The problem are not yearly averages, but outliers. Never cross a river that is on average 4 feet deep. As long as extreme cold somewhat "compensate" extreme heat your average temperature may not be so different from what it is today, but your day to day life may not be exactly enjoyable, to say the least.
Frequent enough extreme weather events can ruin crops, damage infrastructure and make unreliable to live there for the long term, even for industrialized countries. Once in a century extreme weather events are happening every few years now. And no countries are safe from that.
About reaching global yearly average temperature of 2ºC by 2050, we already reached 1.5ºC as global average temperature for some days. This year, due to El Niño conditions that officially started some weeks ago, we are breaking records so bad that there is a big enough visible gap against the trends on the last 40+ years. The change is not smooth nor linear. And we are getting conditions that defies any average.
Global averages are not the same as the temperature you are feeling right now. If that global average rises doesn't mean that your local temperature will rise that amount over what it used to be the same day 100 years ago. You should see it as the increase of the energy of the climate system, that will bring more extreme weather events (even cold ones) and reaching new peaks.
Think in the increase of surface sea temperature from https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ that we are seeing today, that would be equivalent to maybe millions of times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb (to put it easier to understand terms). It is not that the planet heated that amount suddenly in the last few months, but that the extra heat we've been receiving and keeping all this years has been circulating through the system, something is being emitted back, some may had hit saturation points, and some positive feedback loops probably has been triggered.
And those feedback loops with their corresponding tipping points are the reason why we drew the line in 1.5ºC. Not because your thermostat would be 1.5ºC higher, but because by then the system may reach a stage where things will increasingly worsen a lot by themselves, even without our action.
Extreme weather events, not really a big deal. More rain, more snow, hurricanes aren’t a big deal if buildings are built up to code.
Crops dying could be a problem, except are crops really exposed to enough heat during the day that will kill them off entirely? Surely the night will provide cooler temperatures. Won’t some crops develop heat resistance? Can’t we change the times of year in which we plant and harvest?
The oceans dying and becoming devoid of life sucks, but aside from a lack of sea food what does it mean for humans? The ocean isn’t a place most of us will spend much time visiting, if at all. Maybe kelp farms will thrive.
Trying to find some hope in a world that will refuse to change its behavior.
Things won't stop changing, and they will do that for worse. That is the scary part of feedback loops, is easy to get exponential. We have feedback loops that increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (and don't forget that water vapor is one of the most powerful) and so increasing how much heat Earth retains, and and feedback loops that increase warming (like less albedo because less ice). And hitting tipping points mean that things will go irreversibly in that direction after hitting them.
At some point we will reach runaway climate change, and it will be game over.
Cooling Degree Days seem to have varying definitions (from other references):
> Cooling degree days (CDDs) are a widely used measure of heat exposure and cooling demand. It measures how much the mean temperature exceeds a reference temperature each day over a given period, using the dry bulb temperature. For example, considering 18ºC as the baseline temperature for CDD calculation, a day with a mean outdoor temperature of 30°C, has 12 CDDs (30-18). If the next day has a mean temperature of 28°C, it has 10 CDDs. The total for the two days is, therefore, 22
CDDs.
> Degree days are measures of how cold or warm a location is. A degree day compares the mean (the average of the high and low) outdoor temperatures recorded for a location to a standard temperature, usually 65° Fahrenheit (F) in the United States. The more extreme the outside temperature, the higher the number of degree days. A high number of degree days generally results in higher levels of energy use for space heating or cooling.
So this all seems quite arbitrary. As everything warms I suspect that we'll be adjusting that base temp from 18'C/65'F to something warmer that is still tolerable. In the summer I find 24'C indoor temps to be just fine as long as humidity doesn't get too high.
Most (very) cold countries actually. This will require adjustments (like for Canada with its wildfires) but over time these cold countries shall (net) benefit.
A very significant part of Russia is permafrost. As climate gets warm, more of permafrost land is melting. It's not really clear the consequences of this process. It releases trapped CO2, it changes ecosystems, it transforms solid land into a swamp.
I'm not claiming that you're not correct. Cold climate requires spending truly enormous energy and resources to heat people, to build warm houses, to craft warm clothes. Cold climate harvests very lesser amounts of wheat and other plants and animals. This is extremely big part of equation.
There's a fun youtuber called vagabond, who train hops around Russia and Europe.
He had a video showing buildings build on permafrost. They lift the buildings up off the ground so none of the heating heat touches the ground and weakens the foundations.
I fully expect if the permafrost goes soggy, most of the settled north will just sink into the bog.
If someone is wondering why: much of Siberian land is difficult to develop due to permafrost. 65% of Russian territory, which comes up to 11.1 km2, is permafrost. Almost all of it is owned by the state/military and they probably couldn't give less of a fuck about any negative consequences.
I live in Wisconsin, a northern US state that you'd think would benefit from warmer temperatures. But we've spent all summer under the smoke of Canadian wildfires, and we're also experiencing drought conditions, which is obviously not good for farming.
It's going to require some changes on how forests are maintained, but there will still be trees in Canada. In countries which are warmer and drier, they clean their forests and build large alleys so that a wildfire may be contained to a smaller area.
This will require some investment, but there are other areas where it's clear that Canada is going to become a large beneficiary of global warming.
Yeah we get all the tropical storms battering us year round, like the one this past week, and warming might mean they get more intense. plus its not like global warming means we get more sun during the bleak winters. Maybe germany and poland will benefit more then us.
Why is 350ppm the perfect concentration? Higher is better for plants, because most are carbon limited, for example. The Carboniferous era, whose biosphere sequestered so much carbon, had far higher concentrations.
I’m not disagreeing, but that seemed like a statement out of the blue.
Are you sure you didn't mean 250 ppm? That's a lot closer to what it was 200 years ago. 350 ppm is around 1990 levels and it is hard to see how 1990 levels would be what life was made for.
Any interesting links around why 350 is the target? I searched and everyone keeps quoting the same climate guru without any reasoning behind why that number specifically was chosen.
CO2 was below 400 PPM for the last 5 million years and around 350 PPM was the last 100 000 years. It's just the number the nature stabilized at, before human civilization changed it.
Historically life endured all kinds of PPM up to 2000 and above. So probably nature will adapt.
Australia is 57th in supplementary table 5 of the linked paper, which adjusts for urban areas only. I assume that coastal areas (where the cities are) are impacted more under this CDD measure than deserts (which is what most of Australia is).
