Paris Agreement thresholds crossed
arctic-news.blogspot.com
arctic-news.blogspot.com
Surprise to no one.
The way things are going I believe we will hit +2c by 2040. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living, it is human nature. Because of that, many of the young will be forced into a bad condition.
The only thing that could probably stop this, but will be just as bad, is a Yellowstone Event :(
How about we just get out of the way of renewables? Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment.
It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs some investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive.
Right, as long as energy prices are not guaranteed no one is going to invest massively. No one want to be the one having to eat up a 8000$/mwh price like in Texas in the Winter. The 3 month mean volatility of energy prices in Europe is 350% (with peak of more than 1500% in 2009 and 2021). For comparison Bitcoin volatility is 54% in the last 10 years.
The amount of frivolous waste I observe at the individual level, multiplied by the millions, is not insignificant.
Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
In 2024 why are we worried about AI using too much electricity? Because we never decarbonized the grid. 25 years of saying “let’s use nuclear power “ was shot down. Not to worry, global peak fossil fuels by 2030.
For instance you might sacrifice flying to save the climate but airlines actually have CO2 quotas. So if you aren't flying somebody else is likely going to take your place because it will be cheap. CO2 quotas will be reduced year by year so flying will get more expensive and you will move from individual sacrifice to market dynamics.
This is simply restating the dismissal that OP brought up, not providing an answer. The example does not do much as CO2 quotas are nowhere near universal.
People just have to realize how cheap Co2 certificates are and that to fight climate change we need to spend max 5% of GDP annually.
From another article even more recently (no link, was on HN recently) it shows that energy usage by the biggest companies is up a significant percentage (30-50%) and that they won't hit their carbon-neutral or carbon-zero targets. All of this increase is because of investment in "AI" and its massive energy requirements.
So even if you were doing all you could to reduce your impact, all it takes is a single person in charge of one of these companies to do something like build out a datacentre or build a new plant or dig a new coal mine, and all your hard work is for naught.
I am sympathetic to the argument that a simple persons influence is small compared to that of a company CEO. But of course there are many more simple people and their influence together is cumulative.
I still see very much a shared responsibility. Big firms could easily do better, but individuals could as well. In the face of the magnitude of the problem, can we really ignore any part of the equation? Can we really say that only the corporate world has to change or that the corporate world has to change first, when we need change on every level, corporate and individual, as fast as possible?
For instance, in the US, residential made up 311 million of 4.807 billion total metric tons of CO2 output (https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/), which is about 6.5%.
Last year, emissions were 37.55 billion metric tons, which is the highest ever recorded (https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...).
If the entire US residential sector were magically made emission free with everything else remaining the same, global output would be 37.24 billion metric tons instead - negligibly different and still the highest ever recorded.
I don't have figures for the EU available, but you figure it'd be a similar order of magnitude for residential. So if we just estimated it to be about the same, and made the entire EU zero-emission as well, we'd be at 36.93 billion metric tons, which is about where they were in 2018-2019, as well as 2021 due to the pandemic.
Now, you may say: ok, what about transportation and etc? In the US, it's about 28% of emissions from transportation, and of those, 57% are light duty vehicles (including most personal vehicles) - see https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-.... That was from 2022, but if we assume the percentages were about the same in 2023, they'd be about 767 million metric tons (=4.807 * .57 * .28).
So if we magically made all US residential AND personal vehicle emissions go to 0, global emissions would be 36.47 metric tons or about 2017-2018 levels.
If you again assume the EU is around the same as the US, and magically made all US/EU emissions go to 0, we'd have 35.394 metric tons of CO2, or about where levels were hovering in 2013-2016.
TL;DR: if you magically made the entire US residential and personal transport sectors 100% emissions free, global CO2 emissions would only go back to where they were in 2017-2018. If you throw the EU in as well we'd be in the 2013-2016 range.
Of course, declaring it as a solution is the easy bit. The hard bit is actually doing it, and this is where I see personal sacrifice falling short. I assume mass ritual suicide isn't what you had in mind, so what level of personal sacrifice is appropriate? How do you convince people? Are there rewards for adherence of penalties for not? If the government provides incentives, is it still "personal" sacrifice? I heard China and India are the biggest contributors these days, shouldn't they be the ones sacrificing instead of me? How many vegans does it take to offset one new AI datacenter?
It's like asking "why don't we just emit less?" Right, that's the problem. What are you proposing?
As for concrete proposals, I don‘t have any. I don’t think that there need to be universal prescriptions. if everybody takes a good look what he or she really needs for a fulfilled life and what in the end are luxuries. I honestly think that that is enough. But I think the responsibility to decide there is real even if it is in no way enforced. And it should not be easily dismissed.
I don't think I've experienced many quick dismissals. Here's some of the conversations around personal responsibility I've personally experienced:
- reduce reuse recycle (this was drilled into my head at a young age)
- plastic vs paper vs reusable supermarket bags (pretty trivial)
- plastic vs paper straws (infuriatingly banal)
- EVs vs ICE vehicles (currently the only viable options are luxury cars, cutting a whole segment of the population out of the market)
- reduce meat consumption (as unpopular as it is effective)
- do not have children (extreme, extremely polarizing)
- reduce air travel (easy in theory, I just really like travel)
I concede that both attributions (personal or corporate) might be handwavy. Let's continue to wave our hands in both directions not only in one, is all I want to say.
I could not agree more!
Technological progress that leads to higher quality of life is a far better solution than individual sacrifice, not at the least because unlike individual sacrifice, it is self-incentifying.
For example, in a large percentage of the developed world, we don't need to burn fossil fuels directly anymore to heat indoor spaces. Heat pumps (even those powered by fossil fueled electric grids) reduce both overall CO2 emissions and improve indoor and local air quality, all of which improve individual, community, and global quality-of-life, so therefore no "sacrifice". It's similar for electrified transport (both personal and mass transit), and manufacturing.
The problem is that switching to newer emissions-free technology can be capital-intensive in the short term. In the long term it is not only cheaper, but will improve average quality of life.
> Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
Not the OP, but I think the statement holds even when talking about systemic solutions.
We're reaching breakpoints with climate change faster than expected, and we only started to decouple _some_ country's economic growth from CO2 in the last 10 years or so. Even if we can in theory decouple growth from CO2 completely (or near completely) and in so doing maintain the standard of living we enjoy in the global north, in practice we aren't doing it fast enough.
If we want to get emissions under control fast enough to not hit 2 degrees of warming I think it's reasonable to say that the solution will involve a reduction in some standards of living, and that is something no one wants to say because of how hard a sell it is.
I'm not demanding that everyone only bikes to work and lives off their garden and locally grown produce, but it would be nice if we could all agree on a level of personal sacrifice that involves not sabotaging the decarbonization of the grid for selfish reasons.
Though this kind of thinking doesn't ever help things to improve. Still have to believe that we can fix things and we can improve things.
What's depressing is all the people who are still trying to disrupt that chance, even now.
In 2024, we now have coal plants being restarted to power AI and cryptocurrency datacenters.
Insulating houses?
More efficient hybrid cars?
A carbon fee that is returned to the people, mildly diverting the market incentives towards cleaner, greener while putting money in ordinary people's pockets?
Fixing pipeline leaks, moving from coal to methane, from gas boilers to heat pumps, solar water heaters, better urban planning, public transport, modern agriculture, recycling food waste, better landfill design, the list goes on and on.
Imagine the head start we'd have had, and how the market for solar wind and batteries would have been expedited. But no, we spent decades pretending there wasn't a problem and that those who believed there was a problem were Marxists trying to undermine capitalism.
We could effectively geoengineer one by pumping things into the upper atmosphere ourselves, but there's a lot of questions about that and we have no idea if this would help more than it hurt.
https://eos.org/articles/tonga-eruption-may-temporarily-push...
It's normal that people want "better" than what their parents had, question is what is "better". If lots of people would see "better" (for example) as "less polluted town, where you enjoy walking" and NOT "more place to be in your car", things would fix themselves given some time.
My favorite example: why did Netherlands adopted bikes? Because there were killing too many children with cars (ref: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...)
Nowadays there are many opportunities (high speed trains to replace some flights, e-bikes to allow bikes in non-flat cities, insulation to reduce heating, rather cheap renewable energy), so it's not all lost UNLESS people want specifically something very bad (exaggerating: "I love my coal plan!")
not in an open-carry state they wouldn't.
And if it's not, what's the point of this comment? To look tough online?
Idea was that things are not set into stone and change faster than we realize. And there will always be good and bad examples (and if I think about it, probably the backup cameras solution nowadays is not that bad anyhow).
No surer way to continue climate change.
Other things like coal burning factories can be actually brought to 0. Same with electrifying homes and connecting them to renewable energy for 0 perceived change (if the grid supported it). That will also help making EVs actual net zero.
Lots of other opportunities that can drive people away from emissions without meaningfully asking them to change their lives or to completely rebuild civil infrastructure.
I think people don't understand how climate change works. On a human significant time scale, every gram of CO2 you emit mostly just stay there. A small part disolves in the oceans but that's it. The rest will forever contribute to the Earth greenhouse effect.
The goal which was set in the Paris agreement is reaching net zero. We are aiming to entirely stop emitting GHC. Everything which is emitting today needs to stop or be offset. I repeat: everything. That obviously includes transports, an area which moreover is fairly easy to clean especially for a country as rich as the USA.
Here is the study from Nature Climate Change in 2022.
"Tonga eruption increases chance of temporary surface temperature anomaly above 1.5 °C"
A higher global average temperature is not just a few tenths of degrees higher temperature in your normal day, it is the global climate system with a lot of extra energy, the triggering and empowering a bunch of positive feedback loops that push the change pedal down, and the impact that all of that have in other systems, like agriculture or economy.
It is a so complex system that the warming could even trigger an ice age, or quite the opposite of that, but in either case, it will be far worse than just bad for the people living through it. Disrupting a complex system we depend on is simply suicidal.
I've always thought the smoothed line should be truncated (so that it doesn't show present-day estimates where data is lacking.)
And then there's the next graph. A bit confusing because it uses a different baseline, but where you can see the very recent trend becoming horizontal. (And can't really see any early trend because you can only distinguish 2 years.)
Honestly, I'm not sure what to take from that article. But after a needless sensationalistic introduction, I don't think I can take it at face value.
An edit: here's a much clearer view of the anomaly, from a different source, with yet a different baseline:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly
Very recent values have a really large error bar that the source on the article shouldn't have. But you can't use one to fill the missing data on the other.
The big thing is that if the US and Europe had gone fully nuclear by 2000 or so China would have copied that instead of powering its ascent mostly with coal. They're building a lot of solar, wind, and nuclear now but again too late.
Oil for land transportation had to wait until batteries were good enough for cheap practical EVs, but coal fired electricity generation is by far the largest single contributor and is the one that had to be phased out first.
The latter are louder because crackpots are always the loudest. That principle holds everywhere in politics.
And this is a huge part of why so many social problems are never solved despite spending billions of dollars purportedly trying to solve them.
Investment in renewables seems to be the cheapest and best way to reduce Carbon emissions.
Electricity generation is kinda of a solved issue, but a tax would really speed-up industry electrification and grid storage. It could also come with subsides for open-air capture and synthetic fuels, or maybe some direct spending on those.
And if some question still remains, take a look at the recent trends for photovoltaic panels.
It's never too late.
I don't understand why people only want to see the social part of climate change and somehow refuse to look at it from a technical point of view. I blame ecologists for that because a lot of political movements which declare themselves ecologists actually have a social agenda which is not related to ecology and there is often a weird, seemingly catholic inspired, moral overlay on top which emphasis sacrifice and suffering for redemption - completely pointless.
The fact is warming happens because we have put too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The obvious solution to this problem is to, first, stop adding more which is what we generally discuss, then, remove the excess - perfectly doable if costly and energy consuming today.
What we need is more research into how to efficiently scrub CO2 for the atmosphere and how to do it on a large scale. Defeatism is a waste of time.
The whole point about what constitutes the pre-industrial baseline doesn't really make sense. The threshold of 1.5°C is completely arbitraty and was taken on the basis of the 1903-1924 base. Obviously, you can show a bigger increase if you go further back but that doesn't fundamentaly change the issue.
The point about ice cover decline is also weird. The IPCC regularly builds models based on the state of the art for climate modelisation as defined by its working group on the basis of publications. These models are not set in stone. If 2024 shows that ice cover was under taken into account during the last report, that will be corrected in the next (provided it was - I'm far from convinced).
The IPCC is not an observatory publishing warning, nor is it pretenting to be the sole authority about climate change. It is a group of experts publishing a synthesis of the state of the art and multiple models illustrating likely trajectories (note the plural - they publish multiple models). These models can obviously be criticised but at least they exist, are based on consensual science and state their hypotheses clearly. That's the strength of the IPCC.
Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dqz7P-mORs
Climatologists fight with each other in public over whether the threshold has been crossed or not. They often can't even give a straight explanation of their own position. Sabine shows a clip from a recent video call by Michael Mann where he presents a temperature graph that shows 1.5 of warming, but with a baseline of 1970. He claims the baseline doesn't matter and you can "quibble" over it! Unfortunately for Mann he's talking to someone who is switched on, and they point out that 1970 isn't pre-industrial so the Paris Agreement must have been voided years ago according to that data.
Mann gets confused, starts stuttering, starts scrolling through his Twitter feed, points to another graph with a 1970 baseline and then claims the true baseline is actually 1900-2000. Again the guy he's talking to calls him out on it, asking if that's 1950 then it's still not pre-industrial times? Then Mann claims the official baseline is "late 19th century" and there has been only 1.4 degrees of warming since then. The video ends with the guy in the audience saying "Now I'm totally confused", which is reasonable because what Mann is saying isn't internally consistent.
As Hossenfelder and many of the YouTube commenters point out, it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Those two positions aren't compatible.
Because neither is true and neither is claimed. There are no important threshold and baseline will obviously shift what you are looking at.
The threshold put forwards in conference (1.5°C or 2°C) are a communication device because it's easier to draw a line and explain that to people. They are only targets and are not the most important objectives set during climate conferences (the Paris agreement would absolutely not be voided by crossing 1.5°C by the way, that's nonsense).
The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.
> The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.
Are you sure that's a fact, or is it a communication device someone used on you? Look at the graphs Mann presents in the Hossenfelder video and you'll note that temperature increase isn't continuous, it's more like a step function with long plateaus, with the steps aligning with factors like El Niño.
The problem with making up scientific-sounding thresholds for communication is that it's a form of the noble lie and it always ends badly. As Hossenfelder points out, the fighting over whether this threshold was crossed or not is a "science communication disaster". It's like the manager who pretends the company will go bankrupt on December 10th if everyone doesn't ship the product by that date, when in reality no such bankruptcy will occur and he just likes seeing everyone run around in a frenzy, increasing profits. The people doing it believe it's justified but that doesn't change the core dishonesty of the approach and inevitably, when it's revealed that the claims are lies, they will assume all such claims from you are lies. Why fret about any deadline ever again once you discover one of them was fake?
No, that's factually untrue. Go read the IPCC report which is the official communication of the UN on global warming. Absolutely nothing in it implies that 1.5°C is a tipping point.
There is definitely effects with cliff like behaviour (permarfrost melting) but there is nothing magical about 1.5°C.
> Look at the graphs Mann presents in the Hossenfelder video and you'll note that temperature increase isn't continuous, it's more like a step function with long plateaus, with the steps aligning with factors like El Niño.
That's not what continuous means here. It's to be understood as opposite to step-wise. Increase has efffect which varies with the amount in a mostly continuous manner. That's why thresholds are necessary arbitrary.
There is no plateau, it's oscillation with a trend because seasons. [0] Anyway, no one is saying that temperature increase linearily. That's why we always talk about average increase. That's implied when people talk about degree above a baseline. If you don't realise that, you will have hard time following a discussion about the climate.
[0] https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/08/paris-agreement-thr...
> Why fret about any deadline ever again once you discover one of them was fake?
Nobody is fretting about deadlines. You are widely misunderstanding the issue if you think the discussion is about when. It's akin to asking when should we stop pouring poison in the river to which the answer is obviously as soon as possible.
> Are you sure that's a fact, or is it a communication device someone used on you?
I am old enough to read papers myself. Stop insulting me.
> "Exceeding 1.5°C could also trigger multiple climate tipping points — such as breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems — with abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts for humanity"
It helpfully comes with a citation of a paper in Science which has the exact same title, "Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points":
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950
> "Six CTPs become likely (with a further four possible) within the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C warming, including collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, die-off of low-latitude coral reefs, and widespread abrupt permafrost thaw."
This page whole purpose is to explain why the Paris agreement decided to put a goal at 1.5°C and in this context, they list what could happen if this threshold is crossed.
>> "Six CTPs become likely (with a further four possible) within the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C warming, including collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, die-off of low-latitude coral reefs, and widespread abrupt permafrost thaw."
Your own quote actually talks about what I'm saying from the start. It's a range with effects becoming more severe and likely as temperature increase hence the range of 1.5°C to 2°C. They talk about another one at 2.6°C a line latter. That goes directely against your claim that the focus is on 1.5°C as some kind of deadline.
We both agree that they say more warming is worse.
Do you also now accept that the 1.5C figure (or 1.5-2.0 range) isn't merely a communication device set at an arbitrary threshold for political reasons, but one that appears in scientific papers that claim there are non-linear responses involved?
If so, we can now revisit the two original points to find the remaining areas of disagreement:
1. It doesn't make sense to talk about increase if you don't define what it's relative to regardless of whether it's a point or a range, because arguments about tipping points or extreme weather are all based on physics and chemistry that depends on absolute temperatures, not deltas.
2. There are famous climatologists making claims like 1970 being pre-industrial or that baselines don't matter, and the only people pushing back on him are outsiders. Small children know that 1970 is not "pre industrial". Does that problem matter to you?
Your own quote in your previous comments contradicts that.
I can’t really make sense of your two questions. Your 1 entirely misses the point. Yes, the whole thing is about deltas.
Sorry, I’m going to do more productive things with my time. I hope I gave you or an eventual reader some elements to ponder. If not, that’s fine too.
> the whole thing is about deltas.
That isn't physically possible.
Take the collapsing ice sheets. Ice isn't melted by a change in temperature, it's melted by reaching a specific absolute temperature. Saying "if the temperature goes up by 5 degrees this ice will melt" isn't a checkable claim unless you already know what the baseline temperature is, because going from -50 to -45 isn't going to affect it whereas going from -2 to 3 will.
Every claimed tipping point is like this. Abruptly thawing permafrost, coral die-off, ice sheets etc. All dependent on actual absolute temperature levels being crossed. Baseline is everything!
That's why when Mann claims the baseline doesn't matter everyone calls him out on it (except on HN...). Only someone who has totally lost their grip on scientific reality would claim otherwise. That this has happened to such a high profile climatologist should make everyone concerned about whether there's a psychology-style replication crisis in the field.
Obviously the delta will depend of the baseline you take but no one is discussing that either and obviously, some thresholds are in actual value. No one ever denies that.
I don’t understand your obsession about Mann and your weird conspiracy theory about the field. The controversy surrounding Mann was about temperature behaviour and the presence or not of warming acceleration. Nothing to do with baselines. Mann is a respected climatologist.
It’s hard for me to follow the discussion because it’s a bit all over the place but to me. It seems you want to be right and everyone else to be wrong and misinformed so much that you are actually the one missing the point.
Climate change has its dangers, but it's not and need to be an extinction level catastrophe on the scale that much of the hive-minded preening, fetishism and virtue signalling here likes to claim in the comments. It's largely a gradual process that our extremely adaptive and innovative species will adjust to, just as it has to many other changes in history with far fewer technological and social resources at its disposal.
Also, the arguments about individual people feeling guilty for not doing their small part to effect global change on greenhouse gas output are idiotic. They're a misguided deviation of blame against those who it's easiest to browbeat for the sake of feeling morally superior (one's neighbors, friends, family and so forth) with no realistic mechanism for turning such brow-beating into a meaningful global change.
Historically, the big sea changes in social habits have been brought about by specific, personally and measurably visible incentives to adapt those changes, either positive or negative. If people and their societies will behave differently for the sake of mitigating global warming, they'd need the same sort of incentive structure, or a personally beneficial willingness to wide adaption of real, beneficial innovations which reduce some aspect of our environmental impact. Urbanization and industrialized agriculture are two imperfect but usable examples of this. Both reduce our destructive footprint to smaller percentages of the world's surface, and both happen because concrete self-interest, measurable on an individual level, drives them.