5 ms·

Is 0.16 F increase in average temperature per decade a legitimate cause for concern? From my (unlearned) perspective, It seems barely statistically significant.

Afforess 6y ago
> average temperature It's not the average temperature change that is significant, its the effect of the temperature that is significant. For example, 33F vs 32F is very significant... If there are more days above freezing, which leads to extra ice melt, it doesn't matter if the average is up only a tiny bit.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  That makes a lot of sense, thanks.
melling 6y ago
When there were only 22 American Coronavirus deaths on March 9, 2020, was there a cause for concern? Many people said no.
- Pyramus 6y ago
  Your comment may sound unrelated - but it's exactly at the heart of the problem. Both climate change and viral growth increase exponentially. Not only do we release more CO2 into the atmosphere every year, but also the growth rate accelerates.
  - potatoman22 6y ago
    Why does climate change increase exponentially? For reasons other than our collective output increasing exponentially?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Diederich 6y ago
      > Why does climate change increase exponentially? For reasons other than our collective output increasing exponentially? I'm a decades long 'climate change alarmist'. We really don't know if the temperature is really increasing exponentially, considering the proper definition of exponential: "a value increases in proportion to its current value". Also consider that "exponential growth" doesn't necessarily mean "extremely fast"...at least in reasonable time horizons. I and many others think that the amount of energy in our planet's atmosphere is increasing, and we also believe the rate of increase is increasing. This might be technically 'exponential', but it very well might not. It could 'just' be quadratic...which, given the 'right' constants, could be even worse. > For reasons other than our collective output increasing exponentially? Humanity's greenhouse gas output was growing (something like) exponentially (ie, 'very fast') for a good while, but it's probably no longer: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... To your underlying, fundamental question: why is the rate of increase probably increasing? Feedback effects. To seriously get into the weeds, look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback In short, all chaotic but meta-stable systems, such as our planet's climate, have built in many 'tipping points', where a small change in input can have a very large change in behaviour. Under ideal circumstances, such tipping points are quite hard to identify with any precision, and virtually impossible with the most complex system in the world: earth's climate. Even shorter: we don't know for certain, but there's a large and ever growing pile of data that shows here and now impacts of a warming climate. Per my other comment, for example: the rate at which 100, 500 and 1000 year extreme weather events are occurring. In summary: us not knowing with certainty does NOT mean we should not make it a top priority to start reversing the things we do know are causing damage: enormous releases of CO2 and CH4.
      - potatoman22 6y ago
        Thanks!
    - 6y ago
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - zosima 6y ago
    No, the effect of a linear increase of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic. Though the speculation is the there will be catastrophic exponential feedback mechanisms. I guess CO2 is increasing exponentially, so maybe CO2-dependent temperature change is a somewhat linear with respect to time.
- Kenji 6y ago
  Many still say no.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  I understand the potential gravity of the situation, but this example doesn't help to explain the significance of these numbers.
- beervirus 6y ago
  The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/02/01/understand-exponential/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/02/01/understand-exponent...
comte7092 6y ago
Effect size isn’t what statistical significance refers to. It’s only in reference to whether or not the measured effect appears to differ from zero. The effect itself may be minuscule to the point where it’s practically inconsequential in real life.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  Thanks for clearing things up. How would we know if measured climate change is statistically significant? It seems difficult to measure these sorts of cyclical long-term events.
  - comte7092 6y ago
    There are a couple of ways to interpret your question, one is purely statistical “is the climate/temperature actually changing?” And the other is “does it matter?”. I’m not really equipped to answer the second one properly. Re the first question, statistical hypothesis testing requires a null state of the world that you want to test, in this case “is the global temperature changing”. What that requires, more rigorously, is some sort of assumed probability distribution that generates the data we observe. We would probably assume a normal distribution/bell curve with mean equal to the long term average temperature during the last few thousand years, or whatever period is relevant (again, im not a climate scientist), and variance deduced the same way. To test that null hypothesis: “the temperature over the last decade isn’t meaningfully different from the long term average”, you then take your recent data, say the last and ask “what is the probability we’d see this data, assuming the state of the world we assume given our null hypothesis”. If the observed data is sufficiently unlikely to be generated by that null distribution, you say there is a statistically significant difference. Now, That’s not the only way to analyze the data (putting it into two buckets and asking if they differ). But I don’t want to get too into the weeds without better understanding what your wondering about/where the disconnect is. Edit: looking back on this answer, there are some glaring issues that need to be addressed, because they’re both bad analysis and you hinted at it in your question. Obviously the issue here is that cyclical data clumps together so to speak. Sot he temporal binning i outlined here is a big issue, because you are going to get data with lower variance that you would expect. This could conceivably be adjusted for by raising your significance threshold, though off the top of my head I’m not 100% sure how I would approach it personally.
esalman 6y ago
It seems significant if you live in a coastal area prone to tidal flooding. https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/07/17/virginias-coast-saw-two-to-five-times-more-nuisance-floods-in-2019-than-the-national-average/ https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/07/17/virginias-coast-s...
Diederich 6y ago
However much temperature is increasing, I find the frequency of extreme weather events far more problematic. How many 100/500/1000 year storms has the United States dealt with over the past few years? Even more to the point, is it possible that the rate at which these extreme weather events is increasing is also increasing? Without getting into the weeds about particular numbers, it's known that given a global temperature increase, the poles experience the majority of that change. One reason the United States has experienced so much extreme weather of late is because the northern hemisphere polar jet stream has gotten a lot more erratic, in large part because of a declining temperature delta between the north pole and its adjacent temperature bands.
schemescape 6y ago
It probably is, yes. This link (which is not directly related to NOAA's article) has more information: https://skepticalscience.com/few-degrees-global-warming.htm https://skepticalscience.com/few-degrees-global-warming.htm > A few degrees of global warming has a huge impact on ice sheets, sea levels and other aspects of climate.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  I wish that article had citations, but thanks; that helps clear up some avenues in which this can have other impacts.
zosima 6y ago
I think some kind of error bars would have been very enlightening, yes. I find it quite hard to evaluate what is being shown, when the total change in temperature over a century is smaller than the temperature difference between different parts of the room I'm currently sitting in.
rhodozelia 6y ago
Since precipitation that falls as snow is released much later in the spring but precipitation that falls as rain causes additional melting and immediate runoff exactly where the freezing level is can have a dramatic effect on glacial melt And how dry forests get in the summer, with the ensuing forest fires.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
CO2 also has an impact on human cognitive function, and acidifies the ocean. Air pollution - usually linked to CO2 emissions - has a whole slew of other problems. We absolutely have the technology to get rid of coal and oil for transport and electricity production - we need to start banning the production of new ICE cars and new coal power plants now, and tariffing any nations who don't follow.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  OK, but the question was about temperatures, not about CO2. Has there ever been a concern that we could put so much CO2 into the atmosphere as to impair cognitive function?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jfengel 6y ago
Yes, because we're talking about a time frame of 200 years. That amounts to 3.2F, and yeah, that's a lot. It's enough to make a lot of marginally-livable places completely unlivable. It's enough to throw off growing seasons, costing a significant amount of agriculture. It will require more water, already a tough squeeze in a lot of places. It will melt a lot of ice, causing disruptions to sea level that will make expensive storms more frequent. It will throw off rain patterns, meaning that some places will become arable that weren't, but forcing some existing farms to stop. That will be hugely disruptive and expensive. The real problem is that it likely won't just be 3.2F. That's actually pretty much what the IPCC's target is: they want it to be just 3.2F (2C). But even that much involves drastically cutting CO2 output: CO2 is very stable and will last for many centuries. We will continue to get warmer for decades even if we stopped burning fossil fuels utterly, right this instant. Instead, the world as a whole has continued to increase its CO2. (The US has actually gone back down to 1990 levels, largely because of a shift from coal to natural gas, but partly due to renewables.) That means we're on a track for more like 6F to 8F by 2100, and that is pretty clearly a lot.
gilbetron 6y ago
It's misleading, since it sounds like everywhere is just going to be a tiny bit warmer, basically unnoticeable. However, it's really about the massive amount of energy required to warm the atmosphere up by that much, and how that energy isn't equally distributed. One analogy I use is: imagine sitting in a pool with friends, and one person starts pushing one of those floating lounge chairs up and down. They might only increase the average height of the water by a millimeter or so, but the whole pool starts getting more wavy and chaotic. That's how it is with our atmosphere - more extreme events (both "hot" and "cold") occur and in general more chaotic weather as that energy is spread in waves and troughs throughout the world.
- mdiesel 6y ago
  Great way I had it explained to me was that if we imagine weather follows some kind of normal distribution called climate, then a shift of of the distribution makes those extreme weather events far more likely much quicker than it affects the mean weather.
porb121 6y ago
Yes. The effects of increasing average temperature are highly localized. It's not that at every place in the world, every day is 0.16 F hotter, but that in some places, some days are much, much hotter.
chrisco255 6y ago
No. In fact in the grand scheme of earth's climate history it's a normal cyclical perturbation.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- titzer 6y ago
  See this comment a lot, and it's wrong on so many levels. 1. No, this is not a "cyclical perturbation", unless your cycles are long enough to include mega impact events like the ones that killed the dinosaurs[1]. The last time methane levels were this high, it was at least 800,000 years ago. The last time CO2 levels were this high was 3 million years ago. Guess what. The Earth was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius hotter back then than now. That means that parts of the Earth that are currently inhabited by hundreds of millions to billions of people will become uninhabitable. 2. Humans have never existed under the climactic regime that we are unleashing. Humans evolved over the last 400,000 years through a period of glaciation in a little cuccoon in Africa. 3. Civilization has never existed under any climactic regime other than the warm inter-glacial period from about 12,000 years ago when agriculture was first developed. Before that, it was a looong ice age that almost killed humans off completely. Before us, Earth was cyclical between glacial and interglacial periods about every 100,000 years. That cycle is now pretty much obliterated by what we did in the past 150 years. 4. Changes in CO2 concentration change have generally been very slow over Earth's history, on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years. Such an abrupt CO2 concentration change is generally not seen short of massive volcanic activity or a planet-killer asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs and the majority of animal species 65 million years ago. Abrupt climate change means mass extinction for life on Earth. Buckle up, lots of shit is going to die and whole regions will turn to desert. Earth probably will not support our food production systems. Lots of us are going to die, too. 5. There has never been anything remotely like a CO2 "cycle" in Earth's climate history. There is no mechanism nor natural variation that causes CO2 to just go up and down in cycles that are predictable. If you want to educate yourself with some Science, here's a reconstruction of Co2 for the past 550 million years: http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1... If you can spot the cycle, I'm sure they'll award you an honorary doctorate in planetary Science, and you'll be hella famous. [1] It's a stretch to call meteor impacts cyclical; they follow a power law distribution and are random enough that they hit about as regularly as rolling the dice. When the universe hits a hard 9, we take a beating.
crispyporkbites 6y ago
You missed a key point here- this data is USA only- which is not a very big part of the world. The poles are heating up much faster! Eg the North Pole rose 2-4c in the last 50 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3AChange_in_Average_Temperature.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3... The change is accelerating. Projections that held true in the 80s and 90s are being revised. We’re talking about 6-12 degrees Celsius warmer on Average globally in 100 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3AProjected_Change_in_Temperatures_by_2090.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3... That means some days/months will be significantly warmer and our crops, food supply, water supplies and other industries won’t have adapted quickly enough to survive. The worst case scenarios are the breakdown of civilisation and human extinction.
gameswithgo 6y ago
It is enough to change weather patterns, raise sea levels significantly, its a pace of temperature change that causes extinction events, when it has happened this fast in the past.

Afforess 6y ago

> average temperature It's not the average temperature change that is significant, its the effect of the temperature that is significant. For example, 33F vs 32F is very significant... If there are more days above freezing, which leads to extra ice melt, it doesn't matter if the average is up only a tiny bit.

potatoman22 6y ago
That makes a lot of sense, thanks.

melling 6y ago

When there were only 22 American Coronavirus deaths on March 9, 2020, was there a cause for concern? Many people said no.

Pyramus 6y ago
Your comment may sound unrelated - but it's exactly at the heart of the problem. Both climate change and viral growth increase exponentially. Not only do we release more CO2 into the atmosphere every year, but also the growth rate accelerates.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  Why does climate change increase exponentially? For reasons other than our collective output increasing exponentially?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Diederich 6y ago
    > Why does climate change increase exponentially? For reasons other than our collective output increasing exponentially? I'm a decades long 'climate change alarmist'. We really don't know if the temperature is really increasing exponentially, considering the proper definition of exponential: "a value increases in proportion to its current value". Also consider that "exponential growth" doesn't necessarily mean "extremely fast"...at least in reasonable time horizons. I and many others think that the amount of energy in our planet's atmosphere is increasing, and we also believe the rate of increase is increasing. This might be technically 'exponential', but it very well might not. It could 'just' be quadratic...which, given the 'right' constants, could be even worse. > For reasons other than our collective output increasing exponentially? Humanity's greenhouse gas output was growing (something like) exponentially (ie, 'very fast') for a good while, but it's probably no longer: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... To your underlying, fundamental question: why is the rate of increase probably increasing? Feedback effects. To seriously get into the weeds, look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback In short, all chaotic but meta-stable systems, such as our planet's climate, have built in many 'tipping points', where a small change in input can have a very large change in behaviour. Under ideal circumstances, such tipping points are quite hard to identify with any precision, and virtually impossible with the most complex system in the world: earth's climate. Even shorter: we don't know for certain, but there's a large and ever growing pile of data that shows here and now impacts of a warming climate. Per my other comment, for example: the rate at which 100, 500 and 1000 year extreme weather events are occurring. In summary: us not knowing with certainty does NOT mean we should not make it a top priority to start reversing the things we do know are causing damage: enormous releases of CO2 and CH4.
    - potatoman22 6y ago
      Thanks!
  - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zosima 6y ago
  No, the effect of a linear increase of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic. Though the speculation is the there will be catastrophic exponential feedback mechanisms. I guess CO2 is increasing exponentially, so maybe CO2-dependent temperature change is a somewhat linear with respect to time.
Kenji 6y ago
Many still say no.
potatoman22 6y ago
I understand the potential gravity of the situation, but this example doesn't help to explain the significance of these numbers.
beervirus 6y ago
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/02/01/understand-exponential/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/02/01/understand-exponent...

comte7092 6y ago

Effect size isn’t what statistical significance refers to. It’s only in reference to whether or not the measured effect appears to differ from zero. The effect itself may be minuscule to the point where it’s practically inconsequential in real life.

potatoman22 6y ago
Thanks for clearing things up. How would we know if measured climate change is statistically significant? It seems difficult to measure these sorts of cyclical long-term events.
- comte7092 6y ago
  There are a couple of ways to interpret your question, one is purely statistical “is the climate/temperature actually changing?” And the other is “does it matter?”. I’m not really equipped to answer the second one properly. Re the first question, statistical hypothesis testing requires a null state of the world that you want to test, in this case “is the global temperature changing”. What that requires, more rigorously, is some sort of assumed probability distribution that generates the data we observe. We would probably assume a normal distribution/bell curve with mean equal to the long term average temperature during the last few thousand years, or whatever period is relevant (again, im not a climate scientist), and variance deduced the same way. To test that null hypothesis: “the temperature over the last decade isn’t meaningfully different from the long term average”, you then take your recent data, say the last and ask “what is the probability we’d see this data, assuming the state of the world we assume given our null hypothesis”. If the observed data is sufficiently unlikely to be generated by that null distribution, you say there is a statistically significant difference. Now, That’s not the only way to analyze the data (putting it into two buckets and asking if they differ). But I don’t want to get too into the weeds without better understanding what your wondering about/where the disconnect is. Edit: looking back on this answer, there are some glaring issues that need to be addressed, because they’re both bad analysis and you hinted at it in your question. Obviously the issue here is that cyclical data clumps together so to speak. Sot he temporal binning i outlined here is a big issue, because you are going to get data with lower variance that you would expect. This could conceivably be adjusted for by raising your significance threshold, though off the top of my head I’m not 100% sure how I would approach it personally.

esalman 6y ago

It seems significant if you live in a coastal area prone to tidal flooding. https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/07/17/virginias-coast-saw-two-to-five-times-more-nuisance-floods-in-2019-than-the-national-average/ https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/07/17/virginias-coast-s...

Diederich 6y ago

However much temperature is increasing, I find the frequency of extreme weather events far more problematic. How many 100/500/1000 year storms has the United States dealt with over the past few years? Even more to the point, is it possible that the rate at which these extreme weather events is increasing is also increasing? Without getting into the weeds about particular numbers, it's known that given a global temperature increase, the poles experience the majority of that change. One reason the United States has experienced so much extreme weather of late is because the northern hemisphere polar jet stream has gotten a lot more erratic, in large part because of a declining temperature delta between the north pole and its adjacent temperature bands.

schemescape 6y ago

It probably is, yes. This link (which is not directly related to NOAA's article) has more information: https://skepticalscience.com/few-degrees-global-warming.htm https://skepticalscience.com/few-degrees-global-warming.htm > A few degrees of global warming has a huge impact on ice sheets, sea levels and other aspects of climate.

potatoman22 6y ago
I wish that article had citations, but thanks; that helps clear up some avenues in which this can have other impacts.

zosima 6y ago

I think some kind of error bars would have been very enlightening, yes. I find it quite hard to evaluate what is being shown, when the total change in temperature over a century is smaller than the temperature difference between different parts of the room I'm currently sitting in.

rhodozelia 6y ago

Since precipitation that falls as snow is released much later in the spring but precipitation that falls as rain causes additional melting and immediate runoff exactly where the freezing level is can have a dramatic effect on glacial melt And how dry forests get in the summer, with the ensuing forest fires.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

CO2 also has an impact on human cognitive function, and acidifies the ocean. Air pollution - usually linked to CO2 emissions - has a whole slew of other problems. We absolutely have the technology to get rid of coal and oil for transport and electricity production - we need to start banning the production of new ICE cars and new coal power plants now, and tariffing any nations who don't follow.

nerdponx 6y ago
OK, but the question was about temperatures, not about CO2. Has there ever been a concern that we could put so much CO2 into the atmosphere as to impair cognitive function?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jfengel 6y ago

Yes, because we're talking about a time frame of 200 years. That amounts to 3.2F, and yeah, that's a lot. It's enough to make a lot of marginally-livable places completely unlivable. It's enough to throw off growing seasons, costing a significant amount of agriculture. It will require more water, already a tough squeeze in a lot of places. It will melt a lot of ice, causing disruptions to sea level that will make expensive storms more frequent. It will throw off rain patterns, meaning that some places will become arable that weren't, but forcing some existing farms to stop. That will be hugely disruptive and expensive. The real problem is that it likely won't just be 3.2F. That's actually pretty much what the IPCC's target is: they want it to be just 3.2F (2C). But even that much involves drastically cutting CO2 output: CO2 is very stable and will last for many centuries. We will continue to get warmer for decades even if we stopped burning fossil fuels utterly, right this instant. Instead, the world as a whole has continued to increase its CO2. (The US has actually gone back down to 1990 levels, largely because of a shift from coal to natural gas, but partly due to renewables.) That means we're on a track for more like 6F to 8F by 2100, and that is pretty clearly a lot.

gilbetron 6y ago

It's misleading, since it sounds like everywhere is just going to be a tiny bit warmer, basically unnoticeable. However, it's really about the massive amount of energy required to warm the atmosphere up by that much, and how that energy isn't equally distributed. One analogy I use is: imagine sitting in a pool with friends, and one person starts pushing one of those floating lounge chairs up and down. They might only increase the average height of the water by a millimeter or so, but the whole pool starts getting more wavy and chaotic. That's how it is with our atmosphere - more extreme events (both "hot" and "cold") occur and in general more chaotic weather as that energy is spread in waves and troughs throughout the world.

mdiesel 6y ago
Great way I had it explained to me was that if we imagine weather follows some kind of normal distribution called climate, then a shift of of the distribution makes those extreme weather events far more likely much quicker than it affects the mean weather.

porb121 6y ago

Yes. The effects of increasing average temperature are highly localized. It's not that at every place in the world, every day is 0.16 F hotter, but that in some places, some days are much, much hotter.

chrisco255 6y ago

No. In fact in the grand scheme of earth's climate history it's a normal cyclical perturbation.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
titzer 6y ago
See this comment a lot, and it's wrong on so many levels. 1. No, this is not a "cyclical perturbation", unless your cycles are long enough to include mega impact events like the ones that killed the dinosaurs[1]. The last time methane levels were this high, it was at least 800,000 years ago. The last time CO2 levels were this high was 3 million years ago. Guess what. The Earth was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius hotter back then than now. That means that parts of the Earth that are currently inhabited by hundreds of millions to billions of people will become uninhabitable. 2. Humans have never existed under the climactic regime that we are unleashing. Humans evolved over the last 400,000 years through a period of glaciation in a little cuccoon in Africa. 3. Civilization has never existed under any climactic regime other than the warm inter-glacial period from about 12,000 years ago when agriculture was first developed. Before that, it was a looong ice age that almost killed humans off completely. Before us, Earth was cyclical between glacial and interglacial periods about every 100,000 years. That cycle is now pretty much obliterated by what we did in the past 150 years. 4. Changes in CO2 concentration change have generally been very slow over Earth's history, on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years. Such an abrupt CO2 concentration change is generally not seen short of massive volcanic activity or a planet-killer asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs and the majority of animal species 65 million years ago. Abrupt climate change means mass extinction for life on Earth. Buckle up, lots of shit is going to die and whole regions will turn to desert. Earth probably will not support our food production systems. Lots of us are going to die, too. 5. There has never been anything remotely like a CO2 "cycle" in Earth's climate history. There is no mechanism nor natural variation that causes CO2 to just go up and down in cycles that are predictable. If you want to educate yourself with some Science, here's a reconstruction of Co2 for the past 550 million years: http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1... If you can spot the cycle, I'm sure they'll award you an honorary doctorate in planetary Science, and you'll be hella famous. [1] It's a stretch to call meteor impacts cyclical; they follow a power law distribution and are random enough that they hit about as regularly as rolling the dice. When the universe hits a hard 9, we take a beating.

crispyporkbites 6y ago

You missed a key point here- this data is USA only- which is not a very big part of the world. The poles are heating up much faster! Eg the North Pole rose 2-4c in the last 50 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3AChange_in_Average_Temperature.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3... The change is accelerating. Projections that held true in the 80s and 90s are being revised. We’re talking about 6-12 degrees Celsius warmer on Average globally in 100 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3AProjected_Change_in_Temperatures_by_2090.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#/media/File%3... That means some days/months will be significantly warmer and our crops, food supply, water supplies and other industries won’t have adapted quickly enough to survive. The worst case scenarios are the breakdown of civilisation and human extinction.

gameswithgo 6y ago

It is enough to change weather patterns, raise sea levels significantly, its a pace of temperature change that causes extinction events, when it has happened this fast in the past.