> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin.
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
I seem to recall that the first and second IPCC reports (I haven't read the newer ones) indicated that increases would continue for about 200 years, even if emissions went to zero.
The earth is indeed not in thermal equilibrium due to the speed of the recent CO2 increase, so warming would continue if atmospheric CO2 concentration would be held constant.
However, atmospheric CO2 concentration would not stay constant after emissions stop. It would go down slowly, mainly because it would continue to dissolve into the oceans. This effect cancels out the above point. Which is why the IPCC says that "The global temperature will stabilise when carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero."[1]
Unfortunately, stabilizing temperature does not mean that nothing else changes. The stable higher temperature will still mean that glaciers will continue to melt. Sea levels will continue to rise. Oceans will still acidify further.
Methane tipping points are already met, especially from tropical wetlands and the polar regions. Add to that the conversion of past carbon sinks to carbon emitters, such as the boreal forests and the Amazon and we are looking at a continued rise of both emissions and temps for a long time.
I know about the "flipped s-curve" that is methane emissions (inflection point in 2007) is it really considered a tipping point though? Do you have some good papers on that?
>The rapid growth in the atmospheric methane burden that began in late 2006 is very different from methane's past observational record
>Recent studies point to strongly increased emissions from wetlands, especially in the tropics
>This increase is comparable in scale and speed to glacial/interglacial terminations when the global climate system suddenly reorganized
Overall, there is a growing research output although much is still unknown. See for example:
Yes. IPCC AR6 estimates about 0.4-0.5C of warming is masked due to anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Given the conservative nature of IPCC estimates, it is probably more.
Yes yes the solution here is to physically move hundreds or thousands of years of capital investment, especially forms of capital investment that cannot be moved and are just abandoned/destroyed.
That way we can emit a bunch more to rebuild that already-built infrastructure in a different locale!
There's a lot of time though. It's more a matter of the kids or grandkids moving somewhere colder rather than anything sudden. And the biggest problem with building a new house up north is getting planning permission. The actual construction can be relatively trivial.
It's somewhat ironic all the billionaires are about space and mars and shit - like, ok, super in-hospitable, go for it. While we should be building our space fortresses and geo domes on earth to keep the elements out, and survive on some kind of lab food.
Of course not all the knowledge will be left but enough to easily build basic engines using Stirling or Carnot cycles or even pressurized steam. Solar panels don't have to be 25% efficient, 5% amorphous silicon cells would also be very useful.
On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky.
From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.
How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.
This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"
Depends where you live. I live in Vancouver, BC, and the effects here are very, very significant. It used to be that wildfire smoke in the city was super rare, but for the past ~10 years there’s been massive amounts of smoke in the city almost every summer. Weeks each summer where the air is filled with smoke, your throat itches non-stop, and it’s not healthy to be outside for extended periods. Virtually everyone agrees this is due to climate change, and it’s a pretty major negative impact on quality of living here, and pretty much everywhere along the west coast of North America.
Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.
Yeah agreed, I worded that poorly, there’s always multiple causes. Both logging and fire suppression are significant causes too.
It is worth noting, though:
- That paper cuts off at 2017. Things have gotten even worse recently: the previous high (on record) for hectares burned by wildfires in Canada was 7.1 million, this year we’re already at 16.5 million, and still growing quickly: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/simply-science/canadas-r...
It depends on your location I guess? I for one can definitely tell from my own experience, and I'm not even 30 yet.
Proper winter starts much later and is milder than before, it was 10+ degrees Celsius for the past five or so NYE (didn't even need a winter jacket), summer heat waves are more unbearable and last longer, we went from no serious issues with floods in the spring to a number of entire-towns-are-underwater levels of flooding...
Now some of these did happen before, but as an anomaly, definitely not something that happens multiple years in a row.
This is a fair point. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the temperatures in my area the year I was born. Our highest temperature of the year was 96F ... on September 24! Let me tell you, if we hit 96F two weeks from now, it'll be front page news and evidence of climate catastrophe.
I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.
You can't take the number outside of its context. We know the earth is warming, that's not up for contention anymore. When you hit a 50 year record high temperature, the implication is that it's only going to get hotter.
It's not "doom and gloom because it hit 96F"
It's "doom and gloom because it hit 96F and it's only gonna get hotter"
Except that just like the Air Force’s sunspot count, which is so blatantly false that NASA doesn’t even bother trying to get their own numbers to match up — the NOAA has been using statistical manipulation and outright fraud to create the appearance of global warming.
I honestly don't know what to do when people like you exist that confidently refute the scientific consensus based on whatever they read online.
You're why I think the world is doomed. We can't fix climate change when there's a bunch of people who want to be contrarians so bad they're willing to die over it.
No, I don't, because I never said that, because there was never scientific consensus around that. Anyway, I hope you live long enough to see the world burn.
I can experience it here in North Texas. We've had a lot more snow events in the past few years than the over a decade preceding. It used to be an every few years kind of thing, now there's a couple big ice storms every year. Massive difference.
And it swings the other way in the summer too. Yeah, it's Texas, its hot. Upper 90s most days in the peak summer time. Every now a bad summer with a lot of 100F days. Now every summer has streaks of well over 100F days. This summer alone has been the hardest one for me to experience here in my over thirty years in Texas.
Well, I'm not keeping records, but here (Czechia) the heat waves were really different from the past: twice in one summer for more than three weeks (in total), that simply never happened (I believe I remember reliably - public records agree -, because I don't have AC, so I have to consistently measure temperature and manage it by closing windows at 6 AM, closing the drapes, and during night by creating draft).
The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.
You are right, the changes are small and usually hard to see directly.
But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.
It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.
If policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that).
Separately, I wonder if a geoengineering megaproject is more likely to be funded than small incremental changes due to politicians perceiving more immediate ROI, peer clout, and poll ratings.
> If policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that).
Do you honestly see them changing in the following years? We had Paris 8 years ago and the only thing that caused a small, one-year dip in our emissions was a deadly pandemic...
I do, because there is an entire generation steeped in understanding of climate change already taking up policital roles. Minds may be changing (but not fast enough) so intead the politicians changing will be what saves us.
It wasn’t deadly pandemic that did that; it was biz owners complying with orders to let workers stay at home and not commute in and work their jobs that depend on it. Society didn’t collapse either. It’s a decision.
And how much did it cost? It didn't collapse because we printed trillions of dollars, but now we have a huge debt and inflation, which has made poor people even poorer, especially in poorer countries where food insecurity has resurfaced. If it were a sustainable solution, we would have already implemented it.
> Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere
That's hard to imagine, because Norway exported a huge amount of pollution to the rest of the world in order to finance their current policy of green technology adoption. Not everyone has that nice ratio of oil and tiny population.
That's actually the whole deal, even if policies change drastically in the right direction we're still completely screwed. Not quite as screwed but still not notably less. If we stopped our civilization covid-style on a dime and didn't emit any greenouse gasses at all from now on, we're still mostly screwed in the near term. Delayed effects are a bitch.
And policies will only gradually change at best, only after the effects are plainly seen and when it's laughably beyond too late.
Take a genuine look at the science. Scientists themselves are freaking out. There’s no way out of the famine and heat and just the general Collapse that will kill billions.
What's even better is that net zero isn't doing anything for _already emitted carbon_, or the already accumulated heat energy. We can get to net zero and average temperature is still going to keep rising.
I think there are solutions, question is when these will be implemented. I'm referring to planting more trees to cool down cities so that avg temp will decrease, routing rivers/water through city to increase even more the cooling effect (like city of Bishkek)
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.