It's presented as a fact check of an article on The Daily Sceptic, but in reality that article is reporting on the conclusions of several scientific papers, triggered by this one [1] published by a trio of Polish researchers. That paper goes into more detail on the underlying physics than ClimateFeedback's own explanation does, which isn't really mentioned until the very end. ClimateFeedback really should link directly to the sources of the claims they're arguing with.
After reading the ClimateFeedback article, the comments from climatologists, the Daily Sceptic post and scan reading the Kubicki paper, I can't quite work out what they think they're disagreeing with. All sources agree that CO2 impact is logarithmic, i.e. doubling CO2 concentration doesn't cause a linear increase in temperature. The argument seems to be some sort of semantic dispute over whether a logarithmic function can ever be said to truly saturate or stop growing. That is clearly uninteresting. What matters is the actual curves and the actual impact in reality.
This problem appears explicitly in the paragraph after figure 5:
> It is worth noting that although the slope becomes more gradual, the resulting global warming is still predicted to have negative consequences for humans and ecosystems. As explained by the IPCC, “risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change escalate with every increment of global warming.”
"damages ... escalate with every increment of global warming" is a very unclear statement. They jump from arguing concrete facts about physics to vague statements about damages without any kind of quantities attached.
They also say the claim they're debunking isn't precise enough due to not taking into account altitude, but again, the Kubicki paper they're actually arguing with does acknowledge this fact multiple times [2]. This seems like arguing with a strawman, or worse, that they haven't actually read the thing they're trying to debunk.
Finally, the Kubicki paper is actually making the more general argument that the various factors that affect the climate system (e.g. clouds, wind speeds) aren't well understood enough to make accurate predictions of the CO2-temperature link, and more experiments should be done to establish accurate physical data to feed into the models. The Daily Sceptic also claims that the function mapping CO2 levels to temperature (which is in turn not the same thing as damages) isn't known, and estimates vary drastically.
In the comments the invited climatologists seem to accept that this problem does exist but downplay it, saying only that their "best estimates" have a CI from 2 to 5 degrees. Haigh weighs in and says The gratuitous statement that these are “little more than guesses” couldn’t be further from the truth but then also the wide range results from uncertainties which is just a rephrasing. Also if you drop outliers (which the Daily Sceptic isn't doing but the IPCC does) then you can make your confidence seem arbitrarily high, but when the whole thrust of the article is about how expert climatologists are it doesn't seem fair to exclude some, just because their calculations are further from the mean.
[2] "It should be noted that CO2 absorption lines at different altitudes are narrower than CO2 absorption lines under atmospheric pressure", p6 and "it should be noted that unlike the used cuvette, the vertical
structure of the atmosphere undergoes changes in both pressure and temperature", p5
I'm no climate scientist, but at first blush the idea that warming from CO2 concentration levels off to insignificance at some level appreciably close to where we are doesn't pass the smell test, because of Venus. If CO2 concentration levelled off to insignificance at some point we could foreseeably reach in our children's children's children's lifetime, then I don't see how Venus can be at ~450°C from CO2 concentration. Clearly there's a huge amount of warming left to go from CO2 release.
If my back of the envelope calculation is correct, at the top of the atmosphere Venus should have about double the solar irradiance of Earth (simple inverse square law).
It would be interesting to know what average temperature Earth would be at if we simply moved it inwards.
And note that if you think "Maybe we shouldn't be worried until we understand this"
In the past ~14 months things have taken off in ways that nobody who studies this stuff can fully explain yet (leading theory: cleaner fuel -> less sulfur dioxide forcing). We're 4 to 5 standard deviations from the 30-year mean in sea surface temperature right now.
The half of the human population that lives in South, East, and Southeast Asia have been under oppressive heatwaves in the past few days that have taken a sizable death toll.
The USDA just adjusted its planting map using 2022 data and indicated that average winter low temperatures in the US have risen 2.5 degrees over the past 10 years, and continue to rise.
It's looking like extreme wet bulb events and the peripheral consequences of extreme wet bulb events are going to be perhaps the biggest consequence of failing to control CO2 emissions, as the estimate of survivable wet bulb temperatures have been revised down, their importance has been revised up, and the number of outlier heatwaves have ticked up (Vancouver? Really?!). Less sea level rise, less crop failures from weather pattern changes, less hurricanes. Billions of people who come to recognize that an unluckily sunny August week without a breeze can kill a majority of the local population, are going to want to mitigate that risk. Heat pump air conditioning & insulated housing for every single temperate & tropical human residence would work as an alternative... good luck with that. Fail to provide that and you get multifocal crises involving refugees, nativist/nationalist sentiments, infrastructure deficits, and wars of conquest.
Yes. Early estimates (1980s) indicated trouble around 2050-2100. Problems are appearing sooner than expected. Some problems were unexpected. Slow-moving storms, for example, causing flooding in areas that usually don't have flooding.
Small changes in ocean levels are amplified by rivers, which flood upstream because the water can't enter the ocean fast enough. Insurance companies are refusing to insure large regions.
After reading the ClimateFeedback article, the comments from climatologists, the Daily Sceptic post and scan reading the Kubicki paper, I can't quite work out what they think they're disagreeing with. All sources agree that CO2 impact is logarithmic, i.e. doubling CO2 concentration doesn't cause a linear increase in temperature. The argument seems to be some sort of semantic dispute over whether a logarithmic function can ever be said to truly saturate or stop growing. That is clearly uninteresting. What matters is the actual curves and the actual impact in reality.
This problem appears explicitly in the paragraph after figure 5:
> It is worth noting that although the slope becomes more gradual, the resulting global warming is still predicted to have negative consequences for humans and ecosystems. As explained by the IPCC, “risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change escalate with every increment of global warming.”
"damages ... escalate with every increment of global warming" is a very unclear statement. They jump from arguing concrete facts about physics to vague statements about damages without any kind of quantities attached.
They also say the claim they're debunking isn't precise enough due to not taking into account altitude, but again, the Kubicki paper they're actually arguing with does acknowledge this fact multiple times [2]. This seems like arguing with a strawman, or worse, that they haven't actually read the thing they're trying to debunk.
Finally, the Kubicki paper is actually making the more general argument that the various factors that affect the climate system (e.g. clouds, wind speeds) aren't well understood enough to make accurate predictions of the CO2-temperature link, and more experiments should be done to establish accurate physical data to feed into the models. The Daily Sceptic also claims that the function mapping CO2 levels to temperature (which is in turn not the same thing as damages) isn't known, and estimates vary drastically.
In the comments the invited climatologists seem to accept that this problem does exist but downplay it, saying only that their "best estimates" have a CI from 2 to 5 degrees. Haigh weighs in and says The gratuitous statement that these are “little more than guesses” couldn’t be further from the truth but then also the wide range results from uncertainties which is just a rephrasing. Also if you drop outliers (which the Daily Sceptic isn't doing but the IPCC does) then you can make your confidence seem arbitrarily high, but when the whole thrust of the article is about how expert climatologists are it doesn't seem fair to exclude some, just because their calculations are further from the mean.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266649682...
[2] "It should be noted that CO2 absorption lines at different altitudes are narrower than CO2 absorption lines under atmospheric pressure", p6 and "it should be noted that unlike the used cuvette, the vertical structure of the atmosphere undergoes changes in both pressure and temperature", p5