What happened last time it was as warm as it’s going to get later this century?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Since I was a kid I've heard in the news that in the next 5 years or 10 years there will be all these catastrophes linked to global warming and I have yet to see them come true.
I remember the BBC reporting years ago that the children of today would only know snow from what they've seen in snow globes, things like that. I think part of the reason for inaction is due to the news media over simplifying the problem and reporting (perhaps even exaggerating) the worst long term predictions.
The media should be more responsible about this kind of thing.
I think it was the photos of disinterred coffins floating through the flooded streets of New Orleans that first really hit me: it's here.
Picking a single event like New Orleans isn't great evidence. I lived through a once in 300 years hurricane in southern England in '87 - that tells us nothing.
But the increasing frequency of adverse events and once in a x years events is starting to nod its head in the direction of the impacts of global warming starting to manifest.
The point he made is a good one - media sensationalism, supported by people who should know better; it does more harm than good.
The future looks bleak as we, in the west, can go 100% nuke, zero carbon etc but it's like a fart in a jacuzzi compared to what China will bring as its economy scales to western per-capita size.
I suspect we will see more and more accumulation of research on impacts rather than just predicted impacts as we continue to experience increased temperatures. Although you do not have to touch a flame to know it will burn, more and more real world instances of getting "burned" are harder and harder to ignore.
"The researchers found no signs of an epidemic or disease, leading them to suggest that changing climates in southern Africa could be to blame — but they stress that more research is needed to confirm this idea."
In my situation, temperatures have gone up, with heat records being broken left and right. Used to be we only got like two or three weeks of >30 weather, now it's a multiple of that. You can see it in the sales of AC units and such.
Eh? Models have consistently underestimated the timeline. What exactly random individual articles in the bait-crazy science-ignorant general media may exclaim isn't particularly relevant to the actual state of the science. I mean, you don't read about computer science or bio or whatever stories there, see them get something hilariously wrong, then immediately flip to the next page and take their expertise on some other technical subject as gospel do you? The IPCC reports have been very conservative and used significant error bars. They've even consistently indulged in the fiction that somehow the world would come together and suddenly deal with emissions rather then just letting it run. Interest backed media constantly have played down any possible consequences or flat out asserted it'd be a net positive, that there'd be lots of new farmland say. The old lie of "back in the 70s they said we'd see a new ice age!!" still gets trotted out.
The picture you paint seems the pretty much the polar opposite of the media reality over the last few decades.
Global warming is a slow-moving problem, which humans are terrible at dealing with. It's unfolding over a time span that it hard for humans to perceive in their lifetimes unless they're personally keeping track, and large segments of our population have been trained to distrust scientific reporting.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
It seems some years are cooler than others, but the general trend is upwards.
I don't see where the last two years indicate much of a temperature drop. Do you have a source of information for your statement?
While 2017 was slightly cooler than the year preceding, it was the second hottest year since global temperature records began in 1880.
From the same page you linked. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20180118/
We'll see how 2018 compares. Look at the chart and you can see that it's not a straight line, it has ups and downs. I see no reason at all to assume that it's trending downward for the next few decades to erase the increase seen over the last century.
The models have consistently undershot the mark: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
As for climate disasters, we've had Katrina (2005) - 3rd most intense landfalling storm in the US in 100 years [1], Irma (2017) - the strongest observed in the Atlantic in terms of maximum sustained winds since Wilma [2], Wilma (2005) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere, after Hurricane Patricia in 2015 [3], Patricia (2015) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone on record worldwide [4], Harvey (2017) - tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record[5] - which also caused "500 year floods" (3rd time in 3 years [6]). And that's just a sampling.
For a while now, we've gotten a new "hottest month on record" every few months. And we've pretty consistently gotten "hottest year" on record every few years (increasingly every year or every other year). If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades. With those records have come any number of record breaking heatwaves, many of which have been very deadly. One of the most recent occurred in Pakistan and saw a temperature of 50.2C (122F) in the city of Nawabshah. [7] Seriously, just google the term "record breaking heatwave" and do some reading.
You may not have experienced the extreme effects over-exaggerating TV anchors talked about in your childhood, but the world is experiencing climate effects as bad as the models predicted, or worse. Please don't use your personal anecdotal experience to undercut the validity of climate models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houst... [7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city...
> If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades.
How long have we been tracking these records?
So I think that in order to argue that new records are evidence in favor of a trend, one needs to quantify the likelihood of it not being due to chance somehow.
I fully believe you heard some fantastical reporting when you were a child, but that is a reflection on the journalism, not the science. Overall the modeling has been quite conservative, and has had good accuracy for such domains.
What are you expecting?
Course if the Gulf Stream gets shut down we'll start getting similar snow amounts to Norway
I wonder what went wrong with those predictions? Did we end up taking enough action to stop that?
1. Recent studies on current climate models show they consistently over-predict carbon impact on global warming (source: Nature, Nov 2017: Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C). The article shows that the previous carbon budget was off by a factor of 4 for the next few years, and always predicted higher temps. In other words, the models over-fit the data and thus lose predictive capabilities.
2. Increase/decrease in drought occurrence is inconclusive (Trenberth et al in Nature, 2013): "Two recent papers looked at the question of whether large-scale drought has been increasing under climate change. A study in Nature by Sheffield et al entitled ‘Little change in global drought over the past 60 years’ was published at almost the same time that ‘Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models’ by Dai appeared in Nature Climate Change (published online in August 2012)."
3. On storms, SREX p. 159: The present assessment regarding observed trends in tropical cyclone activity is essentially identical to the WMO assessment (Knutson et al., 2010): there is low confidence that any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.
4. The greatest two-year cooling event of the last 100 years just occurred in Feb, per GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data. Global avg temp dropped 0.56 deg C.
Climate change is real, but we have to be more careful about politicizing and forecasting what will happen. The 'imminent danger!' storyline has been played out since the turn of the century (nearly 20 years now) with many failed famous predictions.
To be taken seriously (and it should be) we must be conservative and accurate in prognostications. Further exaggeration is only doing harm.
Obviously there would be many low level implementation details to work through, but this seems obvious enough that I assume it's been proposed many times. However I haven't been able to figure out the right search terms to find any papers developing it further. I've seen plenty of carbon pricing schemes proposed but all of them seem to use pretty arbitrary rates rather then simply directly internalizing the goal of zero net emissions and letting a market on each side sort out how best the meet that goal in any given place. I'd love it if anyone knows where I could better search, after some recent work I do have access to college resources again so academic journals would be fine too. There are also of course plenty of awful schemes by various political parties pushing various subsidies or "efficiency improvements" or whatever in a command-control fashion, but that's not great either. Any HNers who have ideas/sources would be awesome.
If all companies currently follow expensive but environment-friendly processes, a rouge company can undercut them by following a cheaper but environment-harmful process. This will either force other companies to follow the rogue company, or they go out of business.
You seem to be implicitly saying that property rights cannot be established and enforced, as this is how markets are used to solve such problems. Similar things have been done though, no?
Look at it this way- say you can make a ton of money manufacturing widgets, but you also make a ton of CO2. There is no law against this discharge, so you do it anyway. Climate change might cause you many problems, but it's 50 years or more until you start to personally feel the heat. This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario.
To take your second part first, taxing is part of the free market. The free market is a creation of and tool for use of government. Regulation to ensure cost internalization, information symmetry, contractual enforcement, and so forth are all basics for it to work at all. And a market has no goals of its own nor does it take into account human floor levels, it's up to society (and in turn its government) to choose goal states and then use all tools to find the most efficient routes towards reaching and then maintaining them.
To go back to the first, you've just restated the question: how do you "tax" the externality? How do you find the right rate? How do you adjust it and account for changing factors? It's government that sets the goal, but government tends to be bad at figuring out implementations and then reacting with high temporal or spatial granularity. In this case we have two linked problems, and we don't care about the "how" at all so long as its within framework requirements, we care about the end of "net zero carbon increase in the atmosphere" (or long term dealing with past emissions, though that'd require taxing other sources). This is exactly the sort of situation that's an ideal fit for using "market" (massively crowd sourced value apportionment utilizing capitalism) to optimize. On the one side is energy generation, which must directly pay per unit for the cost of dealing with their own emissions, and on the other side is finding the ways to most efficiently remove each unit and then collect the money. That would be expected to vary over time and by location, and to feedback into each other (and overall demand/efficiency) via the simple mechanism of price.
1. Political buy-in to set a cost of carbon emission 2. Economic viability of removal (often referred to as carbon capture and storage, or CCS)
1 is non-trivial, but happening. Canada has a provincial carbon tax measure which requires setting a price. A price is also defined in the European cap-and-trade system.
2 is also non-trivial, as the economics are pretty bad right now. However, CCS costs are projected to decrease rapidly. [0]
Right now, integrating CCS is on average more expensive than purchasing carbon credits. Carbon offsetting companies are, to your point, an example of private enterprise filling a gap.
Just shard your operation so that no one "company" exceeds that level.
My thought was that you'd have to be over N volume of CO2 emissions to have a mandated payment.
Maybe if we had a single "world government" but then the cure (not to the mention the process required to get to that state) might be worse than the disease!
This is probably a more effective approach than the usual cap-and-trade carbon tax models.
(nitpick: s/the free market/market mechanisms/ - free market implies lack of regulation and government involvement)
edit: this is getting downvoted, so perhaps it's a miscommunication. I am most worried about heat waves and disrupted weather patterns causing more common crop failures and the geopolitical stress/conflict that will lead to. You can see the beginnings of this in Syria, Yemen, and various N. African countries where climate change induced drought was the underlying cause for the civic unrest. Look at the migrant populations fleeing these areas. I don't mean anything melodramatic, just that this will be a period of hardship and suffering greater than what we've become accustomed to in recent history.