Elon Musk says we're paying 'too much attention' to this climate change variable
AP Photo/Jack Plunkett
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk took to Twitter on Wednesday to point out some worrisome news that the Arctic ice cap is much, much smaller than it should be at this point in the season.
Specifically, Musk highlighted a chart-filled defense of climate change science at Slate by scientist and author Phil Plait (who's also known as "The Bad Astronomer").
Below is Musk's tweet, but take special note of that last part:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/715219872204992512
Great article by @BadAstronomer. Important to note max temp record. Too much attention on avg temp. Max matters most https://t.co/0FnIAVsbIu
In case you missed it, it's "Max matters most."
What Musk is saying is that there's too much attention on the global average temperatures, which can show seemingly negligible differences in warming.
For example, when NASA's Earth Observatory writes that the globe has warmed, on average, about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, or roughly third of a degree each decade, that may not sound like a big deal.
First, it's important to remember that global warming is more than just a single rising thermometer. Different parts of the world see different effects as part of climate change. Some places — particularly the poles — are heating up. Other regions are seeing colder winters or more extreme storms.
The term "global warming," while essentially accurate, can obscure some of those phenomena.
It's more telling to measure how a region's current climate is behaving atypically, using an established baseline. Deviations in one direction or another — cooler or warmer — are called "global surface temperature anomalies."
And those temperature anomalies matter a lot. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) even calls anomalies "more important than absolute temperature," because they take regional differences into account. Alaska's warmest summer will always be cooler than Florida's — but if both are off the charts, anomalies will reflect that.
Take this map, for example, which shows all global temperature anomalies from February 2016:
AP Photo/Jack Plunkett
You can quickly see that some places, like Alaska and a huge swath of Eurasia, are much warmer than usual.
The Northern Hemisphere already shattered maximum temperature records for January and February, and there are signs that the trend won't let up as we progress through 2016. Others — western Mongolia and a few parts of eastern Russia — were cooler.
On average, everything's getting hotter, even with those unusually cold spots. But the Arctic is undergoing a much, much greater shift, as Plait noted in his post. Temperatures there were higher by 4-11 degrees Fahrenheit on average.
The weather there also diverged wildly from the norm, to the tune of 50 degrees above average. The temperature in the Arctic Circle, by most accounts, was above the melting point of water in the middle of winter.
That's the sort of extreme shift that isn't apparent in average global temperatures. They're still useful in their own way — it's how we can say with certainly we've seen 15 of the 16 warmest years on record in the last 15 years — but Musk also has a point.
We're not only experiencing global warming, but also extreme and abrupt climate change. Paying attention to the most extraordinary shifts can help us understand how far gone we really are.
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