Hot Water

[morrison]

sea-surface-temp-figure1-2016.png (87.41 KiB) Viewed 13978 times

Average ocean surface temps courtesy of the US EPA. But they're a bunch of alarmists.
"But metro Vancouver has yet to really see the effects of it and we probably wont until 2040 or so."
I suggest you talk to some people who have lived here at least 50 years?

[Slappy]

Average ocean surface temps courtesy of the US EPA. But they're a bunch of alarmists.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here, I said the world is warming but the world is a big place. The region we occupy is not indicative of the average.

As you can see from the Halibut Bank data in the last 28 years the Georgia Straight hasn't really changed.

I suggest you talk to some people who have lived here at least 50 years?

I've lived in metro Vancouver for 43 years so something crazy must have happened in those 7 before me. This is exactly the point I was making earlier, people experience variation and they think it's global warming.

You need to actually look at data. As the YVR temperature data shows our local climate hasn't really changed in past 80 years.

What makes you think that global warming will effect the earth equally?

[gabrielb]

I wish I could agree, but data ...


We live close to water and the ocean may be a buffer for extremes.

[ShonanDB]

"Deep Thoughts Tuesday" You can tell there hasn't been much wind lately!:)

If you look back through geological history the average temperatures have both risen and dropped many times depending on the cycles. We have been in a general warming trend since the last glacial period about 10,000+ years ago. If you look back farther you'll see that the average temperature was as much as 3 degrees C warmer than now and this has happened a number of times long before humans were around.
Global warming is taking place (and has been for the last 10k years) and we have definately influenced the speed it's happening at but we are not the only factor in the system, just one of many things contributing.
The biggest problem is that our ancestors thought it was a good idea to build most of our cities within a few meters of sea level thinking that water levels and climate would remain constant.
Going back to geological history, the warming cycles reach a peak and then head back the other way into a cooling trend so the question is, are we nearing the peak before the switch or are we still a 100 + years away? It may get a fair bit warmer than now in our lifetime and it's difficult to predict how our area will be affected.

[keeldude]

Those graphs of Halibut bank water temp and YVR have a large range in the Y-axis, something on the order of 20 degrees. The contested temperature trend is on the order of a single degree. Hence, any subtle trend in these particular graphs is masked by the 20 degree temperature swings and not readily discernible to the eye. This is why computers are used to process the data. If we had an excel spreadsheet of the Temp and Date, we could easily get excel to plot a linear function (close enough for our purposes considering short time scales--ie, decades). Those graphs are going to have a positive slope (meaning increasing over time) guaranteed.

It would be theoretically possible to approximate the values I need pixel by pixel using those images but I'd have to revisit some computing and image processing. Would be great to have the raw data used to draw those graphs in a text table, as the plot I am speaking about would take a minute or two.

[Slappy]

The YVR graph is 80 years of data, a trend would be visible. The HB data is much shorter so it could be more easily masked.

That data is just from the EC site. Here's an even easier to get version for you:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jrR8HMzZlTLk2MnjJv9NLvGiXR0w6ez-
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kLXNfDJw6PLAHxn3H6J5wGIBSd6lorH7

YVR is column 1 vs. 8 for mean temp.
HB is column 2 vs. 23 for sea surface temp.

Make sure you choose a even section for your trendline, and even then there were a few missing data points I had to trim because they failed to report. The HB data is especially bad for missing data points.

[Randal]

You are never going to see a small change just by looking at a graph.

People have spent their entire careers studying this using sophisticated tools.
There is nothing useful that us laypeople can add. It is a very complex problem.

We are creating so many problems. Global warming is just one aspect.

It is too bad that it has become the politicized 'wedge issue'. Over population, over consumption, deforestation and land development, species extinction, over fishing, ocean acidification, plastics and who knows what else accumulating everywhere..

It is a hard world to bring up kids in. We try to restrain ourselves from excess consumption and travel but so many people just don't seem to care about anything.

[Slappy]

Here is the data with a fake +0.8 degree trend and -0.8 degree trend added, both are visible.

fake rise:

yvr-fake-up.png (130.74 KiB) Viewed 13877 times

real data:

yvr-mean.png (130.46 KiB) Viewed 13877 times

fake fall:

yvr-fake-down.png (130.12 KiB) Viewed 13877 times

Adding grid lines helped a lot.

My estimate is over that 80 year span YVR has seen around 0.4 degree warming. That means over the past 40 years (what we might feel the difference is from our childhood) it's a rise of 0.2 degrees. In the swings of temperature we have 0.2 degrees isn't something you will notice.

[morrison]

https://www.whistler.ca/services/enviro ... and-energy

You should show these guys your graphs and explain how wrong they have it?

.... We try to restrain ourselves from excess consumption and travel but so many people just don't seem to care about anything.

Well said.

[keeldude]

My estimate is over that 80 year span YVR has seen around 0.4 degree warming. That means over the past 40 years (what we might feel the difference is from our childhood) it's a rise of 0.2 degrees. In the swings of temperature we have 0.2 degrees isn't something you will notice.

Thanks for the levelheaded discussion and for doing the legwork for me! I am going to play around with the data later myself. Curious where you got the data from? I was snooping around EnvCan website for a while last night but kept going in circles trying to find the monthly historical data which is allegedly there.

I think that's very interesting that you could measure the slope yourself. A lot of the data collection and analysis can be done by laypeople without PhDs. The hard part is getting the temperature data for a significantly large sample size distributed over the globe. My next investigation would be to look at the standard deviation of max/min temperatures to see if there are more extreme temperature events. A +0.4C change is important I think, due to various feedback systems that can result, ie, snowpack or glacier melting (reduced coverage of snow enhances melting--here that could affect our water resevoir, though by a different token we may get more precipitation over the year due to higher temperatures. A very complex problem). And like you mentioned, Vancouver is not going to be reflective of the global average, some places will be higher and some lower, so too much focus on a single location will soon lose its value in the global climate discussion.

Also embedded in climate projections is the greater disparity in temperatures, ie higher highs and lower lows. I 100% agree that we should be wary of linking individual weather events to climate change as the data really comes from averages over longer time scales and geographical areas. I used to be an alarmist myself (the world is going to end in the next 100 years). But I think we are going to adapt to a significant and while some particularly susceptible regions will be adversely affected (Bangladesh, India, Maldives off the top of my head) the average person in a developed nation might not notice the slow creep of change, both in climate and economically,in a highly complex and nuanced world.