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> This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C. It seems to me that continuing

> This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C. It seems to me that continuing to communicate just the average temperature increase is a missed opportunity to engage with a greater portion of the population. 1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much, but once one understands that’s an average made out of much bigger positive and negative swings in temperature, one gets a much more dramatic picture. I suspect focusing on the widening of the temperature range, rather than the average temperature change would work better with communications to the wider public

headmelted 5y ago
Also people need to be presented with the consequences. I still know a lot of people who genuinely believe it means slightly warmer summers. They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water. Also just dropping this link here as I remember watching it at the time and thinking isn't it great we're not there yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  Yeah, I don’t mean to be disparaging but the average person doesn’t really seem to grasp this beyond: it’ll be slightly warmer. And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park. Maybe there should be more focus on the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc. Although to be honest if this is lost on people up until now anyway, what hope is there? A significant number of people just don’t seem to care.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    It's difficult to care about long-term problems like climate change, when you are struggling to provide for your family in the present. That's some of it, although some others seem to emotionally reject any information about climate change, which is more concerning (especially when those people end up in positions of political power).
    - konspence 5y ago
      This year has proven that climate change isn't just a long term problem. Manhattan was engulfed in smoke from the west coast. People were flooded out of their homes in Western Europe. And heat waves across the west coast lead to dozens of deaths. I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media. We can look at our response to Covid as a model for how we might respond to climate change slapping us in the face. If that is a fair comparison, I am worried.
      - Ma8ee 5y ago
        I don’t think our responses to COVID was only disaster. Big parts of them was disorganised and inconsistent. But in the whole they were also forceful, creating not only one, but several effective vaccines in a fraction of the time it usually takes, and making them available to billions of people. Also, suddenly, there are trillions of dollars made available to keep the economy afloat and reduce personal sufferings. If the same scale of efforts were used to fight climate change, it wouldn’t be a problem. Right now I’m just waiting for the natural disasters being big and frequent enough so people can’t deny what they see with their own eyes. After that I expect things to happen relatively fast. Maybe some oil and coal executives that have spend billions spewing lies will be found dangling from lamppost too, when people finally understand what happened. (I in no way condone the last part, it is merely meant as a way to express that some people probably will be very angry.)
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      - mschuster91 5y ago
        > I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media. You did, there were floods in India (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/23/india/floods-landslides-maharashtra-intl-hnk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/23/india/floods-landslides-m...) and China (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148623/flooding-in-central-china https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148623/flooding-in-...). I wonder if there exists a website that gathers reports of extreme weather events (floods, tornados/hurricanes, heat waves/firestorms) worldwide.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    What is the thesis here, that storms are a new hitherto unknown phenomenon that are radically outside the human experience? There has never been an era where humans didn't have to put up with horrific storms. It took Pompeii 4-6m of volcanic ash to stop humans picking up the pieces and carrying on. I don't think a focus on "oh there'll be more storms" is going to cut it. We have to be ready for storms anyway, having more of them doesn't change the risk calculations all that much in my mind. I'd rather pay the taxes for a big well air conditioned community centre to deal with heat waves. It'll be cheaper than what gets wasted on sporting venues.
    - Retric 5y ago
      The thesis is you trade up. This isn’t about an extra thunderstorm or two, big storms are expensive and disruptive. More tropical storms become hurricanes. Category 1 hurricanes hit 2 etc, and what would have been a 5 hits harder and stays a 5 for longer. It’s about more frequent forced evacuations, overtopped levies, and massive cleanup etc. Rising sea levels aren’t just larger high tides their also larger tsunami. Beyond that you just get more extreme events like heat waves in the Arctic, longer drought mixed with extra flooding, more hail, mudslides, bigger blizzards etc. We’re looking at 100’s of billions in damages per year not simply adding a few AC to community centers. Though you’re also likely to have higher cooling bills.
      - roenxi 5y ago
        > We’re looking at 100’s of billions in damages per year not simply adding a few AC to community centers. The US government spends 7 trillion dollars a year. That isn't an alarming number.
        Retric 5y ago
        Most of the cost from weather events isn’t born by the federal government. Looking just at extreme 1+ billion dollar weather events over the last 20 years averages close to 100 billion per year in the US. “The total cost of these 298 events exceeds $1.975 trillion.” However, things are getting worse. “The 1980–2020 annual average is 7.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2016–2020) is 16.2 events (CPI-adjusted).“ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ Of course not all of that is based on climate change, but smaller storms also cost money for everything from snow removal to lost crops, and preparation for storms costs even more.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    > And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park. This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada. The gulf stream is already being disrupted by meltwater from the arctic.
    - JetSetWilly 5y ago
      > This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada. That is overstating the effect of the gulf stream. Canada and Russia have continental weather - they get cold because the interior doesn't have a huge heat sink in the form of an ocean surrounding it keeping it warmer (or cooler). The UK is small and surrounded by ocean, with prevailing winds off that ocean. It isn't going to have a continental weather system if the gulf stream is disrupted, and it isn't going to suddenly have a climate as cold as canada. It may have unpredictable effects and may not be desirable, but we wouldn't suddenly be suffering from equivalently cold weather as the same latitude in Canada or Russia.
      - deleted 5y ago
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  - zejn 5y ago
    It is hard to "care". People are bombarded with articles and viewpoints and even lies to the point that they are unable to orient themselves - and just zone out. When the easiest thing to say is to just tell them to "stop burning stuff". Do we call it fuel? Stop using it. Can't stop using it? Ok, but please use as little as possible.
  - jiri 5y ago
    I can confirm that: I am from EU, far inland. Warmer climate seems like a good idea to me and rising sea level does not bother me at all. Yes, I dislike storms, floods and droughts but these are thing we know and we are prepared. And it might be even cheaper to be better prepared for storms than to bear externalized costs of CO2 ... hard to estimate that. We need some new technology, something very cheap, efficient and disruptive, that will force oil and gas to stay in the ground economically :-|
- bemmu 5y ago
  Waitbutwhy put it well: “ 18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice”
  - adwn 5y ago
    That's not really helpful, when you think about it: Are the effects linear? How much ice would the US be under for temperatures of 1°C below 20th century average? A fifth of half a mile? No ice at all? And what does that imply for 2°C above? 0.2 miles of ice below the surface? I prefer actual predictions of the effects, not bad analogies or useless data points.
    - vermilingua 5y ago
      Sure, it's unhelpful if you're trying to build a model or understand the science, but 90% of people aren't; and it's accurate –if unhelpful– analogies like this that get those people onboard.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      The point is to show that the system is very sensitive, and that the folk wisdom of "2 C is just 2 C what's the big deal?" isn't valid.
      - adwn 5y ago
        Then why not just explain to people the predicted consequences of a 2°C temperature increase?
- mynameismon 5y ago
  When I was a kid, that was what I believed in too. And that is what most people would say if they heard it for the first time. What most people do not do while saying this statement is taking the context of the change in average temperatures around the world. What should be shown are graphics like this XKCD [1], which puts in perspective the average global temperatures in past 22,000 years. (spoiler: the last time Earth's average global temperature was 4 degrees below the average global temperature during the 1970s, the Earth was covered in sheets of ice). This is where we have well and truly allowed climate change deniers to take over and spread misinformation. [1]: https://xkcd.com/1732 https://xkcd.com/1732
- enriquto 5y ago
  > They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water. If you put it that way it's no wonder that they think you are crazy. Storms mean heavy rainfall that means more drinking water. What is your point, exactly?
  - igorkraw 5y ago
    That if you try to drink storm water run off, you'll die of diarrhea. A lot of the damage in Germany right now is polluted drinking water
    - enriquto 5y ago
      Sure, but my point was that, among all the horrrific things that climate change is bringing, the OP picked two of them that seem to cancel out.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        The two things happen in different parts of the world.
benlumen 5y ago
Completely agree. The "average" language always used is largely responsible for the apathy, I think. It's effectively meaningless.
Joeri 5y ago
An ice age is a global temperature difference of about 5 degrees. So we are going to have at least a third of an ice age’s temperature delta in heating, if we do everything right, and two thirds if we do business as usual.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  In comic form: https://xkcd.com/1379/ https://xkcd.com/1379/
Xplune13 5y ago
Yes and I don't think people are going to wake up till everyone faces the consequences of climate change in their personal lives, which is quite honestly just sad.
- teniutza 5y ago
  I don't think this is going to be enough. We see everyday people affected by the pandemic yet many of them still refuse to get vaccinated, keep distance or even wear a mask... They will just dismiss these consequences as "one offs"... I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.
  - Xplune13 5y ago
    It might sound harsh but we're lucky that large scale pandemic like this had comparatively lower death rate, the scenario might've been completely different if it was more fatal. So, I think people will wake up if there are harsher consequences in large of chunk of population in their personal lives than covid (this is pretty horrific that we as humans with all our knowledge and technology can't prevent this without immediate danger). I know that there are going to be some people even in that case to deny climate change, but that would be significantly smaller minority compared to what it is right now in case of covid (at least I think so). > I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly. Yes, I completely agree on this one.
- drclau 5y ago
  There were people infected with Covid, in hospital, which still denied that Covid is real. Granted, those extremes are rare, but it shows how resilient in their beliefs deniers are. I think you are quite optimistic in thinking people will wake up. Nevertheless, we don’t need everyone to accept the reality, for us to be able to take action as a civilization.
CalRobert 5y ago
Just expressing it in Fahrenheit for Americans would help.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
In the late 80's I took a Botney class at Sonoma State. The professor always talked about what 1 degree of warming will do to the oceans. He talked about it all the time. It was his worst fear. I though he might be overreacting a bit at the time, but not now. He was an interesting guy, and was far from politically correct. I remember his stance on people/bikes who don't walk on designated paths. The whole, "You are ruining the indiginious fauna argument". Well his unpopular stance was the surviving plants will be stronger. I will never forget the honest worry he had over a 1 degree change in temperature.
tux3 5y ago
I agree that communicating the average seems very ineffective, and if you can carefully source better numbers to replace that measure, you would do well to post them here. People will be happy to copy those if you can show it to them. I suspect it may not be trivial to find a measure for the widening that people intuitively understand, but it's worth trying.
gspr 5y ago
I see this a lot, too. "It's just 2 degrees" – what the hell is wrong with you? If your body temperature is 2-3 degrees above normal, you feel like absolute shit. Likewise for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations; "it's just 0.04 %" – dude, you surely start noticing the effects of "just" 0.04% alcohol in your blood. Or hey, try cyanide. What is wrong with people?!
- foxfluff 5y ago
  But this isn't about body temperature or alcohol concentrations, so comparisons like that are not useful. Look, I just had a glass of cool water, perhaps between five to ten degrees celsius. And I'm about to have a coffee. What's that, fifty degrees? With 5% to 10% milk concentration. And I think I'll be just fine. You don't?! What the hell is wrong with you? If you want to explain why a two-degree increase in average temperature on the planet is dramatic, then you need to do better than compare it to something completely different.
  - ygjb 5y ago
    No, you are underestimating the fact that people already understand how average temperature works, especially folks they have ever lived in a modest home with no AC. If someone's home is 24-26C, and they turn on their oven to cook something for dinner, it will warm up their home, depending on the size of their home and ventilation. Overall the average temperature increase won't be that much, but they localized temperature increase is very dramatic. Your apartment might not be hot, but that small area that is 200C is having a dramatic impact on everything else in your apartment. Bonus points for extra comprehension if they have a basement or ground floor that has a substantially lower temperature. Again, the average temperature might be high, but it doesn't mean that it's hot everywhere in the house. Understanding this isn't rocket science, and the only reason people are ignoring it is because people in power have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of it by outright lying, obfuscating, or denying it.
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      I think you meant to reply to someone else? A change in average temperature (either direction) does not imply extreme temperature swings. My current apartment is much warmer than my previous apartment! I'm not dying, and the extreme temperatures at the oven or the cool parts of the apartment are not any more extreme than they were before. And no, I haven't ever noticed my oven having a dramatic impact on everything else in my apartment. So, no, this kind of appeal to intuition about the average temperature in an apartment does not help explain why 2degC across the globe means more than just.. a bit warmer temperature. And most certainly comparing it to something like body temperature (which tends to be very steady compared to air temperature) does not help at all.
konspence 5y ago
There's nothing to "keep" under 1.5C, we are pretty much already there when error bars are considered. 2C is going to be breached regardless because even if we went carbon neutral today we have decades of locked in warming. Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me. I still advocate for mitigation/reduction efforts because future generations exist and they deserve the best climate we can pass on, but let's not pretend like we are on track to preserve any level of normal. 1.5C is more than a moonshot - it is behind us.
- ttiurani 5y ago
  Don't quite know what you mean by "locked in warming" (nor didn't have time to look at this report yet), but the previous scenarios have massive scale future magic carbon takeback tech baked in. I assume if there was something like that ongoing on a global scale and almost no new emissions, 1.5 degrees might be theoretically possible?
  - konspence 5y ago
    Thanks, good call out. This was largely based on some charts from An Inconvenient Truth which showed temp as a latent responding variable to CO2 PPM. Obviously a lot of research has happened since then, so I looked it up, and the lag period between CO2 and temperature rise is much shorter than I expected. It seems it is just a decade - so if we went to carbon negative today, we could see results in under 10 years [1] [2]. Kind of unclear if the baseline carbon we could achieve will result in YoY decrease in temperature, given the feedback loops and it already raising temperatures every year. If the research you mentioned is predicated on massive carbon takeback then I am highly suspicious. The public sector doesn't have the will, and the private sector doesn't have the incentive. [1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/03... [2]: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-climate-change/ https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
  - miltondts 5y ago
mrpopo 5y ago
Yes. In first approximation, if we reach a global temperature increase of X degrees, the actual temperature increase that people will actually feel on land will be double that. Oceans are warming up much more slowly because they are so deep and trap all the heat. See this tweet: https://twitter.com/JFrancisClimate/status/1387767130565791753 https://twitter.com/JFrancisClimate/status/13877671305657917... And on top of that, there will be much higher temperature swings.
hutzlibu 5y ago
I think Randall puts it into perspective very well: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ (but still not targeting laypersons) Scientific facts alone are not helping most people. Recently there was torrential rain in parts of germany. And people were warned (per official SMS) with: Expect x liters of rain per hour. Most understood, ok, so there is heavy rain. I keep my umbrella close by. What they did not understand is, that this meant a massive flood, with houses close to small rivers vanished and over 160 people died.
fragmede 5y ago
1 or 2 just isn't a big number. How about using the number of Joules it would take to heat the Earth's atmosphere by 1 degree (Celcius, because we're not Philistines). It'll be an approximate (as is any measurement at planetary scale, eg 1 AU) but that's fine.
lordnacho 5y ago
I wrote about this not long ago, the problem with the climate crisis is there's no crisis point. In a "proper" crisis or perhaps "ordinary" is a better term, there's a point where the leadership needs to drop all other agenda items and focus on the crisis. Whether that's bailing out the economy, starting a war, or calling a new election, there's a time when nothing else matters. The climate crisis is a thousand individual, distributed, manageable events that happen all the time. Forest fires, floods, storms, they all happen and they're all dealt with locally. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. Every time. Forever. It's the frog boiling analogy. Can we handle x amount of rain? Yes. Can we handle 1.1x? Sure. How about 1.2x floods? Sure. It will be like inflation was to our generation, grandad will tell stories about how you could buy a whole meal for a dollar. Except instead of meals, it's hurricanes. There doesn't seem to be anything in the context of what you said in your comment that would lead us to a "let's deal with it now" moment. Telling people about the 1 or 2 degrees, sure, they need to know, but it will never bring anyone to a negotiating table.
- phreeza 5y ago
  I sincerely hope it won't be necessary, but in Kim Stanley Robinsons book Ministry for the future, there is a wet bulb heat wave that kills hundreds of thousands that serves to at least somewhat galvanize the world into action. Perhaps something like that could be a plausible thing to happen.
- rescripting 5y ago
  You'll experience the climate crisis as an ever increasing digital stream of catastrophes captured on cellphone camera until, one day, you're the one doing the filming.
virgilp 5y ago
> 1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much Did not seem like much to me, until I realized that 28 degrees inside the house is "comfortable" while 30 is "too hot".
- brailsafe 5y ago
  In what world is 28°C comfortable!?
  - virgilp 5y ago
    Well, definitely not North America because there it seems to be a mandate that you gotta freeze inside during summer. But trust me, you (still?) can live without AC.
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    Maybe when it's really dry inside ? But indeed, over 25/26 with central european humidity is unpleasant.
    - virgilp 5y ago
      Bucharest here. I'm fine at 25 but if you ask my wife she'll say that it's too cold. I do realize though that different people have different definition of comfort ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

headmelted 5y ago

Also people need to be presented with the consequences. I still know a lot of people who genuinely believe it means slightly warmer summers. They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water. Also just dropping this link here as I remember watching it at the time and thinking isn't it great we're not there yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
Yeah, I don’t mean to be disparaging but the average person doesn’t really seem to grasp this beyond: it’ll be slightly warmer. And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park. Maybe there should be more focus on the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc. Although to be honest if this is lost on people up until now anyway, what hope is there? A significant number of people just don’t seem to care.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  It's difficult to care about long-term problems like climate change, when you are struggling to provide for your family in the present. That's some of it, although some others seem to emotionally reject any information about climate change, which is more concerning (especially when those people end up in positions of political power).
  - konspence 5y ago
    This year has proven that climate change isn't just a long term problem. Manhattan was engulfed in smoke from the west coast. People were flooded out of their homes in Western Europe. And heat waves across the west coast lead to dozens of deaths. I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media. We can look at our response to Covid as a model for how we might respond to climate change slapping us in the face. If that is a fair comparison, I am worried.
    - Ma8ee 5y ago
      I don’t think our responses to COVID was only disaster. Big parts of them was disorganised and inconsistent. But in the whole they were also forceful, creating not only one, but several effective vaccines in a fraction of the time it usually takes, and making them available to billions of people. Also, suddenly, there are trillions of dollars made available to keep the economy afloat and reduce personal sufferings. If the same scale of efforts were used to fight climate change, it wouldn’t be a problem. Right now I’m just waiting for the natural disasters being big and frequent enough so people can’t deny what they see with their own eyes. After that I expect things to happen relatively fast. Maybe some oil and coal executives that have spend billions spewing lies will be found dangling from lamppost too, when people finally understand what happened. (I in no way condone the last part, it is merely meant as a way to express that some people probably will be very angry.)
      - deleted 5y ago
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    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media. You did, there were floods in India (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/23/india/floods-landslides-maharashtra-intl-hnk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/23/india/floods-landslides-m...) and China (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148623/flooding-in-central-china https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148623/flooding-in-...). I wonder if there exists a website that gathers reports of extreme weather events (floods, tornados/hurricanes, heat waves/firestorms) worldwide.
- roenxi 5y ago
  What is the thesis here, that storms are a new hitherto unknown phenomenon that are radically outside the human experience? There has never been an era where humans didn't have to put up with horrific storms. It took Pompeii 4-6m of volcanic ash to stop humans picking up the pieces and carrying on. I don't think a focus on "oh there'll be more storms" is going to cut it. We have to be ready for storms anyway, having more of them doesn't change the risk calculations all that much in my mind. I'd rather pay the taxes for a big well air conditioned community centre to deal with heat waves. It'll be cheaper than what gets wasted on sporting venues.
  - Retric 5y ago
    The thesis is you trade up. This isn’t about an extra thunderstorm or two, big storms are expensive and disruptive. More tropical storms become hurricanes. Category 1 hurricanes hit 2 etc, and what would have been a 5 hits harder and stays a 5 for longer. It’s about more frequent forced evacuations, overtopped levies, and massive cleanup etc. Rising sea levels aren’t just larger high tides their also larger tsunami. Beyond that you just get more extreme events like heat waves in the Arctic, longer drought mixed with extra flooding, more hail, mudslides, bigger blizzards etc. We’re looking at 100’s of billions in damages per year not simply adding a few AC to community centers. Though you’re also likely to have higher cooling bills.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      > We’re looking at 100’s of billions in damages per year not simply adding a few AC to community centers. The US government spends 7 trillion dollars a year. That isn't an alarming number.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Most of the cost from weather events isn’t born by the federal government. Looking just at extreme 1+ billion dollar weather events over the last 20 years averages close to 100 billion per year in the US. “The total cost of these 298 events exceeds $1.975 trillion.” However, things are getting worse. “The 1980–2020 annual average is 7.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2016–2020) is 16.2 events (CPI-adjusted).“ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ Of course not all of that is based on climate change, but smaller storms also cost money for everything from snow removal to lost crops, and preparation for storms costs even more.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  > And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park. This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada. The gulf stream is already being disrupted by meltwater from the arctic.
  - JetSetWilly 5y ago
    > This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada. That is overstating the effect of the gulf stream. Canada and Russia have continental weather - they get cold because the interior doesn't have a huge heat sink in the form of an ocean surrounding it keeping it warmer (or cooler). The UK is small and surrounded by ocean, with prevailing winds off that ocean. It isn't going to have a continental weather system if the gulf stream is disrupted, and it isn't going to suddenly have a climate as cold as canada. It may have unpredictable effects and may not be desirable, but we wouldn't suddenly be suffering from equivalently cold weather as the same latitude in Canada or Russia.
    - deleted 5y ago
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- zejn 5y ago
  It is hard to "care". People are bombarded with articles and viewpoints and even lies to the point that they are unable to orient themselves - and just zone out. When the easiest thing to say is to just tell them to "stop burning stuff". Do we call it fuel? Stop using it. Can't stop using it? Ok, but please use as little as possible.
- jiri 5y ago
  I can confirm that: I am from EU, far inland. Warmer climate seems like a good idea to me and rising sea level does not bother me at all. Yes, I dislike storms, floods and droughts but these are thing we know and we are prepared. And it might be even cheaper to be better prepared for storms than to bear externalized costs of CO2 ... hard to estimate that. We need some new technology, something very cheap, efficient and disruptive, that will force oil and gas to stay in the ground economically :-|
bemmu 5y ago
Waitbutwhy put it well: “ 18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice”
- adwn 5y ago
  That's not really helpful, when you think about it: Are the effects linear? How much ice would the US be under for temperatures of 1°C below 20th century average? A fifth of half a mile? No ice at all? And what does that imply for 2°C above? 0.2 miles of ice below the surface? I prefer actual predictions of the effects, not bad analogies or useless data points.
  - vermilingua 5y ago
    Sure, it's unhelpful if you're trying to build a model or understand the science, but 90% of people aren't; and it's accurate –if unhelpful– analogies like this that get those people onboard.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    The point is to show that the system is very sensitive, and that the folk wisdom of "2 C is just 2 C what's the big deal?" isn't valid.
    - adwn 5y ago
      Then why not just explain to people the predicted consequences of a 2°C temperature increase?
mynameismon 5y ago
When I was a kid, that was what I believed in too. And that is what most people would say if they heard it for the first time. What most people do not do while saying this statement is taking the context of the change in average temperatures around the world. What should be shown are graphics like this XKCD [1], which puts in perspective the average global temperatures in past 22,000 years. (spoiler: the last time Earth's average global temperature was 4 degrees below the average global temperature during the 1970s, the Earth was covered in sheets of ice). This is where we have well and truly allowed climate change deniers to take over and spread misinformation. [1]: https://xkcd.com/1732 https://xkcd.com/1732
enriquto 5y ago
> They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water. If you put it that way it's no wonder that they think you are crazy. Storms mean heavy rainfall that means more drinking water. What is your point, exactly?
- igorkraw 5y ago
  That if you try to drink storm water run off, you'll die of diarrhea. A lot of the damage in Germany right now is polluted drinking water
  - enriquto 5y ago
    Sure, but my point was that, among all the horrrific things that climate change is bringing, the OP picked two of them that seem to cancel out.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      The two things happen in different parts of the world.

benlumen 5y ago

Completely agree. The "average" language always used is largely responsible for the apathy, I think. It's effectively meaningless.

Joeri 5y ago

An ice age is a global temperature difference of about 5 degrees. So we are going to have at least a third of an ice age’s temperature delta in heating, if we do everything right, and two thirds if we do business as usual.

MauranKilom 5y ago
In comic form: https://xkcd.com/1379/ https://xkcd.com/1379/

Xplune13 5y ago

Yes and I don't think people are going to wake up till everyone faces the consequences of climate change in their personal lives, which is quite honestly just sad.

teniutza 5y ago
I don't think this is going to be enough. We see everyday people affected by the pandemic yet many of them still refuse to get vaccinated, keep distance or even wear a mask... They will just dismiss these consequences as "one offs"... I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.
- Xplune13 5y ago
  It might sound harsh but we're lucky that large scale pandemic like this had comparatively lower death rate, the scenario might've been completely different if it was more fatal. So, I think people will wake up if there are harsher consequences in large of chunk of population in their personal lives than covid (this is pretty horrific that we as humans with all our knowledge and technology can't prevent this without immediate danger). I know that there are going to be some people even in that case to deny climate change, but that would be significantly smaller minority compared to what it is right now in case of covid (at least I think so). > I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly. Yes, I completely agree on this one.
drclau 5y ago
There were people infected with Covid, in hospital, which still denied that Covid is real. Granted, those extremes are rare, but it shows how resilient in their beliefs deniers are. I think you are quite optimistic in thinking people will wake up. Nevertheless, we don’t need everyone to accept the reality, for us to be able to take action as a civilization.

CalRobert 5y ago

Just expressing it in Fahrenheit for Americans would help.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

In the late 80's I took a Botney class at Sonoma State. The professor always talked about what 1 degree of warming will do to the oceans. He talked about it all the time. It was his worst fear. I though he might be overreacting a bit at the time, but not now. He was an interesting guy, and was far from politically correct. I remember his stance on people/bikes who don't walk on designated paths. The whole, "You are ruining the indiginious fauna argument". Well his unpopular stance was the surviving plants will be stronger. I will never forget the honest worry he had over a 1 degree change in temperature.

tux3 5y ago

I agree that communicating the average seems very ineffective, and if you can carefully source better numbers to replace that measure, you would do well to post them here. People will be happy to copy those if you can show it to them. I suspect it may not be trivial to find a measure for the widening that people intuitively understand, but it's worth trying.

gspr 5y ago

I see this a lot, too. "It's just 2 degrees" – what the hell is wrong with you? If your body temperature is 2-3 degrees above normal, you feel like absolute shit. Likewise for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations; "it's just 0.04 %" – dude, you surely start noticing the effects of "just" 0.04% alcohol in your blood. Or hey, try cyanide. What is wrong with people?!

foxfluff 5y ago
But this isn't about body temperature or alcohol concentrations, so comparisons like that are not useful. Look, I just had a glass of cool water, perhaps between five to ten degrees celsius. And I'm about to have a coffee. What's that, fifty degrees? With 5% to 10% milk concentration. And I think I'll be just fine. You don't?! What the hell is wrong with you? If you want to explain why a two-degree increase in average temperature on the planet is dramatic, then you need to do better than compare it to something completely different.
- ygjb 5y ago
  No, you are underestimating the fact that people already understand how average temperature works, especially folks they have ever lived in a modest home with no AC. If someone's home is 24-26C, and they turn on their oven to cook something for dinner, it will warm up their home, depending on the size of their home and ventilation. Overall the average temperature increase won't be that much, but they localized temperature increase is very dramatic. Your apartment might not be hot, but that small area that is 200C is having a dramatic impact on everything else in your apartment. Bonus points for extra comprehension if they have a basement or ground floor that has a substantially lower temperature. Again, the average temperature might be high, but it doesn't mean that it's hot everywhere in the house. Understanding this isn't rocket science, and the only reason people are ignoring it is because people in power have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of it by outright lying, obfuscating, or denying it.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    I think you meant to reply to someone else? A change in average temperature (either direction) does not imply extreme temperature swings. My current apartment is much warmer than my previous apartment! I'm not dying, and the extreme temperatures at the oven or the cool parts of the apartment are not any more extreme than they were before. And no, I haven't ever noticed my oven having a dramatic impact on everything else in my apartment. So, no, this kind of appeal to intuition about the average temperature in an apartment does not help explain why 2degC across the globe means more than just.. a bit warmer temperature. And most certainly comparing it to something like body temperature (which tends to be very steady compared to air temperature) does not help at all.

konspence 5y ago

There's nothing to "keep" under 1.5C, we are pretty much already there when error bars are considered. 2C is going to be breached regardless because even if we went carbon neutral today we have decades of locked in warming. Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me. I still advocate for mitigation/reduction efforts because future generations exist and they deserve the best climate we can pass on, but let's not pretend like we are on track to preserve any level of normal. 1.5C is more than a moonshot - it is behind us.

ttiurani 5y ago
Don't quite know what you mean by "locked in warming" (nor didn't have time to look at this report yet), but the previous scenarios have massive scale future magic carbon takeback tech baked in. I assume if there was something like that ongoing on a global scale and almost no new emissions, 1.5 degrees might be theoretically possible?
- konspence 5y ago
  Thanks, good call out. This was largely based on some charts from An Inconvenient Truth which showed temp as a latent responding variable to CO2 PPM. Obviously a lot of research has happened since then, so I looked it up, and the lag period between CO2 and temperature rise is much shorter than I expected. It seems it is just a decade - so if we went to carbon negative today, we could see results in under 10 years [1] [2]. Kind of unclear if the baseline carbon we could achieve will result in YoY decrease in temperature, given the feedback loops and it already raising temperatures every year. If the research you mentioned is predicated on massive carbon takeback then I am highly suspicious. The public sector doesn't have the will, and the private sector doesn't have the incentive. [1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/03... [2]: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-climate-change/ https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
- miltondts 5y ago

mrpopo 5y ago

Yes. In first approximation, if we reach a global temperature increase of X degrees, the actual temperature increase that people will actually feel on land will be double that. Oceans are warming up much more slowly because they are so deep and trap all the heat. See this tweet: https://twitter.com/JFrancisClimate/status/1387767130565791753 https://twitter.com/JFrancisClimate/status/13877671305657917... And on top of that, there will be much higher temperature swings.

hutzlibu 5y ago

I think Randall puts it into perspective very well: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ (but still not targeting laypersons) Scientific facts alone are not helping most people. Recently there was torrential rain in parts of germany. And people were warned (per official SMS) with: Expect x liters of rain per hour. Most understood, ok, so there is heavy rain. I keep my umbrella close by. What they did not understand is, that this meant a massive flood, with houses close to small rivers vanished and over 160 people died.

fragmede 5y ago

1 or 2 just isn't a big number. How about using the number of Joules it would take to heat the Earth's atmosphere by 1 degree (Celcius, because we're not Philistines). It'll be an approximate (as is any measurement at planetary scale, eg 1 AU) but that's fine.

lordnacho 5y ago

I wrote about this not long ago, the problem with the climate crisis is there's no crisis point. In a "proper" crisis or perhaps "ordinary" is a better term, there's a point where the leadership needs to drop all other agenda items and focus on the crisis. Whether that's bailing out the economy, starting a war, or calling a new election, there's a time when nothing else matters. The climate crisis is a thousand individual, distributed, manageable events that happen all the time. Forest fires, floods, storms, they all happen and they're all dealt with locally. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. Every time. Forever. It's the frog boiling analogy. Can we handle x amount of rain? Yes. Can we handle 1.1x? Sure. How about 1.2x floods? Sure. It will be like inflation was to our generation, grandad will tell stories about how you could buy a whole meal for a dollar. Except instead of meals, it's hurricanes. There doesn't seem to be anything in the context of what you said in your comment that would lead us to a "let's deal with it now" moment. Telling people about the 1 or 2 degrees, sure, they need to know, but it will never bring anyone to a negotiating table.

phreeza 5y ago
I sincerely hope it won't be necessary, but in Kim Stanley Robinsons book Ministry for the future, there is a wet bulb heat wave that kills hundreds of thousands that serves to at least somewhat galvanize the world into action. Perhaps something like that could be a plausible thing to happen.
rescripting 5y ago
You'll experience the climate crisis as an ever increasing digital stream of catastrophes captured on cellphone camera until, one day, you're the one doing the filming.

virgilp 5y ago

> 1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much Did not seem like much to me, until I realized that 28 degrees inside the house is "comfortable" while 30 is "too hot".

brailsafe 5y ago
In what world is 28°C comfortable!?
- virgilp 5y ago
  Well, definitely not North America because there it seems to be a mandate that you gotta freeze inside during summer. But trust me, you (still?) can live without AC.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Maybe when it's really dry inside ? But indeed, over 25/26 with central european humidity is unpleasant.
  - virgilp 5y ago
    Bucharest here. I'm fine at 25 but if you ask my wife she'll say that it's too cold. I do realize though that different people have different definition of comfort ¯\_(ツ)_/¯