6 ms·

Paris Agreement thresholds crossed

86 points by doener 2y ago

delichon 2y ago
In the first graph, the "Lowess Smoothing" line seems to me to not intuitively be a smoothing of the "No Smoothing" line. Is that just me, does it look like a good fit to you? Maybe "local polynomial regression" is not a good way to extrapolate from a low number of widely scattered plot points.
- timmg 2y ago
  I think a lot of "smoothing" algorithms don't work at the ends of the data. Smoothing usually takes in past and future data. At the end of the graph there is no future data. (Maybe that's not the case for this type of smoothing?) I've always thought the smoothed line should be truncated (so that it doesn't show present-day estimates where data is lacking.)
  - partitioned 2y ago
    It depends on the type of signal. If it's non-linear and chaotic, sure. If its periodic, or has sustained trends, this approach is the basis for most engineering and science.
    - timmg 2y ago
      Do you think global temperature is periodic or non-linear and chaotic?
      - partitioned 2y ago
        I think it is periodic and has sustained trends.
- crubier 2y ago
  The signal is very noisy, but there is much more past data that is not shown on that figure, supporting the trend line. The trend line is not just fitting data visible on the time interval of the figure, but also fitting past data.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  It's much worse than that, since the next paragraph completely negates that finding with "the anomaly has been at about the same level for over the past 13 months". And then there's the next graph. A bit confusing because it uses a different baseline, but where you can see the very recent trend becoming horizontal. (And can't really see any early trend because you can only distinguish 2 years.) Honestly, I'm not sure what to take from that article. But after a needless sensationalistic introduction, I don't think I can take it at face value. An edit: here's a much clearer view of the anomaly, from a different source, with yet a different baseline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly Very recent values have a really large error bar that the source on the article shouldn't have. But you can't use one to fill the missing data on the other.
jmclnx 2y ago
>The image below, created with NASA data while using a 1903-1924 custom base, illustrates that the temperature anomaly through July 2024 has been above 1.5°C for the past 13 months. Surprise to no one. The way things are going I believe we will hit +2c by 2040. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living, it is human nature. Because of that, many of the young will be forced into a bad condition. The only thing that could probably stop this, but will be just as bad, is a Yellowstone Event :(
- voisin 2y ago
  > No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living How about we just get out of the way of renewables? Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment.
  - oezi 2y ago
    Absolutely right! It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs some investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks. This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts. Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive.
  - mezyt 2y ago
    > Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment. Right, as long as energy prices are not guaranteed no one is going to invest massively. No one want to be the one having to eat up a 8000$/mwh price like in Texas in the Winter. The 3 month mean volatility of energy prices in Europe is 350% (with peak of more than 1500% in 2009 and 2021). For comparison Bitcoin volatility is 54% in the last 10 years.
    - voisin 2y ago
      Could you elaborate on your point I a bit? I think you are making a good point but I am not fully grokking it. Are you looking at the investment on the utility’s level or the individual level? Wouldn’t high variability provide an “insurance justification” for individuals to push solar / battery or similar? Who eats the $8000/mwh currently that wouldn’t be able to justify renewables on just that basis?
api 2y ago
If we'd started converting coal power entirely to nuclear in the 1970s and not stopped, we'd have had a chance to avert this. At this point we can still maybe blunt the effect but it's too late. The big thing is that if the US and Europe had gone fully nuclear by 2000 or so China would have copied that instead of powering its ascent mostly with coal. They're building a lot of solar, wind, and nuclear now but again too late. Oil for land transportation had to wait until batteries were good enough for cheap practical EVs, but coal fired electricity generation is by far the largest single contributor and is the one that had to be phased out first.
- locopati 2y ago
  if we could have trusted companies running nuclear power plants, maybe that could have happened, but you can't combine deregulation with nuclear power and think that's going to turn out great for people.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    This is FUD. Even with the worst entity running nuclear (The Soviets), the death toll is lower than for other sources.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Not much point in bemoaning what wasn't done in the 1970s. (I've done it myself, but it's not really productive unless someone solves time travel and the grandfather paradox.)
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    There is when most political groups making noise about climate are still against the technology that could have solved a lot of it.
    - api 2y ago
      There are really two kinds of greens: science-based types that are interested in practical solutions and understand engineering, and anti-technology or even anti-civilization types that want to use the issue to force de-industrialization and de-development. Solutions are not what the second group wants. A solution would eliminate the problem as a political and social lever. The latter are louder because crackpots are always the loudest. That principle holds everywhere in politics.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
I wish the submission was pointing directly towards the NASA data which are the interesting part of the submission. The rest is not very good. Arctic news critic of IPCC is frankly weird and misguided. The whole point about what constitutes the pre-industrial baseline doesn't really make sense. The threshold of 1.5°C is completely arbitraty and was taken on the basis of the 1903-1924 base. Obviously, you can show a bigger increase if you go further back but that doesn't fundamentaly change the issue. The point about ice cover decline is also weird. The IPCC regularly builds models based on the state of the art for climate modelisation as defined by its working group on the basis of publications. These models are not set in stone. If 2024 shows that ice cover was under taken into account during the last report, that will be corrected in the next (provided it was - I'm far from convinced). The IPCC is not an observatory publishing warning, nor is it pretenting to be the sole authority about climate change. It is a group of experts publishing a synthesis of the state of the art and multiple models illustrating likely trajectories (note the plural - they publish multiple models). These models can obviously be criticised but at least they exist, are based on consensual science and state their hypotheses clearly. That's the strength of the IPCC.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Maybe, maybe not. The Paris Agreement doesn't actually have a threshold: although it clearly intended to specify one, it's not worded precisely enough to actually do so. Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dqz7P-mORs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dqz7P-mORs Climatologists fight with each other in public over whether the threshold has been crossed or not. They often can't even give a straight explanation of their own position. Sabine shows a clip from a recent video call by Michael Mann where he presents a temperature graph that shows 1.5 of warming, but with a baseline of 1970. He claims the baseline doesn't matter and you can "quibble" over it! Unfortunately for Mann he's talking to someone who is switched on, and they point out that 1970 isn't pre-industrial so the Paris Agreement must have been voided years ago according to that data. Mann gets confused, starts stuttering, starts scrolling through his Twitter feed, points to another graph with a 1970 baseline and then claims the true baseline is actually 1900-2000. Again the guy he's talking to calls him out on it, asking if that's 1950 then it's still not pre-industrial times? Then Mann claims the official baseline is "late 19th century" and there has been only 1.4 degrees of warming since then. The video ends with the guy in the audience saying "Now I'm totally confused", which is reasonable because what Mann is saying isn't internally consistent. As Hossenfelder and many of the YouTube commenters point out, it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Those two positions aren't compatible.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  There are dozens of ways to look at the increase in temperatures that make it obvious it’s happening. The fact that humans can find some way to quibble about the exact baseline measurement and then convince themselves they’ve done something useful, that’s more an argument about the intellectual quality of (some) people than any point you should be making to win some argument.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  > it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Because neither is true and neither is claimed. There are no important threshold and baseline will obviously shift what you are looking at. The threshold put forwards in conference (1.5°C or 2°C) are a communication device because it's easier to draw a line and explain that to people. They are only targets and are not the most important objectives set during climate conferences (the Paris agreement would absolutely not be voided by crossing 1.5°C by the way, that's nonsense). The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.
southernplaces7 2y ago
I would make a cash bet with anyone who wants it that by, say, 2050, barring some major singular catastrophe like a nuclear war, a supervolcano or an asteroid event, the metrics of environmental and human well-being globally will be better than they are today, and that we also adapt with only modest, possibly even minimal suffering (demonstrable by solid evidence of a causal chain) from the warming we've already caused and likely will continue to cause in the intervening decades. Climate change has its dangers, but it's not and need to be an extinction level catastrophe on the scale that much of the hive-minded preening, fetishism and virtue signalling here likes to claim in the comments. It's largely a gradual process that our extremely adaptive and innovative species will adjust to, just as it has to many other changes in history with far fewer technological and social resources at its disposal. Also, the arguments about individual people feeling guilty for not doing their small part to effect global change on greenhouse gas output are idiotic. They're a misguided deviation of blame against those who it's easiest to browbeat for the sake of feeling morally superior (one's neighbors, friends, family and so forth) with no realistic mechanism for turning such brow-beating into a meaningful global change. Historically, the big sea changes in social habits have been brought about by specific, personally and measurably visible incentives to adapt those changes, either positive or negative. If people and their societies will behave differently for the sake of mitigating global warming, they'd need the same sort of incentive structure, or a personally beneficial willingness to wide adaption of real, beneficial innovations which reduce some aspect of our environmental impact. Urbanization and industrialized agriculture are two imperfect but usable examples of this. Both reduce our destructive footprint to smaller percentages of the world's surface, and both happen because concrete self-interest, measurable on an individual level, drives them.

86 points by doener 2y ago

In the first graph, the "Lowess Smoothing" line seems to me to not intuitively be a smoothing of the "No Smoothing" line. Is that just me, does it look like a good fit to you? Maybe "local polynomial regression" is not a good way to extrapolate from a low number of widely scattered plot points.

timmg 2y ago
I think a lot of "smoothing" algorithms don't work at the ends of the data. Smoothing usually takes in past and future data. At the end of the graph there is no future data. (Maybe that's not the case for this type of smoothing?) I've always thought the smoothed line should be truncated (so that it doesn't show present-day estimates where data is lacking.)
- partitioned 2y ago
  It depends on the type of signal. If it's non-linear and chaotic, sure. If its periodic, or has sustained trends, this approach is the basis for most engineering and science.
  - timmg 2y ago
    Do you think global temperature is periodic or non-linear and chaotic?
    - partitioned 2y ago
      I think it is periodic and has sustained trends.
crubier 2y ago
The signal is very noisy, but there is much more past data that is not shown on that figure, supporting the trend line. The trend line is not just fitting data visible on the time interval of the figure, but also fitting past data.
marcosdumay 2y ago
It's much worse than that, since the next paragraph completely negates that finding with "the anomaly has been at about the same level for over the past 13 months". And then there's the next graph. A bit confusing because it uses a different baseline, but where you can see the very recent trend becoming horizontal. (And can't really see any early trend because you can only distinguish 2 years.) Honestly, I'm not sure what to take from that article. But after a needless sensationalistic introduction, I don't think I can take it at face value. An edit: here's a much clearer view of the anomaly, from a different source, with yet a different baseline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly Very recent values have a really large error bar that the source on the article shouldn't have. But you can't use one to fill the missing data on the other.

jmclnx 2y ago

>The image below, created with NASA data while using a 1903-1924 custom base, illustrates that the temperature anomaly through July 2024 has been above 1.5°C for the past 13 months. Surprise to no one. The way things are going I believe we will hit +2c by 2040. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living, it is human nature. Because of that, many of the young will be forced into a bad condition. The only thing that could probably stop this, but will be just as bad, is a Yellowstone Event :(

voisin 2y ago
> No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living How about we just get out of the way of renewables? Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment.
- oezi 2y ago
  Absolutely right! It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs some investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks. This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts. Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive.
- mezyt 2y ago
  > Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment. Right, as long as energy prices are not guaranteed no one is going to invest massively. No one want to be the one having to eat up a 8000$/mwh price like in Texas in the Winter. The 3 month mean volatility of energy prices in Europe is 350% (with peak of more than 1500% in 2009 and 2021). For comparison Bitcoin volatility is 54% in the last 10 years.
  - voisin 2y ago
    Could you elaborate on your point I a bit? I think you are making a good point but I am not fully grokking it. Are you looking at the investment on the utility’s level or the individual level? Wouldn’t high variability provide an “insurance justification” for individuals to push solar / battery or similar? Who eats the $8000/mwh currently that wouldn’t be able to justify renewables on just that basis?

api 2y ago

If we'd started converting coal power entirely to nuclear in the 1970s and not stopped, we'd have had a chance to avert this. At this point we can still maybe blunt the effect but it's too late. The big thing is that if the US and Europe had gone fully nuclear by 2000 or so China would have copied that instead of powering its ascent mostly with coal. They're building a lot of solar, wind, and nuclear now but again too late. Oil for land transportation had to wait until batteries were good enough for cheap practical EVs, but coal fired electricity generation is by far the largest single contributor and is the one that had to be phased out first.

locopati 2y ago
if we could have trusted companies running nuclear power plants, maybe that could have happened, but you can't combine deregulation with nuclear power and think that's going to turn out great for people.
- fsflover 2y ago
  This is FUD. Even with the worst entity running nuclear (The Soviets), the death toll is lower than for other sources.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Not much point in bemoaning what wasn't done in the 1970s. (I've done it myself, but it's not really productive unless someone solves time travel and the grandfather paradox.)
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  There is when most political groups making noise about climate are still against the technology that could have solved a lot of it.
  - api 2y ago
    There are really two kinds of greens: science-based types that are interested in practical solutions and understand engineering, and anti-technology or even anti-civilization types that want to use the issue to force de-industrialization and de-development. Solutions are not what the second group wants. A solution would eliminate the problem as a political and social lever. The latter are louder because crackpots are always the loudest. That principle holds everywhere in politics.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

I wish the submission was pointing directly towards the NASA data which are the interesting part of the submission. The rest is not very good. Arctic news critic of IPCC is frankly weird and misguided. The whole point about what constitutes the pre-industrial baseline doesn't really make sense. The threshold of 1.5°C is completely arbitraty and was taken on the basis of the 1903-1924 base. Obviously, you can show a bigger increase if you go further back but that doesn't fundamentaly change the issue. The point about ice cover decline is also weird. The IPCC regularly builds models based on the state of the art for climate modelisation as defined by its working group on the basis of publications. These models are not set in stone. If 2024 shows that ice cover was under taken into account during the last report, that will be corrected in the next (provided it was - I'm far from convinced). The IPCC is not an observatory publishing warning, nor is it pretenting to be the sole authority about climate change. It is a group of experts publishing a synthesis of the state of the art and multiple models illustrating likely trajectories (note the plural - they publish multiple models). These models can obviously be criticised but at least they exist, are based on consensual science and state their hypotheses clearly. That's the strength of the IPCC.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Maybe, maybe not. The Paris Agreement doesn't actually have a threshold: although it clearly intended to specify one, it's not worded precisely enough to actually do so. Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dqz7P-mORs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dqz7P-mORs Climatologists fight with each other in public over whether the threshold has been crossed or not. They often can't even give a straight explanation of their own position. Sabine shows a clip from a recent video call by Michael Mann where he presents a temperature graph that shows 1.5 of warming, but with a baseline of 1970. He claims the baseline doesn't matter and you can "quibble" over it! Unfortunately for Mann he's talking to someone who is switched on, and they point out that 1970 isn't pre-industrial so the Paris Agreement must have been voided years ago according to that data. Mann gets confused, starts stuttering, starts scrolling through his Twitter feed, points to another graph with a 1970 baseline and then claims the true baseline is actually 1900-2000. Again the guy he's talking to calls him out on it, asking if that's 1950 then it's still not pre-industrial times? Then Mann claims the official baseline is "late 19th century" and there has been only 1.4 degrees of warming since then. The video ends with the guy in the audience saying "Now I'm totally confused", which is reasonable because what Mann is saying isn't internally consistent. As Hossenfelder and many of the YouTube commenters point out, it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Those two positions aren't compatible.

matthewdgreen 2y ago
There are dozens of ways to look at the increase in temperatures that make it obvious it’s happening. The fact that humans can find some way to quibble about the exact baseline measurement and then convince themselves they’ve done something useful, that’s more an argument about the intellectual quality of (some) people than any point you should be making to win some argument.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
> it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Because neither is true and neither is claimed. There are no important threshold and baseline will obviously shift what you are looking at. The threshold put forwards in conference (1.5°C or 2°C) are a communication device because it's easier to draw a line and explain that to people. They are only targets and are not the most important objectives set during climate conferences (the Paris agreement would absolutely not be voided by crossing 1.5°C by the way, that's nonsense). The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.

southernplaces7 2y ago

I would make a cash bet with anyone who wants it that by, say, 2050, barring some major singular catastrophe like a nuclear war, a supervolcano or an asteroid event, the metrics of environmental and human well-being globally will be better than they are today, and that we also adapt with only modest, possibly even minimal suffering (demonstrable by solid evidence of a causal chain) from the warming we've already caused and likely will continue to cause in the intervening decades. Climate change has its dangers, but it's not and need to be an extinction level catastrophe on the scale that much of the hive-minded preening, fetishism and virtue signalling here likes to claim in the comments. It's largely a gradual process that our extremely adaptive and innovative species will adjust to, just as it has to many other changes in history with far fewer technological and social resources at its disposal. Also, the arguments about individual people feeling guilty for not doing their small part to effect global change on greenhouse gas output are idiotic. They're a misguided deviation of blame against those who it's easiest to browbeat for the sake of feeling morally superior (one's neighbors, friends, family and so forth) with no realistic mechanism for turning such brow-beating into a meaningful global change. Historically, the big sea changes in social habits have been brought about by specific, personally and measurably visible incentives to adapt those changes, either positive or negative. If people and their societies will behave differently for the sake of mitigating global warming, they'd need the same sort of incentive structure, or a personally beneficial willingness to wide adaption of real, beneficial innovations which reduce some aspect of our environmental impact. Urbanization and industrialized agriculture are two imperfect but usable examples of this. Both reduce our destructive footprint to smaller percentages of the world's surface, and both happen because concrete self-interest, measurable on an individual level, drives them.