That was my first reaction too. A perfect fit for a cover image of a story. Also generally when referencing something within an article you want to display a figure before talking about it.
Plotting it this way is just a shift and rescaling. As the other commenter already showed this will lead to a plot that looks pretty much the same in terms of difference relative to the past data. I think standard deviation makes sense here since we don’t really have an innate sense of what is a meaningful change in ocean surface temperature and the point is to show that we are already far beyond normal here.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's a hallmark of a low-effort comment that it is not even terminated with a period, and this is the case with many of your comments.
Communication about truth is also hard when against decades of industry, talk radio, right-wing media, and Republican propaganda lying about the climate. And humans, with very little scientific or critical thinking skills, felt comfort in the lie that "everything is ok!". Getting past a person's discomfort in order for them to accept truth is a high hill.
Please don't post flame bait on HN, including population-wide swipes like “the ignorance of the common human being”. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If it's true “in this particular case”, it's true of every other case too, and thus it's not really a substantive assertion. It's just a fact of life that affects everything, and pointing it out in this particular instance reeks of “shouting into the void”. Sure it might be cathartic but it doesn't move us any closer to a solution, and serves only to make us more miserable. In HN guidelines terms it can be seen as fulmination or curmudgeonliness, which we're specifically trying to avoid here.
It would be much better to think about novel ways of overcoming the issue and sharing that in the spirit of curious conversation, which is the primary ethos of HN.
I have spend so much time and energy in the last 6 years talking about it, trying to do stuff, isn't it sometimes valid to just respond like this to at least have a short outlet?
After all i didn't create an original comment, i leveraged a response instead.
I'm not sure if you're being actively malicious or just a great example of how lies can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, but your comment is a great example of what we're up against here.
If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.
That's a lot of assumptions about me based on "the important figure should be at the top of the page, not the bottom". Joe Average isn't going to want to read 14 paragraphs before getting to the actual graph the title mentions
It maybe would, if people were to read it in the first place.
But they don't: they go to the comments here first and try to get the gist of reactions, in order to save themselves the time to actually read the piece.
You pretend, it wasn't trivial for people to scroll down to the graph. Such things aren't the issue at all.
The reactions you cause with your comment above are.
I doubt my single comment about the design choices of the article is turning people off from seeing what the article is about. I'm stressing that the graph is actually important to see, not saying "the design is bad so you shouldn't read this article". And given people's attention spans these days, I'd imagine reading 14 paragraphs to find the graph the title talks about might be non-trivial
"The point isn't whether it's true about you in particular" - then wtf are you saying? That this person can say true things but is still wrong?
I agree with them, and I also agree with the concern in the article. Both can be right. And I think you're off base here with all your unfounded assumptions and straw-manning.
If you want to to down that road the article reads like AI slop which cooks the planet itself with energy use. Or, alternately, if the message is that important it is all the more important that it be communicated effectively.
