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For a more sane assessment of issues like this, see http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearchorguk-costs-of.html http://julesandjames.blogspo

For a more sane assessment of issues like this, see http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearchorguk-costs-of.html http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearcho...

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
There is nothing there that invalidates, or questions the sanity of the feature article at all. In a world of rising temperature, the highest temperatures will tend to be most recent. The 1.5°C figure is based on a 30 year rolling average. There will be individual high and low years making up that average. There is an increasing chance, assessed at 10%, of one of those high points breaching 1.5°C. The rolling average will trail behind as is the point of rolling averages. So a sane estimate from the Met Office, an organisation with good track record on climate.
- radford-neal 8y ago
  But why would "breaching" 1.5C in a single year, due to random variability, be of any particular significance? Note that we're talking about _global average_ temperature, which doesn't translate into anything much for the local temperature in any spot you might be concerned about. Note also that we may well have been breaching 1.5C now and then for millennia, due to random variability. (Well, also because global temperatures back about 7000 years ago may have been generally higher than today.)
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Why? The temperature in and of itself matters less than the total energy in the system and whether it supports life as we know it and the systems we've built to depend on it. If we go through a temporary spell where temperatures are ahead of the average, thanks to alignment of various factors like El Niño etc, we get to see a flavour of what's coming. Just like the recent heat wave in Europe, or more extreme storms, perhaps even extreme cold events, changes to trade winds or Gulf Stream etc and local areas of cooling. Who knows what will tip over the edge from borderline into extinct or broken? Who knows what previously unforeseen consequences will result? Or how near to uninhabitable some places become. Perhaps Australia, perhaps somewhere more populous like cities in India or Bangladesh. The significance then, is a taste of things to come may provoke action, or even acceptance among those who pretend it's not happening. The trend is so clear I don't have too much hope here. It's mostly academic what temperatures were 7,000 years ago. There were a minuscule fraction of today's population with only somewhere under 20m humans globally. Living an undeveloped lifestyle. No global agriculture with fragile global supply chains and production targets. Plenty of animals to hunt, plenty of extra land owned by no one, no hard borders. Plenty of local deaths due to drought, flood or pestilence too. Yet even with a tiny number of humans, archaeology points to local climatic changes as prime suspect of the fall many civilisations including the ancient Egyptian.

For a more sane assessment of issues like this, see http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearchorguk-costs-of.html http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/01/blueskiesresearcho...

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

There is nothing there that invalidates, or questions the sanity of the feature article at all. In a world of rising temperature, the highest temperatures will tend to be most recent. The 1.5°C figure is based on a 30 year rolling average. There will be individual high and low years making up that average. There is an increasing chance, assessed at 10%, of one of those high points breaching 1.5°C. The rolling average will trail behind as is the point of rolling averages. So a sane estimate from the Met Office, an organisation with good track record on climate.

radford-neal 8y ago
But why would "breaching" 1.5C in a single year, due to random variability, be of any particular significance? Note that we're talking about _global average_ temperature, which doesn't translate into anything much for the local temperature in any spot you might be concerned about. Note also that we may well have been breaching 1.5C now and then for millennia, due to random variability. (Well, also because global temperatures back about 7000 years ago may have been generally higher than today.)
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Why? The temperature in and of itself matters less than the total energy in the system and whether it supports life as we know it and the systems we've built to depend on it. If we go through a temporary spell where temperatures are ahead of the average, thanks to alignment of various factors like El Niño etc, we get to see a flavour of what's coming. Just like the recent heat wave in Europe, or more extreme storms, perhaps even extreme cold events, changes to trade winds or Gulf Stream etc and local areas of cooling. Who knows what will tip over the edge from borderline into extinct or broken? Who knows what previously unforeseen consequences will result? Or how near to uninhabitable some places become. Perhaps Australia, perhaps somewhere more populous like cities in India or Bangladesh. The significance then, is a taste of things to come may provoke action, or even acceptance among those who pretend it's not happening. The trend is so clear I don't have too much hope here. It's mostly academic what temperatures were 7,000 years ago. There were a minuscule fraction of today's population with only somewhere under 20m humans globally. Living an undeveloped lifestyle. No global agriculture with fragile global supply chains and production targets. Plenty of animals to hunt, plenty of extra land owned by no one, no hard borders. Plenty of local deaths due to drought, flood or pestilence too. Yet even with a tiny number of humans, archaeology points to local climatic changes as prime suspect of the fall many civilisations including the ancient Egyptian.