4 ms·

What happens at 1.5?

vkou 3y ago
Avoidance of the worst impacts of climate change on agriculture. If you're interested in hearing more about why we should be concerned about the stability of agriculture, consider looking at what happened to your grocery bill, just because a regional war broke out half a world away.
- erulabs 3y ago
  This is made somewhat more complex than might be immediately obvious as there is a huge amount of land which is too cold to be used for agriculture. Plants do not mind higher CO2 levels. It will cause dramatic chaos, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not clear the total amount of arable land will decrease.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > consider looking at what happened to your grocery bill, just because a regional war broke out half a world away Assuming you are in the US...there is very little agricultural import from a region half a world away.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > there is very little agricultural import from a region half a world away. And yet, I feel the price shocks nevertheless.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Or they are from other more immediate sources.
no_wizard 3y ago
Lots of bad things[0]: >1.5 degrees is about the level of warming that scientists say would be more likely to start setting off irreversible feedback loops, such as the disintegration of ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the abrupt thawing of permafrost in the Arctic, or the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream current [0]: https://grist.org/science/el-nino-tipping-points-amazon-great-barrier-reef/ https://grist.org/science/el-nino-tipping-points-amazon-grea...
jfengel 3y ago
At 1.5C the Greenland Ice Sheet can't sustain itself. It will take a long time to disappear, but disappearance becomes inevitable. A bunch of coral reefs die at 1.5C. Not just die back and bleach, but dead-dead. Shifts in the location of equatorial rains, which are especially important in agriculture in poor countries. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0705414105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0705414105 That starts to happen at 1.5C and becomes really inevitable at 2C. The goal was to hold it to 1.5C to mitigate the worst of the damage. Note that this is referring to when it gets above 1.5C every year. This paper doesn't predict that. It predicts that one year will be above 1.5C. That, in and of itself, is less relevant, except that it arrived a good decade or more sooner than expected. Which means that the consequences of permanently hitting 1.5C will also happen sooner.

vkou 3y ago

Avoidance of the worst impacts of climate change on agriculture. If you're interested in hearing more about why we should be concerned about the stability of agriculture, consider looking at what happened to your grocery bill, just because a regional war broke out half a world away.

erulabs 3y ago
This is made somewhat more complex than might be immediately obvious as there is a huge amount of land which is too cold to be used for agriculture. Plants do not mind higher CO2 levels. It will cause dramatic chaos, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not clear the total amount of arable land will decrease.
paulddraper 3y ago
> consider looking at what happened to your grocery bill, just because a regional war broke out half a world away Assuming you are in the US...there is very little agricultural import from a region half a world away.
- vkou 3y ago
  > there is very little agricultural import from a region half a world away. And yet, I feel the price shocks nevertheless.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Or they are from other more immediate sources.

no_wizard 3y ago

Lots of bad things[0]: >1.5 degrees is about the level of warming that scientists say would be more likely to start setting off irreversible feedback loops, such as the disintegration of ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the abrupt thawing of permafrost in the Arctic, or the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream current [0]: https://grist.org/science/el-nino-tipping-points-amazon-great-barrier-reef/ https://grist.org/science/el-nino-tipping-points-amazon-grea...

jfengel 3y ago

At 1.5C the Greenland Ice Sheet can't sustain itself. It will take a long time to disappear, but disappearance becomes inevitable. A bunch of coral reefs die at 1.5C. Not just die back and bleach, but dead-dead. Shifts in the location of equatorial rains, which are especially important in agriculture in poor countries. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0705414105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0705414105 That starts to happen at 1.5C and becomes really inevitable at 2C. The goal was to hold it to 1.5C to mitigate the worst of the damage. Note that this is referring to when it gets above 1.5C every year. This paper doesn't predict that. It predicts that one year will be above 1.5C. That, in and of itself, is less relevant, except that it arrived a good decade or more sooner than expected. Which means that the consequences of permanently hitting 1.5C will also happen sooner.