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Does the climate change extremely? Part 2

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  Does the climate change extremely? Part 2 Was Al Gore an alarmist? Are there no more extreme climate events than there used to be? As I wrote in the previous post, a close family member said "[He] does not deny that there is a climate, or that it changes".  I looked at the claims made about the global climate made by a Dutch political party and we discussed the first one they made. Loosely speaking, they say the climate is always changing and it's now a bit hotter and it used to be a bit colder and it was a bit hotter before that. We looked at the global temperature record and found that it definitely does change and that the story they tell focuses on the Northern Hemisphere. The global temperature has gone up - despite the current active trend - and it is accelerating rapidly. In this post we look at their second claim, that " extreme climate events do not happen more frequently or cause more damage than historic events of a similar nature ". Is there no in

“I do not deny there is a climate, or that it changes”

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  “I do not deny there is a climate, or that it changes” This was said to me by a close family member. I called it a "standard opening line" for climate denialism. At the same time, I do not want to dismiss my family member completely. So I wanted to discuss in a medium where I can take my time to investigate different arguments in-depth to see what they entail. This also allows me to provide source material. I'm actively drawing from claims made on the Climate page of a political party in the Netherlands. The first claim is, paraphrased, "The climate has changed in the past, therefore, change is nothing to worry about". In this post, I will take these claims at face value. Therefore, I will look into the periods, the changes involved, and their causes. In a second post, which I hope to write after this, I will review a second claim made by the page. This claim boils down to, "extreme climate events do not happen more frequently or cause more damage than h

Covid19 data guide: Is R for naught?

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Introduction Tesla re-opens its California plant and the US starts to lift measures across the country. The Netherlands slowly eases out of its ‘intelligent lockdown’. But does the data agree that this is the right time? In this blog, I will try to show common statistics and explain how to look at them. I will refer to "the coronavirus" as COVID19 . A small disclaimer; I'm not actually a health professional, virologist, or epidemics expert. I'm a former junior physicist and have been a data engineer for years. I will supply my sources at the end. Please follow the advice of your local disease control agencies and government. I have composed a small report in Google Datastudio with data from Google Public Datasets –specifically the dataset JHU Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases, by country - Johns Hopkins University – to accompany the images in this blog. Global active cases. Bubbles are sized in proportion to the number of current active cases. The sideba