Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm? Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating.
Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm? Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating.
Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating.
Hasn't is been predicted for like...decades now that warming releases more greenhouse gasses which accelerates warming? That the feedback loop creates exactly what we are seeing now?
Or am I just smoking crack...
61How many people in your circle of life would know what "Feedback Loop" meant in climate change?
Probably a very low percentage. People think it's linear and won't effect them. Sad years ahead mate.
24Don’t look up.
22I hope we are still in the "Don't look (it) up" phase.
1
If I remember from the last time I was reading about it, the IPCC wasn’t using models that include feedback loops because they tend to be fairly conservative and there’s a number of different ways assumptions can be made.
I’m a biologist and not a climate scientist, but my understanding is that while feedback loops are widely accepted as being part of the dynamic, there’s a number of different approaches and those are available in individual modeling projects but not in the consensus models. I’m not sure if that’s changed, though.
13The IPCC report must be agreed upon by representatives from every country. Including Saudi Arabia, and USA. So you can imagine how "conservative" it is compared to reality. Anything slightly uncomfortable gets negotiated down to the point where the oil-producing countries are fine with it.
The 195 member countries of the IPCC sign off on different parts of the report. The summaries for policymakers are “approved,” meaning that “the material has been subject to detailed, line-by-line discussion” between the member countries and the authors. The synthesis reports are “adopted,” which implies “a section-by-section discussion.” And the full report, which this year runs nearly 4,000 pages long, is “accepted,” which means both parties agree that “the technical summary and chapters of the underlying report present a comprehensive, objective, and balanced view of the subject matter.”
https://qz.com/2044703/how-governments-of-the-world-have-responded-to-the-ipcc-report
If people find the IPCC reports alarming as they are, imagine how alarming the draft from the scientists is before the Saudis, Russians and Americans get out the black markers.
15This is largely because we simply don't have the capabilities to model these systems with the accuracy needed to make useful predictions. Individuals, however, should absolutely be aware that things can go bad far quicker than we're able to deal with.
2
Yes, but they're trying to figure out if that's where we're at or if this is a temporary blip from the Honga Tonga Honga Ha'apai volcano.
Most volcanoes that size would cool the planet by ejecting a bunch of ash and sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. But the Tonga volcano was underwater, so it threw a metric shitton of water vapor into the upper atmosphere instead, and this has a warming effect. This is part of the reason for the increase in precipitation on the West Coast of the US this year.
Add this volcano on top of the near simultaneous flip into an El Niño pattern, and they're just not sure how permanent the warming we saw this year is going to be. But any way you go about it, this is really not good. We've just experienced dramatic warming from two things that we can't predict and can't control, on top of the part where we're not doing nearly enough about the things we can control.
10Yep, it's been well established for a while. I learned about this 25+ years ago in elementary school. But instead of doing anything since then, we added 2 billion people to the population.
8Population growth is not a cause of climate change worth paying attention to. Most of those extra two billion were born in poor countries, especially in Africa. These countries have a fraction of the per capita emissions of wealthy countries like America that are currently seeing or soon to see population decline. When we're having a conversation about how to control total emissions, it's orders of magnitude more efficient to focus on per capita emissions than on population. For one, we can reduce per capita emissions without getting into ethical issues regarding population control or economic issues like those caused by the one child policy in China.
0
Yeah, that subtitle is a bit strange. My best guess is that we're only just smashing through the +1.5°C target and if I remember correctly, some years ago we assumed the accelerating effects wouldn't really kick in until after that.
So, maybe that is genuinely a question, whether we're now at the steep bit of the rollercoaster.
6I think that they didn't expect to see it starting that fast. It was predicted to start in a decade or two
5I'd imagine their models already account for that
5
Relevant bits:
As extreme as this year’s temperatures were, they did not catch researchers off guard. Scientists’ ... 2023’s heat is still broadly within this range, albeit on the high end. ... one exceptional year would not be enough to suggest something was faulty with the computer models ... Global temperatures have long bobbed up and down around a steady warming trend because of cyclical factors like El Niño ... has intensified since, possibly signaling more record heat to come in 2024. ... “I’m not willing to say that we’ve ‘broken the climate’ or there’s anything weird going on until more evidence comes in.” ... Until the current El Niño is over, “it’s unlikely we’ll be able to make definitive claims,” he said.
25Researchers know we're screwed, so saying they weren't caught off guard doesn't make me feel better.
26Yep. Hunting for the drama of a surprise or models being wrong is pretty dumb stuff at this stage.
There’s almost an air of owning the scientists by fucking the climate even harder than they understood.
19Apocalyptic climate changes on schedule.
1
We're on the vertical part of the graph now. CO2 concentrations for the last 800k years. We're fully 25% over the maximum free CO2 over that period. Investments in extraction are still accelerating. Atmospheric methane, while shorter lived, is at the highest we've ever seen.
Climate averages are based on 30 year moving averages, generally. But there's every reason to believe we're into the hockey stick now. You can't simply put away atmospheric carbon that took geologic processes millions of years to sequester and we're not even slowing down. Even while regenerable sources take up a larger proportion of power generation, we're not drawing down the bad sources. We're just increasing our capacity for power consumption.
17I'm visiting Toronto, when I was here 15 years it was around -5 to -20C out, today it's +8C and raining. There are going to be some serious droughts this summer with no snowpack.
16I live in PA and it was 60F on Christmas. My dogs got to play outside most of the day and I didn't even have to put on a sweater to check on them. I have the feeling I won't have to use my brand new winter coat this winter.
13I'd say probably since we stopped dumping sulfur compounds into the atmosphere using all of our cargo ships
10Think this may be relevant to that hypothesis:
And in a much-discussed report last month, the climate researcher James E. Hansen argued that scientists had vastly underestimated how much more the planet would warm in the coming decades if nations cleaned up aerosols without cutting carbon emissions. Not all scientists are persuaded.
11Beyond the accuracy of the Sulfur aerosols theory, the interesting part in the linked video is the stuff about geoengineering.
Which basically said that if aerosol pollution was accidentally keeping the planet relatively cool and so holding off climate change which is actually at a worse level than we thought, then it raises the unavoidable point of whether we’ll be forced to continue to employ geoengineering in our fight against climate change however uncomfortable and dangerous the prospect is.
Green’s opinion on the video is that there’ll be a lot of resistance but that we’ll probably be directed to in the end and so the more we prepare and think about it the better.
7
Yes, the article mentions that:
This year, aerosols have been of particular interest because of a 2020 international regulation that restricted pollution from ships
4
Now this is an avengers level threat!
6I just drove across BC and the only time my tires touched snow was Rogers pass.
2Spoiler:
Yes
1I just hope it's thorough. We humans are like cockroaches, except, you know, we hurt each other for fun.
1
