July was world's hottest month on record, WMO says
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In hotter countries (many of which are developing), abiotic and biotic stresses can easily combine with bad weather events to wipe out an entire region's production. The political instability that this can and likely will cause is the greatest short-term climate change issue in my opinion. I really don't see how it can be avoided, given trans-national institutions which may have helped buffer these impacts are also at their lowest ebb since WW2.
Humanity is not faced with a problem. Humanity is the problem.
The earth itself has no moral view on what should happen.
(by definition, defining these criteria for the world would necessarily involve politics)
But politically, the coordination problem is unsolvable. Until the effects of the warming become big enough that one of the more powerful agents involved has a clearly positive inventive gradient to actually expend that energy at a personal loss, without the cooperation of others. (Say, for instance, if a majority of US territory becomes uninhabitable due to semi-persistent fires, persistent droughts, etc, I'd expect the US to actually solve the problem irrespective of what the other powers are doing.)
Even in the realm of "figurative language", it is ridiculously over the top and over used. It adds nothing to a discussion that is chock-a-block full of over the top assertions.
The change of there being a collapse of most of the significant ecosystems isn't trivial. The change of mass migrations and conflicts over resources unlike anything we've ever seen before are no longer trivial.
Out of all the hills to die on in the "debate" over climate change, this is about the most ridiculous, pedantic, and useless. How many millions of dead people would you like before considering it adequate language?
You seem to be working from the assumption that the apocalyptic predictions are a certainty and that humanity will be unable to adapt, that climate change is an existential threat.
I tend to think that a linear (or worse) extrapolation of warming trends is unscientific and unlikely, that the effects of current modest warming will not be apocalyptic (which still leaves plenty of room for various catastrophes), and that human ingenuity will be able to mitigate the worst effects. In short I don't think global warming is an existential threat to humanity or the Earth.
The problem with apocalyptic, existential threat language is that it can be leveraged to advocate for or justify extremely radical private and public actions as well as governmental power grabs. I'm more worried about radical "ends-justifies-the-means" people and the side-effects of giving government more power than I am of the effects of global warming.
Sure, I could be wrong, but over 100 million people have been killed by misguided governments historically and to me that is a much more tangible threat.
Wait so now you're more of an authority than the already-conservative IPCC models which do not account for the ever worsening effects of sea ice and the methane feedback loop?
We're already observing in real time the loss of many ecosystems due to climate change, and we're far from the temperatures proposed by the BUA scenarios.
You're saying that a linear warming trend is unscientific when the entirety of the evidence at hand is showing that an increase way above linear is most likely, and already being observed. So what, you're expecting that the continued, non-linear increases in CO2 concentrations are going to magically not work with all the known feedback loops?
I was saying that the "extrapolation" of current trends into the future without bound is unscientific. Perhaps that isn't quite right. I could have made it clear that they are unproven hypothesis at this point. So just an element of the scientific process, but not a conclusive scientific results.
Positive feedback loops are very unusual in nature and so that is one reason I said "unlikely".
In any case treating the predictions of climate models as equivalent to the confirmation of hypothesis via the scientific method is just wrong by definition. They are different things.
We know the amount of ice in places vulnerable to climate change, and we have a solid understanding of the albedo effects of Arctic sea ice.
The correlation between CO2 and atmospheric temperatures isn't just empericial, but can be well modeled with today's forecasting supercomputers. The predictions that were made 40 years ago are in line with what we are observing today, and the ensemble modeling system we use to look at different climate scenarios shows the ample world of possibilities.
None of those things indicate that there's any reason why there should be a _better_ case than the already conservative predictions, and all point towards those feedback loops being substantially more dramatic.
For the record, the "extrapolation" isn't unbounded; there are limits to atmospheric temperature determined by atmospheric radiation, ocean albedo, the effects of temperature on cloud formations, etc. It's just that the limit is high enough that there will be literally no ecosystem able to adapt and our capacity to grow food is out of the question at the point.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/
Click the sub-heading for "Monthly Mean Global Surface Temperature", which will show the line graph/data for the temperature difference for a given month compared to the mean for 1951-1980.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/index.html#q202
> Q. Why does GISS show no data from before 1880?
> A. The analysis is limited to the period since 1880 because of poor spatial coverage of stations and decreasing data quality prior to that time. Meteorological station data provide a useful indication of temperature change in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics for a few decades prior to 1880, and there are a small number of station records that extend back to previous centuries. However, we believe that analyses for these earlier years need to be carried out on a station by station basis with an attempt to discern the method and reliability of measurements at each station, a task beyond the scope of our analysis. Global studies of still earlier times depend upon incorporation of proxy measures of temperature change like tree rings, ice core data, etc.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/index.html#q102
> Q. Why does GISS stay with the 1951-1980 base period?
> A. The primary focus of the GISS analysis are long-term temperature changes over many decades and centuries, and a fixed base period yields anomalies that are consistent over time.
https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/
The current political "climate" makes very improbable that we'll achieve "only 2 deg in 2100" target that the politicians mention but don't do enough -- compare with how much easier were had we started in 2000:
What we have with climate is more like your neighbor appearing with two wives two months ago, with thirty wives one month ago, and today he has sixty wives and maybe a few husbands. Still waiting to verify if something is not right?
Coin flips are independent events. Daily temperatures are not.
Still, we must protect our environment. Pollution is horrible and it needs to be addressed.
The higher the expertise of the climatologist the more likely they are to agree as well. Or, only the incompetent ones disagree.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151106083011/http://tigger.uic...
https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-conse...
Or the other option, that your political understanding of the world is lacking?
That's not really relevant, is it? The issues with the climate change happening now is that it is man-made, and that we've built most of our civilization around the assumption that the climate was either not changing, or was changing very slowly.
If something was causing increase flooding in, say, Nebraska, would you bring up that Nebraska was hundreds of meters below water 100 million years ago? If an arsonist were setting wildfires in your your near inhabited areas, would you bring up that there have been wildfires for hundreds of thousands of years due to lighting?
And yes, we know that most of the present day climate change is man-made, because we know that most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere during industrial times is man-made. We know that because CO2 that comes from burning fossil fuels and plants has a different isotope makeup than CO2 that comes from other sources.
Tomorrow temperature around Tunis will be in the 41-45C range. That's very uncommon for this coastal city.
Weather is not climate, yada yada.
What is it going to take to get a global consensus that we'd like to have unadjusted temperature data, not controlled by adjusters that have a funding agenda?
What would it take to get a little raw data up in the house?
The UK's Met Office historic has raw station readings going as far back as the station. Some go back further than others, unsurprisingly.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
I've been keeping track of data monthly for 30 years, and syncing with government sources of same, and you besmirch yourself.
The fact is: this could well be a crisis. But governments covering data for political reasons does nothing to inspire confidence, regardless of the squealing of pantywaists.
To wit- you don't spend trillions of other people's money on your night terrors