World breaches key 1.5C warming mark for record number of days
bbc.com
bbc.com
Each time a big wildfire happens by arson, the breaking point is rescheduled months, maybe years closer. So the yesterday models could develop into a situation like: we have 100 years to fix it -> we have 20 years -> we have 5 years. The models would be still true. Researchers can make models but can't anticipate that. nobody could.
I suspect (This is just my own opinion) that the current repeated heat waves are, in part at least, an effect of the Ukraine war releasing lots of heat with all those bombs exploding each day for 2 years. If I'm right we will see the climate chilling a little in the year after the war (as long as the point of no return is not achieved). We will not know it until either the war is ended; or we end the job to break the climate beyond repair. Whatever happens first.
This all handwringing about forest fires in US is just so meh. Get a grip, look at the big picture. Stuff burns every year in such quantities, what that does burn in US can be ignored, it's just a rounding error.
1) That's a comforting but very improbable claim. I bet that all climate researchers in US noticed that and cared about it. Whataboutism will not help here.
2) This is not how nature works. It will not care about how much people will wave banners in the streets. Much less if the Monalisa is marinated in tomato sauce or not. Nature is not a democracy, is a machine.
As footnote, sometimes I can't fall to ask myself if Russia (that just this week was talking about starting nuclear probes in Siberia and last week was talking about retaking Alaska), really wants to stop climate change or, having a lot of land covered by ice, would secretly expect to benefit of the warming. Is a mystery what they were thinking, but logic or reason quit the room some time ago.
So no, no luck here. Forests burn, peat burns in such quantities you wouldn't believe and all those "climate researchers" care for are citation numbers of their papers and how to not get deplatformed.
This is the sad state of reality.
Note: I wanted to make sure I was not talking out my bum, so I did some quick research to make sure I was not going crazy, and luckily (for me), I was correct.
Fires are classed A-L based on number of acres[1], so taking the bottom of G as the middle, that's 5000 acres.
The Intertribal Timber Council compiled data from the US Forest Service to estimate the BTU-equivalent output of forest fires back in 2002, estimating BTUs as around 794.6 Million BTUs per-acre[2].
That would put a 5000 acres fire at 794,600,000 * 5,000 = 3,973,000,000,000 BTUs. That's 3.9 Trillion.
The energy release of the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima is a commonly-used unit for estimating earthquake and asteroid impact events (HBE = Hiroshima Bomb Explosion). According to justintools[3], it is equivalent to 56,869,019,274 BTUs (56 Billion*).
Comparing the 2, it would require ~70 "HBEs" to equal one 5k acre forest fire in total heat generated.
If I had to guess, I'd postulate the difference is down to time, since a bomb exploding peaks in heat very quickly and then immediately begins to drop off, whereas a forest fire is burning for hours and hours.
[1]: https://www.nwcg.gov/sites/default/files/data-standards/pdf/...
[2]: https://www.itcnet.org/file_download/a909947a-b11b-4799-9652...
[3]: https://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/energy.php?k1=hi...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/21/global-wildfir...
But the effect is still accumulative, hence the "in part at least" in my previous post.
Nature behavior is rarely lineal. Events follow often complex curves with two sudden changes of "velocity". In Ecology is relatively common observing small increases in a variable to trigger huge effects if a threshold is crossed.
We are talking about two different things here. Climate chaos is one; heat waves is another. Anomalous heat this year can be part of a temporal or permanent effect. We can be at a peak in the curve or at a step increasing. What we observed is that something happening in Ukraine needs just a few days to travel to most Europe by air. This is how they discovered Chernobyl in Sweden. We know also that 2023 was heat wave, after heat wave, non stop (wildfires all around the Mediterranean also) and this is unusual behavior.
If the war is feeding this, directly or indirectly (who burned Greece or Canada, and why?), we could return to a "more normal+1" situation, with still a climate chaos problem at the background causing the +1. This does not mean that the antiscience crew was right, but they will try to score the point anyways.
If is the second and each year will we hotter than the previous for the next years, or decades; then we have a big problem at our gates and is not called climate change, is global war
Wars will start in Africa or Asia as long as the areas more punished by climate became insufferable to live, and if the wars are helping the climate change (and Putin's Ukrainian genocide is obviously feeding it at some extent) we could pass the non return point much faster that we expect.
This does not mean that the research models were wrong and the scientists were "puzzled", as every journal parrots constantly. It means that new events happened later.
its not spelled like that in English, genocide has a different meaning.. basically you sounded reasonable until that gibberish part
signed- also concerned but anti-gibberish
Genocide definition: The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group
So, exactly what is happening here for the last two years.
Destroying systematically relevant art, cultural symbols, valuable historical buildings all around the country. Bombing civilians systematically. Bombing hospitals, schools, nurseries with babies inside. Destroying churches, and commiting every single hideous war crime in the list except nuke, while barking about the need to denazify and "clean" a population, attempt to kill the president...
We could tick practically every checkbox in the list
I'm glad to inform you that this is uppercase flashing neon letters saying Genocide.
By that logic, so is human body heat.
The amount of heat from bombs is such a miniscule part of global heat generated, it's meaningless to cite other than as a political claim.
I'm anti-war, and you don't need to link war to every bad thing out there (like climate change) just to justify that position.
What matters is net deforestation. The sum total of carbon contained in biomass going up or down. Which is going down, but primarily due to agriculture and other development.
The Nordstream pipeline attack was the largest release of methane in human history. Sometimes bombs blow up things that cause global warming.
this is startling - any further info on that?
edit I see this one https://www.unep.org/technical-highlight/unep-finds-nord-str...
Good question? Maybe takes that long for the oceans to warm from lack of cloud ?
Personally I thought it read more like an opinion piece ? Interesting ideas there but seems unverified ?
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
The authors of the paper suggest a +0.15 Wm−2 radiative forcing and give the radiative forcing increase due to CO2 form 1996 to 2005 as +0.26 Wm−2.
This seems to provide an explanation of a huge jump in temperatures non expected by current CO2-only models.
Why this effect would not have been seen in the summer of 2022 I don't know, nor seems the authors of the paper or the liked article address it.
Also the author says this effect may dissipate in 5-10 years at which point the expected warming from CO2 would "match" the current temperatures anyway so there's no real 'cooling' to be expected.
Disclaimer: I'm a father and absolutely not interested in shutting down the conversation about this, something about that website just gets my BS detector going.
The title suggests if the 1.5C mark is broken something bad will happen, but is that really the case? Or is it purely symbolic?
Many climate scientists sounding the alarm get attacked and silenced (and activists get killed!), so there's reason to believe that things are actually much worse than the media lets on.
Still, climate activists are routinely targeted: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63064471
I'm still vaguely recalling an article about a climate scientist disappearing under suspicious circumstances, but I cannot find it now.
Backing the parent comment, please see https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/report-says-200-environme...
Ironic considering that the original claim was:
>Many climate scientists sounding the alarm get attacked and silenced (and activists get killed!)
But the source you provide only mentions "environmental and land defense activists".
I vaguely recall a climate scientist disappearing under odd circumstances but I can't recall where. Maybe this was a scientist and activist in Latin America.
We can control human emissions but not these feedbacks.
I'd say we can't even do that because human stupidity is fifth elemental force.
I am definitely copying that. Very nice way of putting it.
Quite fucking terrifying.
Anyone who is paying attention can feel what's happening. The polycrisis grows every day.
We are not saying the global temperature has gone up 1.5 degrees since you or anyone else you know has been born. We are saying we want to return to a time 150/200 years ago. The weather you experience now may go up .5 degrees. Why is everyone acting like the end of the world is near? We've already gone up 1.5 in the 1800s and we are better off for it.
This is a big deal. The mountains are thawing and crumbling [2].
1: https://www.zamg.ac.at/cms/de/klima/klima-aktuell/klimamonit...
"The mean annual temperature has increased by 1.6°C between 1864 and 2008"
https://www.climatechangepost.com/austria/climate-change/
On target with everyone else.
Scientific consensus is that climate change is real, is impacted by human activity, and shows no sign of abating. We're seeing weather patterns that are breaking records and seasonal changes that correspond with a warming planet.
The denial of these concerns seem to be either from those who are directly profiting from factors contributing to it or those whose political beliefs associate it with a hoax by the enemy.
Fossil fuels provided cheap energy to transform civilization but it's not the only game in town anymore. Transitioning away from them brings significant benefits that are worthy enough regardless of "saving the planet" (e.g., cheaper power, less pollution, energy independence, less environmental destruction, etc).
Seems like we are not much better at figuring it all out if we believe scientific consensus is anything but a political activity.
There is a group who believes the climate is changing but question those who selectively use dates to make the situation appear more dramatic. There is a financial motive in many cases and others have had too many glasses of koolaid
Kitzbühel in early March looked like it usually does in May. I didn't bother trying after that. For those not familiar with skiing in Austria, that is a relatively expensive area that has loads of snow-making capacity.
The schools have learning to ski in their agenda, I really don't know how that's going to happen.