6 ms·
> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Servic
by badtension 3y ago
> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin.
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
- melling 3y agoYes, and there’s a lag effect so the temperature will still increase for years after that. However, to be clear, it’s unlikely we get to net zero in 27 years. We haven’t reached any of our goals so far and the goals only get more difficult
- rc_mob 3y agoYes. Humanity we are not in good shape.
- giardini 3y ago[flagged]
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoI seem to recall that the first and second IPCC reports (I haven't read the newer ones) indicated that increases would continue for about 200 years, even if emissions went to zero.
- wcoenen 3y agoThe earth is indeed not in thermal equilibrium due to the speed of the recent CO2 increase, so warming would continue if atmospheric CO2 concentration would be held constant. However, atmospheric CO2 concentration would not stay constant after emissions stop. It would go down slowly, mainly because it would continue to dissolve into the oceans. This effect cancels out the above point. Which is why the IPCC says that "The global temperature will stabilise when carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero."[1] Unfortunately, stabilizing temperature does not mean that nothing else changes. The stable higher temperature will still mean that glaciers will continue to melt. Sea levels will continue to rise. Oceans will still acidify further. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/ https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/
- badtension 3y agoThank you for the details, I have read similar reports about temperatures not changing that much later on. One thing to keep in mind though are aerosols, which can bump the temperature up by a 0.5-1 C (afaik) if we stop emitting them.
- jules-jules 3y agoYes. IPCC AR6 estimates about 0.4-0.5C of warming is masked due to anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Given the conservative nature of IPCC estimates, it is probably more.
- jules-jules 3y agoMethane tipping points are already met, especially from tropical wetlands and the polar regions. Add to that the conversion of past carbon sinks to carbon emitters, such as the boreal forests and the Amazon and we are looking at a continued rise of both emissions and temps for a long time.
- badtension 3y agoI know about the "flipped s-curve" that is methane emissions (inflection point in 2007) is it really considered a tipping point though? Do you have some good papers on that?
- jules-jules 3y agoHere's a paper from July https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GB007875 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GB00... Key Points >The rapid growth in the atmospheric methane burden that began in late 2006 is very different from methane's past observational record >Recent studies point to strongly increased emissions from wetlands, especially in the tropics >This increase is comparable in scale and speed to glacial/interglacial terminations when the global climate system suddenly reorganized Overall, there is a growing research output although much is still unknown. See for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00616-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00616-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01629-0#Sec1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01629-0#Sec1 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GB006009 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... > Rising methane could be a sign that Earth’s climate is part-way through a ‘termination-level transition’ https://theconversation.com/rising-methane-could-be-a-sign-that-earths-climate-is-part-way-through-a-termination-level-transition-211211 https://theconversation.com/rising-methane-could-be-a-sign-t... >‘Exceptional’ surge in methane emissions from wetlands worries scientists https://www.carbonbrief.org/exceptional-surge-in-methane-emissions-from-wetlands-worries-scientists/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/exceptional-surge-in-methane-emi... Dr Peter Carter has a good run down of the rapid rise in methane emissions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oQNrO0fqOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oQNrO0fqOA
- calvinmorrison 3y agoMaybe Greenland will finally get populated and maybe people will stop living in hurricane zones
- ethanbond 3y agoYes yes the solution here is to physically move hundreds or thousands of years of capital investment, especially forms of capital investment that cannot be moved and are just abandoned/destroyed. That way we can emit a bunch more to rebuild that already-built infrastructure in a different locale!
- eastof 3y agoYou're forgetting that the rebuild is only for survivors so it's a smaller scale.
- tempaccount420 3y agoTo be honest, we could use a hard reset like that every once in a while.
- glial 3y agoMaybe the new cities could be built to be walkable.
- berniedurfee 3y agoUnfortunately, humanity repeats itself.
- Aerbil313 3y agoThis time it won’t because there aint any fuel left.
- badtension 3y ago
- moffkalast 3y agoThe more you think about it the more it becomes plainly obvious how unfathomably screwed we genuinely are.
- datameta 3y agoIf policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that). Separately, I wonder if a geoengineering megaproject is more likely to be funded than small incremental changes due to politicians perceiving more immediate ROI, peer clout, and poll ratings.
- badtension 3y ago> If policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that). Do you honestly see them changing in the following years? We had Paris 8 years ago and the only thing that caused a small, one-year dip in our emissions was a deadly pandemic...
- wahnfrieden 3y agoIt wasn’t deadly pandemic that did that; it was biz owners complying with orders to let workers stay at home and not commute in and work their jobs that depend on it. Society didn’t collapse either. It’s a decision.
- lossolo 3y agoAnd how much did it cost? It didn't collapse because we printed trillions of dollars, but now we have a huge debt and inflation, which has made poor people even poorer, especially in poorer countries where food insecurity has resurfaced. If it were a sustainable solution, we would have already implemented it.
- markwkw 3y agoOn the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky. From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century. How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data. This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"
- badtension 3y agoYou are right, the changes are small and usually hard to see directly. But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s. It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before. [1] https://berkeleyearth.org https://berkeleyearth.org
- yashap 3y agoDepends where you live. I live in Vancouver, BC, and the effects here are very, very significant. It used to be that wildfire smoke in the city was super rare, but for the past ~10 years there’s been massive amounts of smoke in the city almost every summer. Weeks each summer where the air is filled with smoke, your throat itches non-stop, and it’s not healthy to be outside for extended periods. Virtually everyone agrees this is due to climate change, and it’s a pretty major negative impact on quality of living here, and pretty much everywhere along the west coast of North America. Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.
- pier25 3y agoEven if a miracle happens and we get to net zero, warming will continue for decades due to climate lag and feedbacks.
- Moldoteck 3y agoI think there are solutions, question is when these will be implemented. I'm referring to planting more trees to cool down cities so that avg temp will decrease, routing rivers/water through city to increase even more the cooling effect (like city of Bishkek)
- WinLychee 3y agoWhat's even better is that net zero isn't doing anything for _already emitted carbon_, or the already accumulated heat energy. We can get to net zero and average temperature is still going to keep rising.