Earth’s average 2023 temperature is now likely to reach 1.5 °C of warming
nature.com
nature.com
In my opinion there's a kind of Accelerationism going on here, where those who contribute the most to global warming also believe that they will be insulated from the effects, and therefore are the least inclined to address the issue. They're probably not wrong.
That is, those with wealth and power believe in climate change - they just don't care if monsoonal crops fail or northern India becomes uninhabitable. Denialism was always a strategy, not a serious strain of thought.
Eat the rich.
Put it this way, where is humanity suffering from the current hot temperature? Deaths are still far higher due to cold.
We are better off now at these CO2 levels than we were in the past century.
If you want a short answer 'Because even minor temperature variations play havoc with agricultural output. And 1.5 C isn't minor. Nor is it the limit for climate change - it's just the starting point.'
Adaptation will require moving tens and hundreds of millions of people, and we live in a world where people were screaming bloody murder over accepting 20,000 refugees that were fleeing a civil war that we have been pouring weapons and missiles into for the past 12 years.
We're not interested in adaptation.
In the mean time there will be failed harvests and conflicts around the globe. Yes, we'll adapt, human kind in some form will survive, but it's pretty gloomy.
But prevention can still soften the blow. Just because you're about to have a hard landing doesn't mean you take your hands off the stick.
Where humans grow their food is where they've been growing the same food for THOUSANDS of years.
Industrialization has certainly improved yields and the scale but by and large the spaces we allocate for farming have been chosen because they are optimal for the specific plants we grow there.
Rapidly changing climate means many of these locations will no longer be efficient or effective.
The regions of the world that are becoming more comparably temperate and perhaps theoretically would be the new ideal do not have the nutrients in the soil to be effective.
And anyways as long as the climate continues to evolve rapidly, they will not stay stable for long.
This isn't as simple as "We'll just start growing our food 100 kilometers to the north" and nothing else changes.
Heatwaves, heavy rainfalls, droughts, hailstorms and other extreme weather events can devastate crops and disrupt agricultural systems.
Don't forget that overshoot is our problem, and climate change is just one of its symptoms. The loss of biodiversity, particularly pollinators like bees, can threaten crop yields. Increased pests and diseases. Soil erosion. Fires. Etc. etc.
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food-advanced.htm
A specific plant’s response to excess CO2 is sensitive to a variety of factors, including but not limited to: age, genetic variations, functional types, time of year, atmospheric composition, competing plants, disease and pest opportunities, moisture content, nutrient availability, temperature, and sunlight availability. The continued increase of CO2 will represent a powerful forcing agent for a wide variety of changes critical to the success of many plants, affecting natural ecosystems and with large implications for global food production. The global increase of CO2 is thus a grand biological experiment, with countless complications that make the net effect of this increase very difficult to predict with any appreciable level of detail.
Use the drop down and pick the last option.
The full range of potential impacts is vast, complex, and is a subject of ongoing research.
That really was not the case.
Most major civilizational collapses (Bronze age, Rome) can be linked to climate change (of course premodern societies were generally much more sensitive to even relatively slight changes).
Graphical representation of global temperatures, where the relevant period for human civilisations is roughly the past 10,000 (10kyr):
<https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2020/highfidelity.jpg>
Note too that the timescale is discontinous, with the scale expanding at 30,000 years ago and in 1850 (173 years ago). The span to the right of 1850 shows 350 years, the span to the left of 1850 shows ~30,000 years, before expanding again to show 65 million years of climate history, back to the extinction of the (non-avian) dinosaurs.
Chart is "Average Global Surface Temperature: Difference to 1961--1990 (°C)". Citation is IODP: International Ocean Discovery Program.
Appearing in context here:
"High-fidelity record of Earth's climate history puts current changes in context" by University of California - Santa Cruz. September 10, 2020.
<https://phys.org/news/2020-09-high-fidelity-earth-climate-hi...>
why not? doing that would ironically counter all your prior arguments. besides displacing the incumbents and needing adaptation, I do not see a reason why the poor need to be taxed 30% in energy costs in Seattle
Do you understand that last ~2C the permafrost melting accelerates climate change out of our control, and that the end result in a post-5C world is that the ozone layer goes to shit because of all that methane?
Do you understand food production shutdowns once we get beyond a certain carbon threshold?
It’s warmer now, but it won’t be very nice when you have to live in a cave because skin cancer will develop so quickly.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a...
Learned a new word today, thanks. Had to google that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Very depressing...
I think I recently heard Cory Doctorow phrase it like this: Both pessimists and optimists are essentially fatalists. Ie.: at the core it's more important to believe you can make a change, than to "know" what "will" happen.
Hope reserves agency.
Optimism and pessimism both presume an outcome regardless of action, and absolve responsibility.
<https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/book4.html>
That's more about hope as expectation than hope as possibility, I think. And that's certainly Jensen's vibe.
Thanks for the reference.
I think they are just not facing reality, and that has been normalized by the very effective climate disinformation campaign (i.e., climate denial). People follow the herd, they do what's socially acceptable, and that campaign has made it acceptable enough (which is its goal).
The power lies in that campaign (by the same general grouping that uses disinformation for all sorts of other purposes too). That's what needs to be addressed. Fix that and we fix lots of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_justice
The “Disproportionality between causality and burden” section makes me sad.
Of course they need, but I'm not arguing they shouldn't, I'm arguing that we will again exploit them in the process as we always did in our entire history, the only thing that change is the form of exploitation but the exploitation never ended. You have a lot of examples here[1]. We will throw them a few billions to feel good about ourselves so we can look into mirror and say that we are the good guys because we are helping them.
I'm just saying, mutual benefit does not equal exploitation.
> Lots of ways to criticize cooperation between countries in economic areas, call it exploitation
I'm referring to some of the examples on the Wiki page I linked. Many of them clearly involve one side exploiting the other.
> I'm just saying, mutual benefit does not equal exploitation.
Consider slavery. It may appear mutually beneficial on the surface, as one might argue that it's a choice between being a slave or starving or facing death. However, it's essential to acknowledge that such a relationship is deeply unjust and exploitative.
Still, after the US Civil War, people existed who were loath to leave the plantation, strike out on their own. They had been essentially institutionalized all their lives, didn't have skills to survive independently.
Where am I going with this? Well, just that changes are difficult and the law of unintentional consequences looms large.
You are promising devastation to human civilization, but all we have is a hot summer. Even got an end to the drought in California!
If you want to fight climate change, you have to be real about it. Doomsday hyperbole backfires and gives ammunition to people who don't acknowledge that the climate has been warming.
https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/acidification/ocean-acidif...
Effects of Ocean Acidification on shell formation:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21076
https://www.epa.gov/ocean-acidification/effects-ocean-and-co...
This does not come with a silver lining. Imagine, by rough analogy, the effects on the ecosystem if every bug on the planet began struggling to form its exoskeleton.
Who is going to tell people that the concept of tourism does not scale? and the most resources you require, the most inefficient you are?
Not the political authorities, influencers or people admired due to their lifestyle (who happen to be the most influential).
The people compulsively consuming resources should be given some form of mental health support so they stop marsforming the planet.
No need really, most (all?) western countries and large swathes of the rest of the world are already below replacement rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
Now, in the next 30 years we will have grown by almost 2 billion.
Don't you see the problem?
You're right, we're growing exponentially in a finite environment.
https://futureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/great_acc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration
I wonder how long it will take for the population to accept that the the need for growth is encoded in our system's very structure, in its financial system that prioritizes accumulation, exploitation, and pollution over sustainability and equality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot
We're in overshoot. If we were sane, we would work on reducing our consumption, but instead, everybody's just trying to preserve the business-as-usual path for as long as possible, no matter how unsustainable it is.
Maybe we need to start thinking about new ways of managing things.
It doesn't seem like there will ever be a "panic" moment that really motivates drastic emissions reduction. Even with some "instant" tipping point big enough to make news (ocean current change?), there's a lot of steps between what happens and direct effects on the onlooker, and those can be watered down and disputed by fossil fuel groups like they always have been.
But this... its a bit warmer than last year. I don't think passing 1.5C is going to change anyone's mind.
Right now there is a heatwave in Brazil (including the south, so not just tropical areas) with temperatures over 40°C. And it is still winter there.
Will it even be enough though, as a defeatist, my opinion is, it's all too late now. Which I acknowdlege is an easy way out... "Well it's too late to do anything, before I die, I'll have my steak medium rare please."
Very interesting if a bit depressing. It’s like a climate change themed Black Mirror, with some Don’t look up vibes
Very well made, amazing cast, lots to think about
The NOAA predicts "By winter, there is an 84% chance of greater than a moderate strength El Nino, and a 56% chance of a strong El Nino developing."[1]
Several other compounding factors have been listed for this year as well.
We deserve this.
By the time you received an EV, it already polluted more than a gas car due to all the pollution from mining and the logistics involved.
Also, what pollutes the most in onroad vehicles are car tires not exhausts.
Finally, 90% of vehicle emissions comes from offroad vehicles.
EV cars won't do much for the environment at all. And their electricity comes from power plants, which are predominantly not renewable.
You've been deceived.
True, but only about 40% more depending on battery chemistry. The amount emitted by a typical ICE car during its lifetime can be 3-4x its production emissions. Depending on what type of power is used for charging and how often/long it's used an EV can easily come out ahead.
> what pollutes the most in onroad vehicles are car tires not exhausts.
Also true, and EVs do typically pollute a fifth more in large particles iirc, which is terrible for people's health but in climate change terms has no impact on the greenhouse effect. Smaller batteries and more accesible fast charging would entirely negate this problem, but alas the networks are still in their infancy. If there's no mass adoption there's also no reason to cater to that sector.
> their electricity comes from power plants, which are predominantly not renewable
Heavily depends on geography (e.g. as an extreme example in Norway it's 90% hydro), and that's a problem that has to be solved for grid carbon neutrality anyway.
There's more to having an EV than just driving too, lots of people have been pioneering their use as home battery storage for their roof solar, which should reduce load on grid coal and gas.
What happens right after the dam is built?
The water level rises, causing everything living there to die, rot underwater and decay into methane. That methane pollutes more than a coal plant.
Here's an Engineering Explained video from five years ago demonstrating how quickly EVs overtake ICE vehicles in total emissions, including during manufacture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM
Here's a peer-reviewed study which explicitly looks at lifetime emissions including gathering of raw materials, and finds that EVs have far lower lifetime emissions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
Here are the results of a Reuters analysis which also looks at total lifecycle emissions, including resource extraction: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
We only think we know what will happen as the climate changes. Some regions may become “temporarily” more hospitable. Many will not. Millions will look to flee areas where weather is fickle and no longer supports them. Moreso than the planet suddenly becoming inhospitable for everyone all at once, the impending climate migration should concern even the heads buried deepest in the sand.