Met Office: global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years | Hacker News Reader

Met Office: global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years

theguardian.com

Scientists also warned that we have around 12 years to avoid a climate catastrophe [1].

And some scientists [2] claim the next decade can be very challenging - more droughts which can cause crop failures - causing food security issues and in worse cases some kind of societal collapse, the famous 9 meals to anarchy.

What are your views? Are these scientist just mega alarmist?

Do you worry about climate change in the near term?

Are you changing your strategy, e.g. planning to live more self sustainable and move away from cities?

Do you think we could go extinct this century if the world doesn't take this climate emergency serious and launch something like a Manhatten project to tackle it?

[1] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/scary-un-clima...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-w...

[2] http://www.scientistswarning.org/critical-stress/climate/

In the 1980s we needed to do something about Carbon production. Where they knew that otherwise it will be too late by 2000. Now it's year 2019 we are 30-40 years late already. Climate Change is going to happen the only question is now how much and looking at the way countries and world leaders are reacting it's too little to late most of us below the age of 50 are going to see it first hand.

Yes, James Hansen (ex NASA scientist) warned us in the 80s and has been campaigning for this since. His view seems to be not enough is being done.

So how are you planning to change your life in the next decade, i.e. are you looking to move to the country side with more land so you can be more self sufficient (permaculture) as cities will become more dangerous to live in or do you think it will be just a case of food being a bit more expensive and it being a bit hotter.

I'm struggling to understand whether near term it will drastically change our lifes or whether it's something to really worry about post 2050.

are you looking to move to the country side with more land so you can be more self sufficient

Isn't that a terrible thing to do from environmental perspective. Surely using that land for smartly run large scale industrial farms that ship their produce to large distribution points in the center of dense cities could produce far more calories pr. total gram of greenhouse gas emitted.

Yes. I suppose the other way of looking at it is smartly run and managed farms feeding dense cities is a solution for a world where politicians, countries and corporations are doing something substantive about climate change. A world where the supply chains won't break, and the little people won't bear the brunt.

In the world we actually occupy, moving to some rural high ground with a few acres, and as off-grid as possible, to weather a possible Mad Max future looks less and less idiotic.

I was thinking more of permaculture [1], which apparently is better for the environment than our current soil degrading farming practices.

I'm just trying to understand whether there is a real near term danger that will impact global food security.

The US practically pulled out of the paris agreement and do we think the world leaders will take climate change seriously to avert disaster? If not, how will this impact us little people and what should the strategy be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

I am in agricultural trade so looking at growing population in Asia/Africa and the crop production fluctuations year to year with the uncertainty that climate change is already bringing 2050 is too far away. By 2050 we might actually have got some workarounds for the problems the world is going to face in term of food shortages etc in 2030-2035. As far as what I am planning to do one of the things I did was I decided not to have kids not because I feel my having children is going to affect carbon production much but because I will be dead and my future children would have to live in the world we will be leaving behind for them.

When I imagine history books written decades from now and how they will portray our time, I can't imagine any possibility other than them picturing us nearly entirely as cartoonishly and maliciously-stupid idiots for ignoring the problem and voting in people who treat the problem as a joke. Even if things happen to work out by luck, future generations will know we didn't apply ourselves and act on what we knew. I know I'm getting into rudely political territory for HN and polite conversational standards, but we're watching a terrible action in slow motion and we've convinced ourselves that it's rude to interrupt the perpetrators.

There is a 10% chance there could be a year in which the average temperature rise exceeds 1.5 degrees.

This sentence is key: "Climatologists stressed this did not mean the world had broken the Paris agreement 80 years ahead of schedule because international temperature targets are based on 30-year averages."

The title is misleading.

That's more of a policy thing than a temperature thing. Nature will care about the current year (yes - perhaps even further on longer term trends like aquifer depletion and ice cap melting), not the trailing 30 year average.

To highlight the distinction, we could have a 10 deg C increase next year. That would end life as we know it, but would only move the trailing 30 year average .3 deg C.

Also from the article

"The recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on warming of 1.5C, highlighted the calamitous difference even a fraction of a degree above could make to coral reefs, Arctic ecosystems and hundreds of millions of lives. Starting now, the report said emissions would have to be cut by 45% by 2030 to have any chance of holding to that level."

tl;dr - the headline is 100% accurate and appropriate.

Sorry, but 1.5 °C is long gone... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.h...

Just to emphasis the current state: if you would replace every dirty man made machine with something clean, we get a temperature increase by easily 1.5 °C in 3-6 Month. That is known since the last decade, just the amount changed a lot...

For a more sane assessment of issues like this, see

http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearcho...

There is nothing there that invalidates, or questions the sanity of the feature article at all.

In a world of rising temperature, the highest temperatures will tend to be most recent.

The 1.5°C figure is based on a 30 year rolling average. There will be individual high and low years making up that average.

There is an increasing chance, assessed at 10%, of one of those high points breaching 1.5°C. The rolling average will trail behind as is the point of rolling averages.

So a sane estimate from the Met Office, an organisation with good track record on climate.

But why would "breaching" 1.5C in a single year, due to random variability, be of any particular significance?

Note that we're talking about _global average_ temperature, which doesn't translate into anything much for the local temperature in any spot you might be concerned about.

Note also that we may well have been breaching 1.5C now and then for millennia, due to random variability. (Well, also because global temperatures back about 7000 years ago may have been generally higher than today.)

Why? The temperature in and of itself matters less than the total energy in the system and whether it supports life as we know it and the systems we've built to depend on it.

If we go through a temporary spell where temperatures are ahead of the average, thanks to alignment of various factors like El Niño etc, we get to see a flavour of what's coming. Just like the recent heat wave in Europe, or more extreme storms, perhaps even extreme cold events, changes to trade winds or Gulf Stream etc and local areas of cooling.

Who knows what will tip over the edge from borderline into extinct or broken? Who knows what previously unforeseen consequences will result? Or how near to uninhabitable some places become. Perhaps Australia, perhaps somewhere more populous like cities in India or Bangladesh.

The significance then, is a taste of things to come may provoke action, or even acceptance among those who pretend it's not happening. The trend is so clear I don't have too much hope here.

It's mostly academic what temperatures were 7,000 years ago. There were a minuscule fraction of today's population with only somewhere under 20m humans globally. Living an undeveloped lifestyle. No global agriculture with fragile global supply chains and production targets. Plenty of animals to hunt, plenty of extra land owned by no one, no hard borders. Plenty of local deaths due to drought, flood or pestilence too.

Yet even with a tiny number of humans, archaeology points to local climatic changes as prime suspect of the fall many civilisations including the ancient Egyptian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com