
Met Office: global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years - muterad_murilax
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/06/met-office-global-warming-could-exceed-1-point-5-c-in-five-years
======
uxcolumbo
Scientists also warned that we have around 12 years to avoid a climate
catastrophe [1].

And some scientists [2] claim the next decade can be very challenging - more
droughts which can cause crop failures - causing food security issues and in
worse cases some kind of societal collapse, the famous 9 meals to anarchy.

What are your views? Are these scientist just mega alarmist?

Do you worry about climate change in the near term?

Are you changing your strategy, e.g. planning to live more self sustainable
and move away from cities?

Do you think we could go extinct this century if the world doesn't take this
climate emergency serious and launch something like a Manhatten project to
tackle it?

[1] [https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/scary-un-
clima...](https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/scary-un-climate-
change-report)

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-w...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-
warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report)

[2] [http://www.scientistswarning.org/critical-
stress/climate/](http://www.scientistswarning.org/critical-stress/climate/)

~~~
xbmcuser
In the 1980s we needed to do something about Carbon production. Where they
knew that otherwise it will be too late by 2000. Now it's year 2019 we are
30-40 years late already. Climate Change is going to happen the only question
is now how much and looking at the way countries and world leaders are
reacting it's too little to late most of us below the age of 50 are going to
see it first hand.

~~~
uxcolumbo
Yes, James Hansen (ex NASA scientist) warned us in the 80s and has been
campaigning for this since. His view seems to be not enough is being done.

So how are you planning to change your life in the next decade, i.e. are you
looking to move to the country side with more land so you can be more self
sufficient (permaculture) as cities will become more dangerous to live in or
do you think it will be just a case of food being a bit more expensive and it
being a bit hotter.

I'm struggling to understand whether near term it will drastically change our
lifes or whether it's something to really worry about post 2050.

~~~
dagw
_are you looking to move to the country side with more land so you can be more
self sufficient_

Isn't that a terrible thing to do from environmental perspective. Surely using
that land for smartly run large scale industrial farms that ship their produce
to large distribution points in the center of dense cities could produce far
more calories pr. total gram of greenhouse gas emitted.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Yes. I suppose the other way of looking at it is smartly run and managed farms
feeding dense cities is a solution for a world where politicians, countries
and corporations are doing something substantive about climate change. A world
where the supply chains won't break, and the little people won't bear the
brunt.

In the world we actually occupy, moving to some rural high ground with a few
acres, and as off-grid as possible, to weather a possible Mad Max future looks
less and less idiotic.

------
AgentME
When I imagine history books written decades from now and how they will
portray our time, I can't imagine any possibility other than them picturing us
nearly entirely as cartoonishly and maliciously-stupid idiots for ignoring the
problem and voting in people who treat the problem as a joke. Even if things
happen to work out by luck, future generations will know we didn't apply
ourselves and act on what we knew. I know I'm getting into rudely political
territory for HN and polite conversational standards, but we're watching a
terrible action in slow motion and we've convinced ourselves that it's rude to
interrupt the perpetrators.

------
makerofspoons
There is a 10% chance there could be a year in which the average temperature
rise exceeds 1.5 degrees.

This sentence is key: "Climatologists stressed this did not mean the world had
broken the Paris agreement 80 years ahead of schedule because international
temperature targets are based on 30-year averages."

The title is misleading.

~~~
throwaway5752
That's more of a policy thing than a temperature thing. Nature will care about
the current year (yes - perhaps even further on longer term trends like
aquifer depletion and ice cap melting), not the trailing 30 year average.

To highlight the distinction, we could have a 10 deg C increase next year.
That would end life as we know it, but would only move the trailing 30 year
average .3 deg C.

Also from the article

 _" The recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report
on warming of 1.5C, highlighted the calamitous difference even a fraction of a
degree above could make to coral reefs, Arctic ecosystems and hundreds of
millions of lives. Starting now, the report said emissions would have to be
cut by 45% by 2030 to have any chance of holding to that level."_

tl;dr - the headline is 100% accurate and appropriate.

------
poelzi
Sorry, but 1.5 °C is long gone...
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.htm)

Just to emphasis the current state: if you would replace every dirty man made
machine with something clean, we get a temperature increase by easily 1.5 °C
in 3-6 Month. That is known since the last decade, just the amount changed a
lot...

------
radford-neal
For a more sane assessment of issues like this, see

[http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearcho...](http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearchorguk-
costs-of.html)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
There is nothing there that invalidates, or questions the sanity of the
feature article at all.

In a world of rising temperature, the highest temperatures will tend to be
most recent.

The 1.5°C figure is based on a 30 year rolling average. There will be
individual high and low years making up that average.

There is an increasing chance, assessed at 10%, of one of those high points
breaching 1.5°C. The rolling average will trail behind as is the point of
rolling averages.

So a sane estimate from the Met Office, an organisation with good track record
on climate.

~~~
radford-neal
But why would "breaching" 1.5C in a single year, due to random variability, be
of any particular significance?

Note that we're talking about _global average_ temperature, which doesn't
translate into anything much for the local temperature in any spot you might
be concerned about.

Note also that we may well have been breaching 1.5C now and then for
millennia, due to random variability. (Well, also because global temperatures
back about 7000 years ago may have been generally higher than today.)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Why? The temperature in and of itself matters less than the total energy in
the system and whether it supports life as we know it and the systems we've
built to depend on it.

If we go through a temporary spell where temperatures are ahead of the
average, thanks to alignment of various factors like El Niño etc, we get to
see a flavour of what's coming. Just like the recent heat wave in Europe, or
more extreme storms, perhaps even extreme cold events, changes to trade winds
or Gulf Stream etc and local areas of cooling.

Who knows what will tip over the edge from borderline into extinct or broken?
Who knows what previously unforeseen consequences will result? Or how near to
uninhabitable some places become. Perhaps Australia, perhaps somewhere more
populous like cities in India or Bangladesh.

The significance then, is a taste of things to come may provoke action, or
even acceptance among those who pretend it's not happening. The trend is so
clear I don't have too much hope here.

It's mostly academic what temperatures were 7,000 years ago. There were a
minuscule fraction of today's population with only somewhere under 20m humans
globally. Living an undeveloped lifestyle. No global agriculture with fragile
global supply chains and production targets. Plenty of animals to hunt, plenty
of extra land owned by no one, no hard borders. Plenty of local deaths due to
drought, flood or pestilence too.

Yet even with a tiny number of humans, archaeology points to local climatic
changes as prime suspect of the fall many civilisations including the ancient
Egyptian.

