily data matters a lot for studying extremes. Using @BerkeleyEarth daily homogenized gridded data, I took a look at how the number of daily maximum and minimum records has changed over time:
To calculate how the number of records have changed over time, I looked at when the record low and high daily temperature over the 1880-2019 period was recorded in each grid cell for each day of the year, resulting in 365 days * 5498 gridcell max and min records.
If we look specifically at the contiguous US (e.g. excluding Alaska and Hawaii), we see a more pronounced set of 1930s daily maximum records corresponding to the dust bowl, but also see that the past decade (2010-2019) has set more daily maximum records.
Daily minimum temperature records have seen a decline in recent decades in both the global and contiguous US datasets.
If we look at the whole US, including Alaska and Hawaii, we get a slightly different picture. This is in large part due to the fact that Alaska is quite big, and has been warming quite rapidly in recent decades:
One caveat: this is an initial analysis and there may be bugs (indeed, I quickly deleted an earlier thread when I found one!). It also may be biased by changing availability of gridcells over time, though this will matter a lot more for the global than US analyses.
I often get asked about the role of behavior change vs technology in mitigating climate change.
But I find it hard to separate the two; we often forget that there is a virtuous cycle where technology enables behavior change, and behavior change accelerates technological change.
For example, dietary changes (reducing red meat consumption) are a hugely important behavioral change in an otherwise hard-to-decarbonize sector. But switching from beef hamburgers to black bean patties or tofu steaks is a hard sell for many folks.
Now that we have meat alternatives like @ImpossibleFoods that taste nearly the same and can be used in the same recipes, the "costs" of behavioral change are much smaller. The same will happen as we transition from traditional beef steaks to lab-grown meats.
Good post-mortem in @PopSci about the controversy over @ClimateEnvoy's remarks last week. He meant to say largely what the new IEA report says: that we will ultimately need to help bring technologies that are not mature today to market to reach net-zero. popsci.com/environment/ne…
I suggested that a lot of the controversy stemmed from the fact that "People are sort of using this as a proxy for their own larger debates, be it futuristic techno fixes versus technologies that are available today, or large scale reforms of capitalism versus green growth."
@JesseJenkins noted that “the challenge is less about invention and more about taking techs like CCS, air capture, biomass gasification, electrolysis – which are invented today and have been demonstrated at pilot or commercial scale – and making them cheap, mature, and scalable.”
2021 is off to a cooler start, with the seventh warmest Jan-April period since records began in the mid-1800s.
That said, it is still warmer than 164 of the 171 years on record, showing just how much human activity has changed what seems normal. carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-c…
Based on the first four months temperatures and the El Nino/La Nina forecast, @CarbonBrief estimates that annual 2021 temperatures also gave the best chance of ending up as the 7th warmest year on record – and its very likely to be somewhere between the fourth and ninth warmest.
We do not expect every year to set a new record in a warming world, as a lot of year-to-year variability is influenced by El Nino and La Nina cycles. The moderate La Nina event in late 2020 and early 2021 is contributing to cooler temperatures, though its is quickly fading:
My recent thread lauding the new electric F150 truck for getting better performance at a comparable cost engendered a lot of pushback and criticism of America's "autocentrism" and "fetish for big cars". These are real issues, but not a reason to criticize the new F150 per se. 1/x
It is clearly the case that America needs to invest a lot more in modernized public transportation infrastructure, and help reduce the need for car ownership in many areas. The Biden administration infrastructure bill takes a number of important steps to address this. 2/
At the same time, people who are buying $40k+ pickup trucks today (one out of every 16 light vehicles sold in the US! ) are not doing so because they lack other transport alternatives. There are plenty of much more fuel efficient lower cost options to get from point A to B. 3/
Where to start? No, the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was not "as large as what we observe today", at least in 4 out of 5 available reconstructions: carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-…
Yes, the the number of significant tornadoes hasn’t changed much at all, but scientists never claimed that they would (and our models generally can't resolve small-scale events like tornadoes): carbonbrief.org/tornadoes-and-…
I missed quite the climate twitter drama, being offline over the weekend.
I'll just say that while I disagree that ~ half of emissions reductions need to come from tech that we don’t yet have, theres a case to be made that > 50% needs to come from tech that is not mature today.
Debates around mitigation are often framed as a choice between mature technologies today and future innovations. In reality we need to do both; to deploy what is cost-effective today, and to invest in range of solutions needed to tackle hard-to-decarbonize parts of economy.
I suppose a lot of the debate about Kerry's statement comes down to how you interpret "technologies that we don’t yet have". It doesn't help that the Guardian changed that to "technologies that have not yet been invented"...