The entire global ecosystem faces collapse IMO within 10 years or so.
The heating seems to have reached a tipping point.
The best thing for every non-human plant and animal on the planet would be for all humans to vanish overnight.
Bluntly, your little prognostication, here, is based on nothing. Is 2023 a wicked outlier in the global climate? Absolutely. Is global warming continuing to progress as humanity fails to move quickly enough to change our ways? Absolutely.
But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.
If anything, I'm hoping this year will serve as a wake-up call for more people who might've previously been on the fence about the nature and severity of climate change, and will thus accelerate moves by people and their governments to do more about it.
That comment, both it's content and it's implications, are yours. If you're gonna run away from it now, you shouldn't have written it in the first place.
Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.
There's extremely good reason to panic at this stage.
>> But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.
Nope - this year is part of a statistical heat trend. It's not up and down, some years cooler, some warmer. It's getting hotter every year.
Plants and animals and the ocean ecosystem will be devastated by this.
The human food supply depends on seasons, and seasons are being massively disrupted. If plants don't product food then that's a big problem.
I would wonder what do you gain from denying this is where the problem has got to? Why do you need it to not be at catastrophe level right now?
Cool, let's start here, then: what tipping points are you referring to, specifically, and what is the evidence that they're accelerating?
To be clear: ocean temperatures are unusually high this year relative to historic trends, but with just this one year as a major outlier, there's no basis to conclude a tipping point has been reached, especially given El Nino muddies the data.
As for atmospheric temperature, 2023 is likely to be a warmest year on record, but January to July 2016 was hotter, so there no reason to believe 2023 will be wildly outside the current trendline (which, to be clear, is up and to the right):
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/g...
> Why do you need it to not be at catastrophe level right now?
Why do I dispute unsupported claims that the earth is now on an irreversible course to climate disaster that will destroy the human race?
The answer is literally in the first paragraph of my first reply. Go read it again. It seems silly to repeat myself.
Let's not understate this. The OP article is regarding a record low in 2022, but this year (2023) we've now also seen a sustained 5-sigma deviation in sea ice extent.
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1674736887322533888
> alarmist and counterproductive
I think we ought have been alarmed long ago. Rhetoric of restrained caution hasn't really served us well.
This one year, or the year previous, is not evidence that the ecosystem of the planet is going to collapse in 10 years.
It's one year in a long and alarming trendline, but to extrapolate that to such an extreme conclusion is completely unwarranted.
> Rhetoric of restrained caution hasn't really served us well.
First, I didn't suggest "restrained caution". I can only speculate as to how you came to that conclusion.
Second, rhetoric that we're all gonna die by 2030 and nothing can be done is far more harmful.
Global warming writ large has been going on for a lot longer than a couple of years, and ocean temperature tipping points have been an anticipated consequence. An anomaly of this size warrants alarm. If not proof of imminent ecosystem collapse, it seems foolish to 'wait and see'. Though I take your point that defeatism is worse, but I doubt OP is defeatist.
> rhetoric that we're all gonna die by 2030
That's an even more sensationalist spin than what the OP wrote
Yes, it does.
> If not proof of imminent ecosystem collapse, it seems foolish to 'wait and see'.
Jesus Christ. I never said that.
Read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.
> Though I take your point that defeatism is worse, but I doubt OP is defeatist.
You should also try re-reading what they wrote.
> That's an even more sensationalist spin than what the OP wrote
Fair point. The OP didn't say we'd all die by 2030. Just that the climate would collapse. My bad.
Never claimed you did.
> You should also try re-reading what they wrote.
It was hyperbole, and given the moment we find ourselves in, I'll take it over the popular complacency that has characterised the last many decades
It will be a long, slow, boring grind taking place over generations. It already has been. I'm 43 and 66% of the world population is younger than me. I remember there were lots more insects (and amphibians and birds!) when I was a child. That's not considered a crisis for some reason, there's never been a protest about bugs as far as I can tell, and never some apocalyptic "Ahh, all the bugs just died!" moment. It's been "Ho hum, let me spray some more pesticide on my lawn to kill those pesky grubs again" the whole way.
The next generation will have never known what it was like to have XYZ plant or animal or insect or fish around, and they won't miss it.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/24/1082752...
A staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling. Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick and study coauthor Peter Marra
It could take many decades or even centuries for most of the damage to be done. We're trying our hardest to speed it up, but yeah, there's a big reservoir to burn through and most of the time it will look like things are standing still.
Saying that everything is going to unravel in 10 years and collapse is going to turn out to not be true, even if the underlying dynamic is inexorably pointing in a bad direction and headed that way.
I have good news and I have bad news...
But you are right with every shift in biodiversity there are consequences for food chains, etc. No such thing as a "distant event" - it's not just about (magnificent!) penguins, it's about the intricate, interdependent web of life we rely on (lots of unsung heroes in biodiversity).
Compartmentalization and thinking that all of this is remote to our human experience / survival is a complete illusion.
If we are the stewards of this planet, we're called to ack and act with urgency.
Fair warning that he’s a bit of a lightning rod for controversy due in large part to his relatively centrist views on exactly these and similarly hot button issues.
At least if you agree that the dollar won't be useful once we have total global ecosystem collapse.
Gonna be that guy and point out 10 years ago someone was saying we face collapse in 10 years.
Fearmongering like a broken record does not change the fact that it's fearmongering.
You might want to ask a few farmers about that. Especially about how most of their livestock would fare.
OTOH - the U.S. alone has something like half a billion chickens. Mostly live locked up in huge metal sheds on factory farms. Similar ~1/4 billion turkeys. The humans go "poof" ...and those metal sheds probably don't have any "peck here for 30 seconds to open emergency exit" doors. Zero of the trucks which deliver the chicken and turkey feed, the high-intensity farming operations which are growing that feed, and the processing facilities blending it will just keep running due to some sort of Narrative Momentum trope.
I'm not familiar with factory farming of pigs (about 22 million in the U.S.), but I suspect similar issues.
It's like they don't. But such an event would pale in comparison with the turnover as it stands