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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind the scale of the experiment we're living in: between the peak of last ice age (when most of today's developed countries were either under a thick dome of ice, or dry cold steppes with roaming hordes of woolly mammoths) and pre-industrial climate, the global temperature increase was only 5°C, occurring over a few millenia (though this increase was enough to destroy completely this environment and its mammoths, wooly rhinos, cave bears, etc).

Now we're talking of adding 4°C in a couple of centuries. What could go wrong, really? Yeah, about everything, and really strong and fast.

People don't worry because they think of having 4°C daily increase temperature, no big deal: temperature swings daily by tens of degrees. But they should instead think of a fever: a 2°C fever is already pretty strong; a 4°C fever is a very serious condition, potentially deadly.

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I’m not a climate scientist and a few degree increase used to seem like a small thing to me. Then I realized that increasing the global temperature average by a few degrees means putting in a massive amount of more energy into the system and then it clicked for me how much of a big deal this is. This massive increase in energy into the system over a very short period of time means lots of chaotic events will ensue before a new equilibrium is obtained.

It’s interesting that you touch on energy — temperature is a measure of the energy of a system, but most people don’t think of it in those terms.

If you consider how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of your living room by 4C (about 840J per m3), and then extrapolate that to the entire planet, it’s a phenomenal amount of energy, incomprehensibly vast. Then, consider that the oceans, with a heat capacity of 4.2MJ per m3 and a vast volume are also warming by entire degrees, and it’s just staggering.

Yet, the core is even hotter. So we're mostly talking about the relatively thin crust layer on top. Core and mantle has practically unlimited energy supply as well. The planet is basically alot larger, and contains lots more energy than we normally account for.

What does the energy of the Earth’s core have to do with climate? Outside of the effects of volcanoes I can’t think of anything.

I just can't imagine why the bigger picture is never interesting.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=earth+mantle+core+climate&ia=...

From the first link it appears the effect is based on how the liquid flow of the core affects the orbit of the planet. The energy of the core does not play the same role on climate change as the energy that we’ve input into the system.

I don’t think anyone is claiming the bigger picture isn’t interesting. Indeed, I did ask for clarification precisely because I was interested in learning something new.

The NASA study seems to be yet another vector to validate human-caused warming of climate. Validation is one thing, but also understanding exactly how and why we're moving away from an equilibrium vs core cycles, and what that may mean, may say something compelling.

We're like fleas on the back of a giant elephant, and it might help to reorient to gain clarity. Mind you, I don't bring answers, only unasked questions and some wonder.

The other thing is the enormous amount of geothermal energy, trapped beneath our feet. We may require energy, ie. to trap greenhouse gases and as replacement for fossile fuels.

https://www.greenandgrowing.org/how-long-does-carbon-dioxide...

Another issue I think is that the average hides a lot. Both (1, 2, 8, 9) and (4, 5, 5, 6) have the same average.

Now extend that to 365 days, and there's a lot of room for wild events leading to "just" a 1 degree increase in average temperature.

But then, maybe the average temperature is not the right thing to use in this context.

In France, the usual term is "climate warming", not sure about other places. Maybe we should use a term that shows that there's an increase in unusual temperature swings and / or exceptional events. These should be much more intelligible for the average person.

1º increase? Meh, 32º or 33º feel roughly the same.

Huge storms that tear the roofs off houses ever other week? Yeah, that might actually be a concern.

In the US, the term "climate change" has come to be used in favor of "global warming". It probably helped, but the nature of the propaganda and misinformation also shifted to adapt.

I think that the words "climate drift" are more accurate: the climate won't change back on human timescale, we will never have 2021 climate ever again.

And with the system inertia (the physical system, i'm not talking about our inaction), unless positive feedback loops are discovered as the drift continue, we will never have 2030 climate again. Even if every emissions stopped tomorrow.

I've always thought the term Climate Destabilization would be better. No one cares if it gets warm. Everyone cares if their way of life gets destabilized.

Weather Volatility?

Global increase of 4°C means about 8°C increase on land (roughly double). Anything past 3-4°C global increase is just destruction of a massive scale. Just 2°C would be manageable, but we are going to shoot past that really fast (me things).

EDIT: My first sentence is scientific fact (double land temperature). My second sentence is mostly accepted by climate scientists, though the details can be debated (just how bad it's going to get). The third sentence is my personal opinion and only time will tell. But sure, downvote me.

The biggest historic polluters don't care because their temperatures were nice already. It's primarily those regions that had awful temperatures to begin with that will suffer.

You hear all these people coming up with reasons why more CO2 is a good thing but this is always under the assumption that you live in a country that is not impacted by the negative effects. Everything is positive if you are blind to the negatives.

Tell that to British Columbia. BC is famed for stable temperatures. Thats why it is the most desireable place to live in Canada. Vancouver rarely gets below -5 or above 30, and then only ever for a day at a time. Then last week Lytton BC became hotter than a Saudi summer, shattering Canada's all-time hottest temperature by several degrees. Over a period of _days_ everything dried out. Lightning started fires. Now Lytton doesnt exist anymore. 90% burned to the ground and many dead. Climate change means change: the stable is becomes unstable and the moderate becomes extreem.

Roads in western canda are literally failing under this heat.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-infrastructu...

I think that's the part people need to hear - we're moving from semi-stable to a more chaotic climate.

The extremes are moving, and it doesn't take many shifts to destroy everything. E.g. dry + fire, or ice + time, or storms + floods, or humidity + time

Not entirely sure what people need to hear. We need better models and problem definitions.

So better documentation of exactly how badly we are screwed? The ship is sinking. We can measure water inflow to better predict how long we have, or we can start plugging the holes asap and pray we can do so in time.

The story at the moment is a 2 deg c up tick, that sounds pretty fine to me. So we don't get snow so often? OK, but the summers are nicer. All good.

But if the reality is that wild fires burn my house to the ground and snow storms cut me off, freeze my pipes and stop me getting to work - now I'm listening.

Lytton is in the middle of the Fraiser River valley, it has always been hot AF in the middle of summer. Vancouver is far away on the coast. Median temperature in Lytton around Aug 1st is 30C and it has hit ~40C a bunch over its historical record.

This event was, of course, very extreme, but its not that surprising it happened in Lytton.

And the whole Frasier river valley is getting hit hard by climate change and forest fires, pretty much every summer.

It might seem weird because its so far north, but its climate is more like drought-striken areas of WA/OR/CA.

‘Fraser’, no ‘i’. After Simon Fraser, an explorer of western Canada.

Would you swear on your life it wasn't named after Dr. Frasier Crane, esteemed psychologist of the Pacific Northwest?

I didn't think so.

So far north? London is further north than both vancouver and lytton.

London is anomalously warm for its latitude due to the Atlantic Ocean conveyor belt.

Is global yearly average temperature what increases. It is an average that takes into account from the coldest night of winter in the south pole to the hottest days in the sahara. You should not see it as "today's temperature + 4ºC", specially in something as complex as the global climate system.

What you will see in the day to day scale is more extreme weather, reaching new highs, changing in climate features (like some essential sea currents, like the gulf stream, and also air currents like the polar vortex) and not so friendly weather for things that implies predictability, like agriculture, because bad weather in some critical stages mean the loss of crops.

Also, the increase of temperature, the extremes that it reaches, are not evenly distributed, the highest temperature anomalies happen around the poles, where you have a lot of factors that will provide a positive feedback to increase global warming (releasing buried/frozen carbon, less albedo due to ice melting, etc)

If I were to predict the future, I'd say we will see a move away from focusing on passive measures (such as reduction in carbon emissions) to active measures pretty quickly as the passive stuff is not fast enough.

Telling people they will collapse under the heat now while increasing taxes etc. for a long-term agenda will not work well in most societies...

If the average is raised in a process that is described in as implied form by say a gaussian distribution, the tails of the distribution increase by far more than the average. And for climate change the std deviation will increase too.

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