Earth at risk of becoming 'hothouse' if tipping point reached, report warns
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
A change of 4-5°C is a change of 7-9 degrees Fahrenheit, not 39-41.
A human will face winter weather conditions from 0-32F which converts to negative values on the Celsius scale (not practical).
On the other end of the spectrum for summer time conditions, there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C.
And why is that important? Are our bodies so finely tuned that it's important to know the difference between 104 and 105 F?
Even in the less granular celsius, unless it's just about bragging rights everything is about brackets anyway.
30+: wear shorts and hydrate
20-30: comfortable in short sleeves
10-20: bring a light jacket
0-10: wear a sweater
n10-0: wear a winter coat
n20-n10: wear gloves and a hat
n40-n20: no exposed skin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
I'm suspicious of anyone attempting to boil down the operations of such a dynamic, chaotic system as climate into simple cause and effect. There's so damn many things that feed back on each other, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we think we understand. Much more research needs to be done.
Yet the current US stance is to defund such research. :(
Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace.
Of course more peaceful means are preferable but the option needs to be kept on the table to remember why we have and want democratic solutions in the first place.
I'd guess the people involved in those rebellions felt the effects of bad governance much more acutely and directly than people do (currently ...) vis-à-vis climate change.
The disruption of food supplies has been causing annual riots all over the world. The US has remained insulated from these effects by virtue of being relatively rich and relying on over-priced, highly processed foods that have enough margin to buffer against price shocks. But this is clearly an untenable situation.
Shit goes south really fast when people can't afford to eat. And the difference between Mexican or Middle Eastern food riots and American ones is that Americans will come with lots of guns.
Just as you always see affinity between police forces and right-wing activists, you'll see the government put on a face friendly to rural gun culture, and that group will be installed as enforcers.
So I don't buy this argument that the wide availability of guns in America in any way ensures a "Freedman's Paradise." It ensures more oppression, as the (expensive) arm of Federal power recedes.
But I do foresee a situation where there's a clash between the well-fed police (who want to keep it that way) and the starving poor in the US. The inner city riots will not be an issue, most metro PDs have experienced and well equipped riot control departments.
It's the armed, rural uprisings that pose a threat. Think Cliven Bundy-types leading a group of protestors in sieges of government or office buildings.
The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.
Now, why do they drive so much and drive such inefficient cars? It's largely because fuel is so much cheaper in the US than in the EU.
What I was trying to get at in my original comment is not that we should all solve climate change by personal action, and that public policy shouldn't be involved. I wish I could pay more taxes so the country I'm living in would migrate to renewables faster.
Rather, it's that if you look at how concerned people are politically about climate change, and then look at their revealed preferences, both when it comes to what they do personally and what they'd really stand for politically, it turns out that in the aggregate they don't take the problem seriously.
How many people who say "we must do something" in the US would say put up with a 100% increase in fuel taxes (bringing it in more in line with the EU)? I bet you'd go from 50% approval to 5% approval pretty fast.
1. http://internationalcomparisons.org/environment/transportati...
2. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheet...
Citizens need a reeducation regarding meat, regarding travel, regarding transportation of goods and what the globalization does to the environment. The biggest change can only be triggered by either overthrowing the government or forcing them in some other way to start worrying about this.
We need environmentally friendly travel. Research and manufacturing should be funded by fossil fuel taxation.
These tasks should be implemented using the boiling frog principle. Increase taxes and funding by ~1.5% per year until we have met a goal of 50/50% meat/artificial meat consumption and 50/50% fossil fuel/renewable fuel. At which point the taxes and funding could be freezed until a 90/10 ratio is reached and then phased out by 1.5% each year.
It wouldn't shock anyone. You'd be "boiled" into a functioning world.
This should be sanctioned by UN.
If you just say tax meat by the kg you end up with stupid policies like discouraging UK customers from eating beef from New Zealand over domestic produce, even though importing it from abroad is more environmentally efficient (also counting for transport)[1].
Normal every day people don't really believe in climate change, don't really want to do anything and in fact don't have the dimmest clue as to what needs to be done, nor how to do that.
I think dealing with the above fact is too much for people, so instead we simplify using familiar models and tropes.
The argument is probably that meat production emits higher levels of carbon than other types of food production.
Unrelated, meat does have an impact on diabetes and heart disease, so if you're concerned about those things, then you should definitely learn more about it.
Yes they can't live without a car, agreed. But this is by their own choosing.
People do not know that their largest personal impact is cars and meat. They just don't know that at all because 1) they don't know that climate change is real thanks to Fox and Exxon, and 2) they don't think that their habits matter. Your assumption that they do is dangerous and wrong.
Remember that Exxon Mobil has spent 40 years knowing about the dangers of climate change, but "educating" Americans through TV that it isn't a real threat. The primary education Americans get about this topic is from the megacorporations and mega rich people who are selling us polluting products with no alternatives, and is not a real education at all.
Per capita, especially due to the plane travel, their emissions are probably as high as someone in a southern red state. Personal convenience beats doing the right ting.
Yes, I am moving more and more towards that camp too. I don't own a car, never fly, eat mainly chicken instead of beef, and consistently vote green. But I refuse to take more responsibility when the rest of the world is so obviously not picking up its share.
Like another parent said, this is a coordination problem. The collective action that people have been clamouring for for decades hasn't happened, and my personal contribution is small enough to not make a hint of a dent. Frankly, I have resigned myself to the reality that peak civilization is behind us.
Very few people have the luxury of considering anything outside their immediate circle of concern.
The vast majority of the benefit comes from cutting beef (and lamb), which I don't think is that hard of an ask. Other meat reduction has much less benefit.. and it is harder for most people to do.
Source: https://www.skepticalscience.com/how-much-meat-contribute-to...
Polling data for the US shows that 64% believe that climate change is caused by humans and 60% believe we're already experiencing its effects. https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...
That's not the number many would like to see, but it's a clear majority, and we ought to be able to get stuff done with it.
I think the problem is the "faceless" part. Voters need to hold their specific elected officials responsible, and avoid the products of the worst offending companies. We should create trustworthy independent organisations that can name and shame, until we get a comprehensive emissions tax.
I thought that is what news and reporters are suppose to do
So the narrative needs to stop being about sacrifice, and start being about jobs. The immense task of converting the world to renewable energy, has the potential to create millions upon millions of badly-needed jobs. It needs to start being sold that way.
As man-made climate change progresses, the average recorded temperature will likely continue to climb, sure--but the change in variance is far more significant in terms of the extreme events that will occur with increasing regularity.
Further reading concerning methane: [3], [4].
Reason why dismissing this using PETM boundary is probably invalid: There was with high certainty less methane around since PETM didn't immediately follow a cold high-storage period, solar energy was also weaker, and most importantly, PETM was caused by methane alone, not a combination of fossil fuel burning in addition to methane [5].
Just to clarify: If we get the effects of PETM alone, this means around +8C global average on top of what we're doing. But from what I'm reading, PETM effects are not the whole story as pointed out above. Not that it really matters, +10-12C global average is almost certainly a global killer alone (except bacteria), it's just that I don't think it would stabilise there, it would go on to pressure cook earth's surface until absolutely nothing is left.
This stuff has me worried by far the most, especially for my now 2yo son.
[1] https://www.kairoscanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/PBP2...
[2] http://oceanrep.geomar.de/30683/1/GasHydrates_Vol1_screen.pd...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...
[4] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1246
[5] http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exagger...
The earth will one day reach a true runaway greenhouse when the sun brightens by 10% in about 1.1 billion years. But according to J. Hansen in 2013 a complete greenhouse runaway can't happen unless the high temperatures are maintained for several million years, long enough for all the oceans to evaporate, and our own forcing will only(!) last a few tens of thousands. So my understanding is that we won't cause all life to go extinct, if that makes you feel any better.
I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
Everything you've heard about global warming has been true the whole time, and you haven't been listening. I keep trying to wrap my head around the worldview of someone whose commitment to ideology is so powerful that they are willing to condemn their grandchildren to such suffering. It has to be some kind of religious thing.
Oceanic thermocline: explain the data we have and the mathematical model we have to cover this phenomenon.
You can't, because you don't actually know. You just blindly believe it, don't you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#/media/File:Pee...
https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970...
As soon as they actually do in fact research it, they realize that:
a) we don't have the data
b) we don't have an accurate/sane mathematical model for it.
We can't use satellites to measure anything other than surface temperature of the ocean; it would require an actual, physically located sensor network spread throughout the oceans of the world to get this information. Which we don't have now and never had in the past...
We have a whole fleet of submersible thermometers that dive down to 2000 meters. And it's not that hard to tie a thermometer to a lead sinker and take a deep ocean temperature.
"In 1999, to combat this lack of data, an innovative step was taken by scientists to greatly improve the collection of observations inside the ocean through increased sampling of old and new quantities and increased coverage in terms of time and area.
That step was Argo. "
...and atmospheric temperature, and surface temperature of the land, and the solar energy arriving on Earth, and the energy being radiated away from Earth. There are plenty of things we can measure to show that there is warming beside just deep ocean temperature. We probably need deep ocean temperature measurements to predict accurately how the warming effects will be distributed, but we don't need it to show the warming is happening.
I don't know what you are going on with about the oceanic thermocline because all you've said is that there is some problem with some data related to some phenomenon involving it and that we don't have enough data to understand the oceanic thermocline.
You seem to think this thermocline problem is inconsistent with global warming. Let's say you are right. So what? You noted that we don't have good data or models for the thermocline.
We do have good data and models on dozens of things that do indicate warming. Generally in science when you have a lot of things that have good data and good models and support a theory, and some thing without good data or a good model that doesn't fit the theory, you wait until you get good data on the later before considering throwing out the theory.
Water, especially a large deep mass of water like the Pacific, can hold a lot of heat energy.
And we don't know what is happening with the heat transfer and storage cycle; we don't even understand the full operation of heat exchange between ocean and the rest of the planet.
Thermocline is "about" 800 meters of water depth (that's a HUGE heat sink): https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/thermocline.html
Which people, specifically?
ExxonMobil,[34] Telstra, WMC Resources, BHP Billiton, Philip Morris,[35] Murray Irrigation Limited,[36] Visy Industries, Clough Engineering, Caltex, Shell, Esso[3] and British American Tobacco (BAT)
give me some other example of anti-climate change propaganda and I will again show you the money trail.
That's massively misleading.
The scientists that predicted that predicted it because they forecast that the cooling effect from particulate pollution such as smog would be bigger than the warming affect from greenhouse gases.
Not long after, we actually made fairly strong clean air laws and greatly cut back the particulate emissions, thus changing the assumptions that the cooling predictions were based on. The scientists that had predicted cooling, which had only been a small minority, then agreed with the rest that we'd have warming (assuming we didn't also get the greenhouse gases dealt with).
The science underpining the theory of global warming on the other hand is far, far more robust. I don't feel the need to recount how robust it is but I'll just note that it has withstood "red teams" funded by the Koch brothers, as well as Exxon and the other major oil companies who now all accept the science behind global warming.
It is highly disingenuous to equate it with global cooling.
However it then turned out that global warming due to CO2 was happing way faster and way more than any potential cooling. The scientists weren't wrong: the cooling effect is still there. Its just completely swamped by all the things we are doing to the atmosphere.
Edit: I know how to google myself but I am asking people to get a little more involved and not lay out facts out of memory. I thought I could make a good discussion on the topic but kept getting hostility for some reason.
> According to different observational records of global average annual near-surface (land and ocean) temperature, the last decade (2008–2017) was 0.89 °C to 0.93 °C warmer than the pre-industrial average, which makes it the warmest decade on record. Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2000. The year 2017 was one of the world’s three warmest years on record together with the years 2016 and 2015.
> The average annual temperature for the European land area for the last decade (2008–2017) was between 1.6 °C and 1.7 °C above the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. In Europe, 2017 was colder than the previous 3 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
Do bear in mind that most of the costs of global warming are based around:
1) It is happening much faster than we can cope with. If it was happening over 10,000 years then we'd slowly adapt. Or die out. One or the other.
2) Our cities are mostly built on coastlines, and will therefore be hit dramatically by severe weather and by sea rises.
This graph shows just how far off the norm we are for the past two millenia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
You also say you think the last decade seemed colder, the reply you got was that 16 of the 17 hottest years since recording began were after 2000. But you ignore that part of the reply.
You are working for the forces that want to stop our mitigation of the problem, you are the enemy.
It is no use to try to win them over, that's not why they're arguing.