>The image below, created with NASA data while using a 1903-1924 custom base, illustrates that the temperature anomaly through July 2024 has been above 1.5°C for the past 13 months.
Surprise to no one.
The way things are going I believe we will hit +2c by 2040. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living, it is human nature. Because of that, many of the young will be forced into a bad condition.
The only thing that could probably stop this, but will be just as bad, is a Yellowstone Event :(
The standard of living is something very dynamic though. It's more about perception than anything.
It's normal that people want "better" than what their parents had, question is what is "better". If lots of people would see "better" (for example) as "less polluted town, where you enjoy walking" and NOT "more place to be in your car", things would fix themselves given some time.
Nowadays there are many opportunities (high speed trains to replace some flights, e-bikes to allow bikes in non-flat cities, insulation to reduce heating, rather cheap renewable energy), so it's not all lost UNLESS people want specifically something very bad (exaggerating: "I love my coal plan!")
Respectfully, your favourite example depresses me. Pre-2013 or so I would have agreed, but North America, when faced with "Too many parents are accidentally running over their children in driveways and parking lots", chose to mandate backup cameras instead.
The mandate didn't make the US less open to that, it's just that the US is so in love with cars that we don't seriously consider alternatives to driving as solutions to anything. If there was a meeting and the topic was "what to do about the gigantic number of car-related deaths every year", and someone said "maybe we stop driving so much and give people other options of getting around?" they would be laughed out of the room.
Shooting someone, lethally or otherwise, for laughing at you, is seen as an appropriate response in open-carry states? If it is, maybe the people pushing for such laws should drop the "Snowflake" line and take a look in the mirror, because this shit is not normal.
And if it's not, what's the point of this comment? To look tough online?
Different times, different solutions. Backup cameras were not a solution in 1970's Netherlands otherwise maybe it would have been considered.
Idea was that things are not set into stone and change faster than we realize. And there will always be good and bad examples (and if I think about it, probably the backup cameras solution nowadays is not that bad anyhow).
The problem is that you cannot bring it to 0%. It's impossible to have people not use cars in many parts of the world due to adverse weather, physical limitations, etc. there's already a large transition to EVs happening so the actual engine emissions are going down.
Other things like coal burning factories can be actually brought to 0. Same with electrifying homes and connecting them to renewable energy for 0 perceived change (if the grid supported it). That will also help making EVs actual net zero.
Lots of other opportunities that can drive people away from emissions without meaningfully asking them to change their lives or to completely rebuild civil infrastructure.
No one but extremists say it must be brought to 0% immediately. It's that removing all but the most necessary ICE burning, bringing it from 10% emissions to 1% would do a lot! Lots of people actually want more pedestrian friendly places to live. Let's do more to make this plentiful and affordable to the people that do want them. We'll get a lot more bicycles than cars. Most people would rather live and bike around Amsterdam than drive their ICE around parking lots in a typical American suburb. America got short-sighted and into long term infra debt by prioritizing cars everywhere instead of pedestrian / public-transit cores like many places in the world. Individuals can selfishly want it to keep going longer, but it's only going to be worse for everyone and their children as it creaks under the bad infra we've set up.
These are not waste of time. We are past the point where just lowering emissions would be enough.
I think people don't understand how climate change works. On a human significant time scale, every gram of CO2 you emit mostly just stay there. A small part disolves in the oceans but that's it. The rest will forever contribute to the Earth greenhouse effect.
The goal which was set in the Paris agreement is reaching net zero. We are aiming to entirely stop emitting GHC. Everything which is emitting today needs to stop or be offset. I repeat: everything. That obviously includes transports, an area which moreover is fairly easy to clean especially for a country as rich as the USA.
“No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living”
Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
In 2024 why are we worried about AI using too much electricity? Because we never decarbonized the grid. 25 years of saying “let’s use nuclear power “ was shot down. Not to worry, global peak fossil fuels by 2030.
Here in Germany lack of individual sacrifice is absolutely a big part of the problem. NIMBYs protest the construction of new transmission towers at every step because "it ruins the landscape". And when the power company caves in and decides to burry high-voltage transmission lines instead the NIMBYs still fight them because the waste heat might turn some grass brown and reduce some crop yields. The end result is that when there's lots of wind in the North of the country the South still has to run coal or gas plants because we can't transport enough electricity across the country. And don't even get me started about the silly opposition to wind energy, and regional politicians that make ridiculous minimum distance laws to appeal to those voters.
I'm not demanding that everyone only bikes to work and lives off their garden and locally grown produce, but it would be nice if we could all agree on a level of personal sacrifice that involves not sabotaging the decarbonization of the grid for selfish reasons.
Germany's bigger problem is caving to the anti-Nuclear sentiment, which, sure, NIMBYs (or environmentalists as they call themselves today) had a hand in defeating.
>> No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living
> Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
Not the OP, but I think the statement holds even when talking about systemic solutions.
We're reaching breakpoints with climate change faster than expected, and we only started to decouple _some_ country's economic growth from CO2 in the last 10 years or so. Even if we can in theory decouple growth from CO2 completely (or near completely) and in so doing maintain the standard of living we enjoy in the global north, in practice we aren't doing it fast enough.
If we want to get emissions under control fast enough to not hit 2 degrees of warming I think it's reasonable to say that the solution will involve a reduction in some standards of living, and that is something no one wants to say because of how hard a sell it is.
We are at the point where the energy grid is hampering EV adoption and technological (AI) progress - optimistically there is a real economic incentive that renewables will pick up the pace now, pessimistically it's too late.
I think that's a bad attitude. It's very possible that it's too late for an unmodified climate, but with some combination of solar radiation management and a record-setting transition to renewables, our civilization could make it out in (something like) one piece.
What's depressing is all the people who are still trying to disrupt that chance, even now.
Please explain to me, why individual sacrifice is not a solution to the problem. I really am interested what people are thinking here. Naively it would seem that individual sacrifice is surely one possible (though certainly not the only) solution or at least an important contributor. Simply because less consumption directly translates into less greenhouse gas emissions. However, a lot of people dismiss this out of hand. I never fully get why.
Individual sacrifice is a solution. If everybody ate a bullet today, we would drastically reduce greenhouse gas production. Problem solved?
Of course, declaring it as a solution is the easy bit. The hard bit is actually doing it, and this is where I see personal sacrifice falling short. I assume mass ritual suicide isn't what you had in mind, so what level of personal sacrifice is appropriate? How do you convince people? Are there rewards for adherence of penalties for not? If the government provides incentives, is it still "personal" sacrifice? I heard China and India are the biggest contributors these days, shouldn't they be the ones sacrificing instead of me? How many vegans does it take to offset one new AI datacenter?
It's like asking "why don't we just emit less?" Right, that's the problem. What are you proposing?
Ok, point taken. Saying that individual sacrifice is a solution is not saying much. But can we agree that it is saying something? And that that something is better than handwaving at big corporations?
As for concrete proposals, I don‘t have any. I don’t think that there need to be universal prescriptions. if everybody takes a good look what he or she really needs for a fulfilled life and what in the end are luxuries. I honestly think that that is enough. But I think the responsibility to decide there is real even if it is in no way enforced. And it should not be easily dismissed.
I think they're both pretty handwavy. In my opinion, both diagnose the problem correctly (we consume too much), but both lack actionable advice beyond that.
I don't think I've experienced many quick dismissals. Here's some of the conversations around personal responsibility I've personally experienced:
- reduce reuse recycle (this was drilled into my head at a young age)
- plastic vs paper vs reusable supermarket bags (pretty trivial)
- plastic vs paper straws (infuriatingly banal)
- EVs vs ICE vehicles (currently the only viable options are luxury cars, cutting a whole segment of the population out of the market)
- reduce meat consumption (as unpopular as it is effective)
- do not have children (extreme, extremely polarizing)
- reduce air travel (easy in theory, I just really like travel)
While it is heartening to hear that you have not heard many quick dismissals of personal responsibility (it really is), I certainly have quite often (and among them is the GP above, whose comment prompted me to ask for an explanation).
I concede that both attributions (personal or corporate) might be handwavy. Let's continue to wave our hands in both directions not only in one, is all I want to say.
From an article I read recently (https://www.earthday.org/dear-big-oil-its-you-not-me/), it states that individual contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is only a small percentage and that industry and refining is to blame for nearly all of it.
From another article even more recently (no link, was on HN recently) it shows that energy usage by the biggest companies is up a significant percentage (30-50%) and that they won't hit their carbon-neutral or carbon-zero targets. All of this increase is because of investment in "AI" and its massive energy requirements.
So even if you were doing all you could to reduce your impact, all it takes is a single person in charge of one of these companies to do something like build out a datacentre or build a new plant or dig a new coal mine, and all your hard work is for naught.
Mmh, I don't see how the article you linked in the first paragraph gives clear figures regarding individual greenhouse gas emissions. It says that 80% can be _linked_ to 57 Big Oil companies, but that does not mean that these 80% were caused by the companies (they didn't order the cars/trucks/ships to drive and deliver shiny products, they didn't fly in the planes etc.) so I am somewhat hesitant and would like to see more figures for the claim that only a small percentage is _caused_ by individuals. What greenhouse gas emission is in the end not also linked to some bloke wanting a shiny new thing to play with, a great experience or simply a piece of meat?
I am sympathetic to the argument that a simple persons influence is small compared to that of a company CEO. But of course there are many more simple people and their influence together is cumulative.
I still see very much a shared responsibility. Big firms could easily do better, but individuals could as well. In the face of the magnitude of the problem, can we really ignore any part of the equation? Can we really say that only the corporate world has to change or that the corporate world has to change first, when we need change on every level, corporate and individual, as fast as possible?
In developed societies it doesn't make sense to let individuals solve collective problems.
For instance you might sacrifice flying to save the climate but airlines actually have CO2 quotas. So if you aren't flying somebody else is likely going to take your place because it will be cheap. CO2 quotas will be reduced year by year so flying will get more expensive and you will move from individual sacrifice to market dynamics.
> In developed societies it doesn't make sense to let individuals solve collective problems.
This is simply restating the dismissal that OP brought up, not providing an answer. The example does not do much as CO2 quotas are nowhere near universal.
It’s highly disincentivized by basic game theory. Any individual sacrifice has highly negative effects on the individual player, and undetectable positive effects on the problem we’re supposed to be solving.
What principle of basic game theory would that be? You also need to justify the incredibly strong assumption that "any sacrifice" has "highly negative effects" on the individual player. An immediate counterexample would be beef consumption. For many people, reducing their intake would have positive effects on their health.
I'll raise my hand here. The anxiety of seeing the Earth on an inevitable path towards ruin became overwhelming for me a few years ago. In order to deal with it, I have made some sacrifices. I live with roommates in order to reduce my energy use. I eat in ways that are more sustainable. I do not fly on planes. I drive a very efficient car and would walk/bike more, but I have a bad hip and am already fairly limited by it. The car still causes me some guilt. I don't believe that my individual sacrifices make any difference at all, and perhaps are just my own way of engaging in denial.
> Please explain to me, why individual sacrifice is not a solution to the problem
Technological progress that leads to higher quality of life is a far better solution than individual sacrifice, not at the least because unlike individual sacrifice, it is self-incentifying.
For example, in a large percentage of the developed world, we don't need to burn fossil fuels directly anymore to heat indoor spaces. Heat pumps (even those powered by fossil fueled electric grids) reduce both overall CO2 emissions and improve indoor and local air quality, all of which improve individual, community, and global quality-of-life, so therefore no "sacrifice". It's similar for electrified transport (both personal and mass transit), and manufacturing.
The problem is that switching to newer emissions-free technology can be capital-intensive in the short term. In the long term it is not only cheaper, but will improve average quality of life.
If the entire US residential sector were magically made emission free with everything else remaining the same, global output would be 37.24 billion metric tons instead - negligibly different and still the highest ever recorded.
I don't have figures for the EU available, but you figure it'd be a similar order of magnitude for residential. So if we just estimated it to be about the same, and made the entire EU zero-emission as well, we'd be at 36.93 billion metric tons, which is about where they were in 2018-2019, as well as 2021 due to the pandemic.
Now, you may say: ok, what about transportation and etc? In the US, it's about 28% of emissions from transportation, and of those, 57% are light duty vehicles (including most personal vehicles) - see https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-.... That was from 2022, but if we assume the percentages were about the same in 2023, they'd be about 767 million metric tons (=4.807 * .57 * .28).
So if we magically made all US residential AND personal vehicle emissions go to 0, global emissions would be 36.47 metric tons or about 2017-2018 levels.
If you again assume the EU is around the same as the US, and magically made all US/EU emissions go to 0, we'd have 35.394 metric tons of CO2, or about where levels were hovering in 2013-2016.
TL;DR: if you magically made the entire US residential and personal transport sectors 100% emissions free, global CO2 emissions would only go back to where they were in 2017-2018. If you throw the EU in as well we'd be in the 2013-2016 range.
True, residential emissions and personal transport might not make up the majority of emissions (though they make up a sizable amount). However, the effect of personal choices is not restricted to these two sectors. What things you buy and how often you buy new things an where they are built or grown, directly influences transportation and manufacturing of these goods. If we want to effectively combat climate change, we might need to consume less overall not only watch emissions at home or from personal transport.
Or maybe, for those not totally lost to climate change denial propaganda, there was always low hanging fruit that would have made our lives better and saved money and we just didn't do it because of climate change denial propaganda?
Insulating houses?
More efficient hybrid cars?
A carbon fee that is returned to the people, mildly diverting the market incentives towards cleaner, greener while putting money in ordinary people's pockets?
Fixing pipeline leaks, moving from coal to methane, from gas boilers to heat pumps, solar water heaters, better urban planning, public transport, modern agriculture, recycling food waste, better landfill design, the list goes on and on.
Imagine the head start we'd have had, and how the market for solar wind and batteries would have been expedited. But no, we spent decades pretending there wasn't a problem and that those who believed there was a problem were Marxists trying to undermine capitalism.
It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs some investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive.
Individual change has been promoted for 40 years if not more. Promoting it isn't fixing the underlying problem, though I'm sure it makes some people feel better about where they stand on the self-sacrifice ladder when they have others to look down on.
It has been suggested that the whole individual change movement was created to distract the populace from the actual big polluters. Like answering the question of "Why do we keep extracting coal and oil?" with "Why don't you look at your own consumption and reduce that first".
> Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment.
Right, as long as energy prices are not guaranteed no one is going to invest massively. No one want to be the one having to eat up a 8000$/mwh price like in Texas in the Winter. The 3 month mean volatility of energy prices in Europe is 350% (with peak of more than 1500% in 2009 and 2021). For comparison Bitcoin volatility is 54% in the last 10 years.
Could you elaborate on your point I a bit? I think you are making a good point but I am not fully grokking it. Are you looking at the investment on the utility’s level or the individual level? Wouldn’t high variability provide an “insurance justification” for individuals to push solar / battery or similar? Who eats the $8000/mwh currently that wouldn’t be able to justify renewables on just that basis?
We could effectively geoengineer one by pumping things into the upper atmosphere ourselves, but there's a lot of questions about that and we have no idea if this would help more than it hurt.
"Bad condition" is an understatement. We are already being badly hit by stronger, more frequent and more extended extreme weather. Massive heatwaves, flooded cities or cities running out of drinking water are seen as the new normal by now, and that was a process that took relatively few years. And that will be worse in ways that we might not imagine yet, even if we could label them as obvious in hindsight.
A higher global average temperature is not just a few tenths of degrees higher temperature in your normal day, it is the global climate system with a lot of extra energy, the triggering and empowering a bunch of positive feedback loops that push the change pedal down, and the impact that all of that have in other systems, like agriculture or economy.
It is a so complex system that the warming could even trigger an ice age, or quite the opposite of that, but in either case, it will be far worse than just bad for the people living through it. Disrupting a complex system we depend on is simply suicidal.
It's entirely possible that this is temporary due to the Tonga eruption because what is being reported is exactly in line with what the study said was going to happen...temporarily.
Here is the study from Nature Climate Change in 2022.
"Tonga eruption increases chance of temporary surface temperature anomaly above 1.5 °C"
In the first graph, the "Lowess Smoothing" line seems to me to not intuitively be a smoothing of the "No Smoothing" line. Is that just me, does it look like a good fit to you? Maybe "local polynomial regression" is not a good way to extrapolate from a low number of widely scattered plot points.
It's much worse than that, since the next paragraph completely negates that finding with "the anomaly has been at about the same level for over the past 13 months".
And then there's the next graph. A bit confusing because it uses a different baseline, but where you can see the very recent trend becoming horizontal. (And can't really see any early trend because you can only distinguish 2 years.)
Honestly, I'm not sure what to take from that article. But after a needless sensationalistic introduction, I don't think I can take it at face value.
An edit: here's a much clearer view of the anomaly, from a different source, with yet a different baseline:
Very recent values have a really large error bar that the source on the article shouldn't have. But you can't use one to fill the missing data on the other.
The signal is very noisy, but there is much more past data that is not shown on that figure, supporting the trend line. The trend line is not just fitting data visible on the time interval of the figure, but also fitting past data.
I think a lot of "smoothing" algorithms don't work at the ends of the data. Smoothing usually takes in past and future data. At the end of the graph there is no future data. (Maybe that's not the case for this type of smoothing?)
I've always thought the smoothed line should be truncated (so that it doesn't show present-day estimates where data is lacking.)
It depends on the type of signal. If it's non-linear and chaotic, sure. If its periodic, or has sustained trends, this approach is the basis for most engineering and science.
If we'd started converting coal power entirely to nuclear in the 1970s and not stopped, we'd have had a chance to avert this. At this point we can still maybe blunt the effect but it's too late.
The big thing is that if the US and Europe had gone fully nuclear by 2000 or so China would have copied that instead of powering its ascent mostly with coal. They're building a lot of solar, wind, and nuclear now but again too late.
Oil for land transportation had to wait until batteries were good enough for cheap practical EVs, but coal fired electricity generation is by far the largest single contributor and is the one that had to be phased out first.
Those governments that like to spend their billions in useless climate agreements could try doing something useful for a change and work out a carbon tax with punishment for defectors instead of putting random targets on a dart board.
Electricity generation is kinda of a solved issue, but a tax would really speed-up industry electrification and grid storage. It could also come with subsides for open-air capture and synthetic fuels, or maybe some direct spending on those.
We are at a turning point for electricity generation because electricity will be so cheap and plentiful in a couple of years during summer and during the day that we likely don't know what to do with it.
> If we'd started converting coal power entirely to nuclear in the 1970s and not stopped, we'd have had a chance to avert this. At this point we can still maybe blunt the effect but it's too late.
It's never too late.
I don't understand why people only want to see the social part of climate change and somehow refuse to look at it from a technical point of view. I blame ecologists for that because a lot of political movements which declare themselves ecologists actually have a social agenda which is not related to ecology and there is often a weird, seemingly catholic inspired, moral overlay on top which emphasis sacrifice and suffering for redemption - completely pointless.
The fact is warming happens because we have put too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The obvious solution to this problem is to, first, stop adding more which is what we generally discuss, then, remove the excess - perfectly doable if costly and energy consuming today.
What we need is more research into how to efficiently scrub CO2 for the atmosphere and how to do it on a large scale. Defeatism is a waste of time.
Not much point in bemoaning what wasn't done in the 1970s. (I've done it myself, but it's not really productive unless someone solves time travel and the grandfather paradox.)
There are really two kinds of greens: science-based types that are interested in practical solutions and understand engineering, and anti-technology or even anti-civilization types that want to use the issue to force de-industrialization and de-development. Solutions are not what the second group wants. A solution would eliminate the problem as a political and social lever.
The latter are louder because crackpots are always the loudest. That principle holds everywhere in politics.
if we could have trusted companies running nuclear power plants, maybe that could have happened, but you can't combine deregulation with nuclear power and think that's going to turn out great for people.
I wish the submission was pointing directly towards the NASA data which are the interesting part of the submission. The rest is not very good. Arctic news critic of IPCC is frankly weird and misguided.
The whole point about what constitutes the pre-industrial baseline doesn't really make sense. The threshold of 1.5°C is completely arbitraty and was taken on the basis of the 1903-1924 base. Obviously, you can show a bigger increase if you go further back but that doesn't fundamentaly change the issue.
The point about ice cover decline is also weird. The IPCC regularly builds models based on the state of the art for climate modelisation as defined by its working group on the basis of publications. These models are not set in stone. If 2024 shows that ice cover was under taken into account during the last report, that will be corrected in the next (provided it was - I'm far from convinced).
The IPCC is not an observatory publishing warning, nor is it pretenting to be the sole authority about climate change. It is a group of experts publishing a synthesis of the state of the art and multiple models illustrating likely trajectories (note the plural - they publish multiple models). These models can obviously be criticised but at least they exist, are based on consensual science and state their hypotheses clearly. That's the strength of the IPCC.
Maybe, maybe not. The Paris Agreement doesn't actually have a threshold: although it clearly intended to specify one, it's not worded precisely enough to actually do so.
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on the problem:
Climatologists fight with each other in public over whether the threshold has been crossed or not. They often can't even give a straight explanation of their own position. Sabine shows a clip from a recent video call by Michael Mann where he presents a temperature graph that shows 1.5 of warming, but with a baseline of 1970. He claims the baseline doesn't matter and you can "quibble" over it! Unfortunately for Mann he's talking to someone who is switched on, and they point out that 1970 isn't pre-industrial so the Paris Agreement must have been voided years ago according to that data.
Mann gets confused, starts stuttering, starts scrolling through his Twitter feed, points to another graph with a 1970 baseline and then claims the true baseline is actually 1900-2000. Again the guy he's talking to calls him out on it, asking if that's 1950 then it's still not pre-industrial times? Then Mann claims the official baseline is "late 19th century" and there has been only 1.4 degrees of warming since then. The video ends with the guy in the audience saying "Now I'm totally confused", which is reasonable because what Mann is saying isn't internally consistent.
As Hossenfelder and many of the YouTube commenters point out, it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Those two positions aren't compatible.
> it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter.
Because neither is true and neither is claimed. There are no important threshold and baseline will obviously shift what you are looking at.
The threshold put forwards in conference (1.5°C or 2°C) are a communication device because it's easier to draw a line and explain that to people. They are only targets and are not the most important objectives set during climate conferences (the Paris agreement would absolutely not be voided by crossing 1.5°C by the way, that's nonsense).
The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.
1.5 degrees is not only written into international agreements, it gets saturation media coverage. The UN claims that above 1.5 degrees there are multiple tipping points that get triggered. It's universally presented as being of critical import, whether you agree with that or not.
> The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.
Are you sure that's a fact, or is it a communication device someone used on you? Look at the graphs Mann presents in the Hossenfelder video and you'll note that temperature increase isn't continuous, it's more like a step function with long plateaus, with the steps aligning with factors like El Niño.
The problem with making up scientific-sounding thresholds for communication is that it's a form of the noble lie and it always ends badly. As Hossenfelder points out, the fighting over whether this threshold was crossed or not is a "science communication disaster". It's like the manager who pretends the company will go bankrupt on December 10th if everyone doesn't ship the product by that date, when in reality no such bankruptcy will occur and he just likes seeing everyone run around in a frenzy, increasing profits. The people doing it believe it's justified but that doesn't change the core dishonesty of the approach and inevitably, when it's revealed that the claims are lies, they will assume all such claims from you are lies. Why fret about any deadline ever again once you discover one of them was fake?
> The UN claims that above 1.5 degrees there are multiple tipping points that get triggered.
No, that's factually untrue. Go read the IPCC report which is the official communication of the UN on global warming. Absolutely nothing in it implies that 1.5°C is a tipping point.
There is definitely effects with cliff like behaviour (permarfrost melting) but there is nothing magical about 1.5°C.
> Look at the graphs Mann presents in the Hossenfelder video and you'll note that temperature increase isn't continuous, it's more like a step function with long plateaus, with the steps aligning with factors like El Niño.
That's not what continuous means here. It's to be understood as opposite to step-wise. Increase has efffect which varies with the amount in a mostly continuous manner. That's why thresholds are necessary arbitrary.
There is no plateau, it's oscillation with a trend because seasons. [0] Anyway, no one is saying that temperature increase linearily. That's why we always talk about average increase. That's implied when people talk about degree above a baseline. If you don't realise that, you will have hard time following a discussion about the climate.
> Why fret about any deadline ever again once you discover one of them was fake?
Nobody is fretting about deadlines. You are widely misunderstanding the issue if you think the discussion is about when. It's akin to asking when should we stop pouring poison in the river to which the answer is obviously as soon as possible.
> Are you sure that's a fact, or is it a communication device someone used on you?
I am old enough to read papers myself. Stop insulting me.
> "Exceeding 1.5°C could also trigger multiple climate tipping points — such as breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems — with abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts for humanity"
It helpfully comes with a citation of a paper in Science which has the exact same title, "Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points":
> "Six CTPs become likely (with a further four possible) within the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C warming, including collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, die-off of low-latitude coral reefs, and widespread abrupt permafrost thaw."
This page whole purpose is to explain why the Paris agreement decided to put a goal at 1.5°C and in this context, they list what could happen if this threshold is crossed.
>> "Six CTPs become likely (with a further four possible) within the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C warming, including collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, die-off of low-latitude coral reefs, and widespread abrupt permafrost thaw."
Your own quote actually talks about what I'm saying from the start. It's a range with effects becoming more severe and likely as temperature increase hence the range of 1.5°C to 2°C. They talk about another one at 2.6°C a line latter. That goes directely against your claim that the focus is on 1.5°C as some kind of deadline.
You accept that what I said about the UN isn't factually untrue - this is progress. Let's keep going.
We both agree that they say more warming is worse.
Do you also now accept that the 1.5C figure (or 1.5-2.0 range) isn't merely a communication device set at an arbitrary threshold for political reasons, but one that appears in scientific papers that claim there are non-linear responses involved?
If so, we can now revisit the two original points to find the remaining areas of disagreement:
1. It doesn't make sense to talk about increase if you don't define what it's relative to regardless of whether it's a point or a range, because arguments about tipping points or extreme weather are all based on physics and chemistry that depends on absolute temperatures, not deltas.
2. There are famous climatologists making claims like 1970 being pre-industrial or that baselines don't matter, and the only people pushing back on him are outsiders. Small children know that 1970 is not "pre industrial". Does that problem matter to you?
> Do you also now accept that the 1.5C figure (or 1.5-2.0 range) isn't merely a communication device set at an arbitrary threshold for political reasons, but one that appears in scientific papers that claim there are non-linear responses involved?
Your own quote in your previous comments contradicts that.
I can’t really make sense of your two questions. Your 1 entirely misses the point. Yes, the whole thing is about deltas.
Sorry, I’m going to do more productive things with my time. I hope I gave you or an eventual reader some elements to ponder. If not, that’s fine too.
For others who observe then, I will post a final reply too.
> the whole thing is about deltas.
That isn't physically possible.
Take the collapsing ice sheets. Ice isn't melted by a change in temperature, it's melted by reaching a specific absolute temperature. Saying "if the temperature goes up by 5 degrees this ice will melt" isn't a checkable claim unless you already know what the baseline temperature is, because going from -50 to -45 isn't going to affect it whereas going from -2 to 3 will.
Every claimed tipping point is like this. Abruptly thawing permafrost, coral die-off, ice sheets etc. All dependent on actual absolute temperature levels being crossed. Baseline is everything!
That's why when Mann claims the baseline doesn't matter everyone calls him out on it (except on HN...). Only someone who has totally lost their grip on scientific reality would claim otherwise. That this has happened to such a high profile climatologist should make everyone concerned about whether there's a psychology-style replication crisis in the field.
The whole discussion is about how much excess warming we get from human released GHG. That’s why it’s about deltas, why we talk about warming, why the discussion about baselines happen.
Obviously the delta will depend of the baseline you take but no one is discussing that either and obviously, some thresholds are in actual value. No one ever denies that.
I don’t understand your obsession about Mann and your weird conspiracy theory about the field. The controversy surrounding Mann was about temperature behaviour and the presence or not of warming acceleration. Nothing to do with baselines. Mann is a respected climatologist.
It’s hard for me to follow the discussion because it’s a bit all over the place but to me. It seems you want to be right and everyone else to be wrong and misinformed so much that you are actually the one missing the point.
There are dozens of ways to look at the increase in temperatures that make it obvious it’s happening. The fact that humans can find some way to quibble about the exact baseline measurement and then convince themselves they’ve done something useful, that’s more an argument about the intellectual quality of (some) people than any point you should be making to win some argument.
I would make a cash bet with anyone who wants it that by, say, 2050, barring some major singular catastrophe like a nuclear war, a supervolcano or an asteroid event, the metrics of environmental and human well-being globally will be better than they are today, and that we also adapt with only modest, possibly even minimal suffering (demonstrable by solid evidence of a causal chain) from the warming we've already caused and likely will continue to cause in the intervening decades.
Climate change has its dangers, but it's not and need to be an extinction level catastrophe on the scale that much of the hive-minded preening, fetishism and virtue signalling here likes to claim in the comments. It's largely a gradual process that our extremely adaptive and innovative species will adjust to, just as it has to many other changes in history with far fewer technological and social resources at its disposal.
Also, the arguments about individual people feeling guilty for not doing their small part to effect global change on greenhouse gas output are idiotic. They're a misguided deviation of blame against those who it's easiest to browbeat for the sake of feeling morally superior (one's neighbors, friends, family and so forth) with no realistic mechanism for turning such brow-beating into a meaningful global change.
Historically, the big sea changes in social habits have been brought about by specific, personally and measurably visible incentives to adapt those changes, either positive or negative. If people and their societies will behave differently for the sake of mitigating global warming, they'd need the same sort of incentive structure, or a personally beneficial willingness to wide adaption of real, beneficial innovations which reduce some aspect of our environmental impact. Urbanization and industrialized agriculture are two imperfect but usable examples of this. Both reduce our destructive footprint to smaller percentages of the world's surface, and both happen because concrete self-interest, measurable on an individual level, drives them.
Surprise to no one.
The way things are going I believe we will hit +2c by 2040. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living, it is human nature. Because of that, many of the young will be forced into a bad condition.
The only thing that could probably stop this, but will be just as bad, is a Yellowstone Event :(