logoalt Hacker News

TimorousBestieyesterday at 3:13 PM3 repliesview on HN

A weird title.

The content of the paper is summed up as “everyone felt like the climate changed after 2015, the data up to 2023 was inconclusive; we finally have enough to prove it with 95% confidence.”

EDIT: The title is weird because it’s generic to the point of being unsearchable. I’m not disputing the facts of the paper.


Replies

epistasisyesterday at 3:18 PM

It's one of those titles that makes perfect sense to a scientist working in the field, but which is quite inscrutable to those not working in the field. (Just like the titles of most HN submissions)

Since manuscripts are written for those working in the field, and need to be, it's one of the big challenges of science communication. In the past these articles would be in a library and mailed out to the subscribing specialists, which minimized the confusion. In the age of the internet, even our dogs can read highly specialized scientific pre-prints that haven't even been peer reviewed yet.

tjnayloryesterday at 3:35 PM

The title is a fair summary. The paper isn't simply confirming the "climate changed [warmed]" since 2015. The paper is showing the climate warmed the past decade twice as fast as it had between the decades from 1960-2000.

"This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."

guenthertyesterday at 3:29 PM

"inconclusive" only regarding the significant acceleration. The warming part wasn't in question.

The actual abstract reads: "Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted data show that after 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945."

show 1 reply