Earth Had Its 4th Warmest Year on Record in 2018, Say NOAA and Nasa | Hacker News Reader

Earth Had Its 4th Warmest Year on Record in 2018, Say NOAA and Nasa

wunderground.com

36 pointschewbacha8 comments

Statistics like this and global warming in general doesn't really worry me that much because I feel like we've got the technology and methods to stop global warming in a very short space of time. The only thing stopping us doing this is people's habits / lack of education. However I reckon they'll come a point when the urgency really hits people and we'll be fine.

Rich people will be fine, I suspect. The urgency will hit when rich people in powerful nations feel it, by which time poor people in a lot of nations will have had a pretty miserable time. I suspect that the steps then taken will involve protecting rich people's lifestyles, rather than really doing anything about the problem, while poor people's lifestyles adapt to the new conditions (and indeed, many of them die).

What evidence do you have to support this? I don’t know if any tech that can stop this let alone reverse it. Even with zero emissions tomorrow we are in for real trouble.

All the money in the world won’t help you if the planet’s ability to support life collapses and takes millions of years to recover. Yes, that’s a thing that we are on track for.

We won’t be fine, it’s a question of how bad we let it get and if it’s even feasible to stop it once we realize the trouble we are in. People don’t know how much danger we are in already.

I don't have any evidence to support it, I just feel like it would be easy to reduce global emissions in a short space of time as we already have the technology. E.g mass installation of renewal energy like wind and solar which we already have the tech for. Eating more plant based foods as animal products are incredibly wasteful, again we can easily do this it's just changing people's habits. More recycling etc, lots that can be done.

Is it really true that with zero emissions tomorrow we'd still be in trouble? I find that hard to believe

> I don't have any evidence to support it, I just feel like it would be easy to reduce global emissions in a short space of time as we already have the technology.

Unfortunately, none of our feelings are going to be helpful when we pass tipping points that cause the effects to compound on each other. We've already started that process—melting arctic ice means that the ocean there absorbs massive amounts more heat, rather than it reflecting off the surface of the ice.

By the time it's obvious enough that even deniers might believe in it—that is, by the time we have sea levels rising enough to start to drown coastal cities, and formerly fertile places start to become genuine deserts—it will be much, much too late to just "reduce global emissions in a short space of time" or "just change people's habits."

If it were possible to have zero emissions tomorrow, it would still take many years for the climate to return to what we consider "normal"—and some parts might not be able to do so at all, as weather patterns have already begun to change enough that they might not return to a previous equilibrium, but find a new one that shifts moisture or heat from one region to another to the great detriment of both (at least for a few generations).

And zero emissions isn't something we're going to be able to get to this century. Not unless the political situation changes hugely worldwide.

So...we're in trouble. Not "we will be". We are. Now. And it's going to get a lot worse. It is possible to make things better, but it will take massive shifts in patterns of consumption, and probably won't happen until we've seen several parts of the world devastated by famine and war.

Another way of saying this year was colder than the last 3 years

Or another way is that the past 20 years have been hotter than the previous 20 years, excluding 1998 which was a spike in the the otherwise consistent trend. It's in the chart in the article.

You did read more than the title, right?

By god! If that short term random fluctuation continued as a long term trend the Earth would continue cooling forever! You've cracked global warming, what an incredible accomplishment!

(Another another way of wording the headline would be to point out that global temperatures are now permanently in a regime which is significantly hotter than historical averages.)

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