The 2015 Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius was thought to be the threshold for averting severe climate change impacts. But new research says even that level is too high to prevent the catastrophic consequences of sea level rise due to melting glaciers. John Yang speaks with Chris Stokes, one of the study’s authors, to learn more.
In theory, no. There’s actually a tiny bit of runway left. If carbon emissions continued as today for about 2 or 3 years (extrapolate figures) and then stopped, the temperature would plateau at 1.5 and then very slowly fall.
Of course, the problem is that emissions are absolutely not going to stop in 2027.
BTW: current average projection is around +3.5 by century’s end. That’s actually a bit lower than it was a few years ago, due to faster than expected roll-out of green tech. But it’s obviously still way, way too high. Especially because of the risk of tipping points.
According to the paleoclimate data, the CO2 levels of today get you an equilibrium of 10° of global temperature rise. It takes about 100 years before the climate response happens.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false
And yet, says the same article:
So something’s off.
Then they go into the details:
We would need rapid phaseout of carbon within a couple decades. Then we need a global program of solar radiation management (geoengineering) with the example of the Pinatubo eruption given to save inundation of the coastal cities. THEN we need to rapidly find a way to do negative emissions and restore the atmosphere to preindustrial.
(Also, equlibrium warming isn’t the only warming at play. You read the whole thing. Right? The other one is ESS, which involves feedbacks.)
If you just read to the end of that paragraph, it concludes with this:
And what is ‘committed warming’?
They say:
So the earth would eventually remove the CO2 via natural processes it’s not “committed”. It just takes thousands and thousands of years to go away again.
And yet reliable sources say what seems to be generally accepted, namely that stopping carbons emissions completely in a short time frame (a couple of years) would land us with “1.5 degrees by the end of the century”. So, as I said, something is off with this “10 degrees”. Perhaps it’s the “end of the century” bit.
Correct. The system only goes up 60% of the full temperature forcing in 100 years. So 75 years down the road from today you don’t see most of the temperature change, YET
Point 2: “Reliable sources”. They are likely wrong. Read the paper.
There is major politics and a lot of mistakes. They all downplay the severity for non scientific reasons.
The main human motivator was that if climate change was as dire and as bleak as the science suggested, there would be no hope at all. So nobody ever truly considered these scenarios because it was too scary and too politically impossible. Like…why bother thinking about problems for which there is no solution space? Instead focus on a narrow possibility that we are in a different problem that we have some agency within.
People have been looking at the science to see what they want to hear.
Here is a very clear example…
In this paper, they are talking about a comparison between the PETM and the climate forcing of today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
This had PROFOUND effects on the planet. Anoxic oceans, mass animal mortality, acidification of the oceans, decline of plankton and corals etc etc. Palm trees grew in the Arctic.
I mean…this is human extinction level stuff. They don’t come right out and say it anywhere. But you have to understand the context.
If you want to share where you’re getting the “1.5 by 2100” I can try to dispel the idea more fully. It’s probably a junk source. [*]
[*] In this paper I just linked, they talk about how the pollution that comes with CO2 emissions (soot, dust, smoke and other small particles) acts like a sunscreen, and water vapor also interacts with this dust layer and amplifies the effect, rapidly cooling the planet. They discuss how many of the scenarios where we eg. stop CO2 to limit warming by 2100… DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER that dust will stop, and when dust stops temperature actually ramps up even more quickly than we have ever seen before. The dust contribution is a more rapid effect than the CO2 part. Basically the idea is not even scientific at all.
Yeah, no. To be clear, the source I referred to is Our World in Data. It’s widely respected and I have better things to do than second-guess it.
That isn’t a science source. Incorrect domain.
Do you read the funny pages for economy information?
The paper I linked in critical in understanding why these models are wrong.
Many of these models were tuned and calibrated by looking at the first twitches of climate change during the past 50 or 100 years (only). Mainly they were missing very large and important variables. When people have gone back to the paleorecord, they were able to see what was being omitted from the models.
This is exactly why all the headlines are screaming “faster than expected” “sooner than expected” “worse than expected”.
In short, industrial society was producing enough dust (+ water vapor + clouds) to almost totally cancel the warming effect in the short term. Which made it seem like the climate changes very slowly or not very sensitively. Models that didn’t know about dust and water and clouds were having all their numbers tweaked to “agree with reality”…making it seem like climate change isn’t that strong.
Only if you just keep at it, eventually that warming does kick into drive. So this is a very transitory stage. You cannot base a longer range prediction on these 15 year range narrow effects.
You don’t have better things to do. This is one of the most fundamental things to understand to put your whole life into perspective. Most people are either wasting their lives or they are building on a foundation of shifting sands.
Re-read the part with the asterisk in my previous comment. Like, they don’t come out and attack these 1.5 people directly, they just kind of point out the ridiculousness of the claim. Like…“when they say that stuff, they haven’t even thought it out”. It’s not even that they are wrong, they are just completely wrong. They don’t even have an actual argument, it’s really REAL nonsense. It’s a lot of work to try to dispel crap like that because it’s not even based on anything.
But of course, “reliable sources” is like a good example. If you delve into most of the logical fallacies / classical logic mistakes, what’s really interesting is that most of the fallacies are not actually logically tricky. What they are is social. In nearly all cases, someone lets their mind be confused by the perception of the social status or the value or the position of authority of the speaker of the false statement.
We humans survived by prizing group harmony and downplaying logic and reasoning. Like, we could not survive alone in the wilds, we HAD to protect our membership in the group.
My dude, you ARE in a suicidally stupid group. They are killing themselves and everyone around them. Trust no one.
Perhaps you’d consider writing a paper to detail all this. And then submitting it for peer review, of course. I am not a climate scientist so I will content myself with trusting reliable secondary sources.
i mean … hopefully not?
I’m pretty sure they meant the kind that pollute Mother Earth, and contribute to the problem.
Oh, wait… Republican “emissions” do that, too, don’t they?