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The buried lede: What does all this mean for global temperatures? Because global temperature lags ENSO by around three to five months, most of this event’s war

• throwaway_7274 2mo ago
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  • sailingparrot 2mo ago
    > hello Wow, clearly Gemini
• inigyou 2mo ago
  And by a sizable margin they mean maybe 4 degrees Celsius. Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees. All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.
  • fredski42 2mo ago
    Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Well they seem to have switched to releasing stored heat. Isn't that basically the El Nino / La Nina cycle? Metaphorically relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption
    • delichon 2mo ago
      To vaporize 10^21 kg of seawater from ~4 °C to 100 °C would require ~10^27 joules, around 16 trillion Hiroshimas or ~2.5 seconds of the sun's output.
    • metalman 2mo ago
      the oceans can adsorb a great deal more heat, but all the ice will melt, while the deap ocean water expands, from it's rather odd temperature ,that keeps it at the highest density possible, about .5% more than if it were just a bit warmer, so more warming will cause very significsnt sea level rise through several different mechanisms related to heat.
  • cogman10 2mo ago
    > Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C. We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.
    • tjwebbnorfolk 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      • tpurves 2mo ago
        Well that's a relief, glad I am a turtle then and so are most of my friends, and that our whole world economy and food system runs on turtles. So we should be fine.
      • MrGilbert 2mo ago
        I wonder if "but the turtles survived and I was right!" is the best way to look at it if humanity is close to extinction in the next century or so.
      • egman_ekki 2mo ago
        …and from here, it’s turtles all the way down.
      • ahofmann 2mo ago
        So ... It's turtles all the way down?
        • tjwebbnorfolk 2mo ago
          always has been
      • cogman10 2mo ago
        You are right, it is an exaggeration. I should have said "land life" as the ocean temperature doesn't shift that much with the above ocean temps. And I'm sure there's some random bacteria and fungus that can survive and thrive at 40C web bulb. What doesn't tend to do so well is the likes of humans, birds, cattle, horses, mice, rats, insects, many crops, native animal life that didn't evolve to handle high heat temperatures. The last time earth will have been as hot as the 3C temperature was prehistorically.
  • mort96 2mo ago
    The 1.5C target (which, as others pointed out, is not an end-of-the-world scenario) is about average temperature above pre-industrial baseline across 20 years. The temperature anomaly of a single year has nothing to do with that; 2028 will likely be colder again. Average temperature moves in cycles. By confusing single-year temperatures with the 1.5C target, you're just going to make people think "crisis averted" once 2028 turns out to be cold.
    • spwa4 2mo ago
      Does that matter? The only thing that can be done, is for oil producers to stop digging up fossil fuels. And not even Norway is willing to do that, to say nothing about Russia or China, even this year. And that, not digging up the fossil fuel is the only way. If it's dug up, it will be burned. Guaranteed. Oh and it effectively doesn't matter: to merely stop global warming we need 99.7% less fossil fuel production (and that needs to include everything from Saudi oil to Japanese coal) So why would it matter? Because we feel it? We are not willing to implement real policy when we feel it. We are not willing to implement real policy when we don't feel it. And geoengineering ... while it at least has the possibility for someone to just do that without the agreement of everyone ... so at least there's the realistic option to do something, so many nations, so many people, have their lives utterly dependent on climate change continuing. So nobody's making serious plans for that either (because, realistically, it'll mean war if something like that is implemented. Which is still better than doing nothing imho)
      • mort96 2mo ago
        Yes, accuracy matters in this discussion. Not conflating numbers which have no relation to each other matters. We haven't "surpassed the 1.5C target" just because one year is abnormally hot. When we finally do officially surpass it, we don't want a lot of people to be confused and ask, "wait didn't we already surpass it in 2026?".
        • spwa4 2mo ago
          Neither side cares about accuracy, and both will prevent you from getting your message out. The discussion has 2 sides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVlRompc1yE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVlRompc1yE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxQZ8ub54Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxQZ8ub54Y These are the conversations that get translated into policy. They are literally about directly satisfying people's emotions. No detours. Accuracy? I hope you're joking. AND there's the problem that the policy the "pro-global-warming" camp wants will not even help. Global CO2 emission reduction is not realistic. I'm working in AI and hoping that will help. If I had the realistic option (I have a family to support), I'd love to work in Chemistry to make it at least possible, maybe even easy, to do something about that (of course, even Chemistry products are being designed with AI, so ...). Achieving anything in policy seems to me beyond absurd. In fact I find it very hard to defend the viewpoint that even the policymakers pushing global warming action even want to help. Technological solutions at least might achieve something.
• trentor 2mo ago
  El Nino mostly affects temperature in winter. It can raise the baseline a little in summer but that's not the problem with the heat waves we have this year. There is no buried lede but there is a lot of misunderstanding about El Nino on your side.
• usrnm 2mo ago
  > if not a heat pump Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.
  • dom96 2mo ago
    The annoying thing is that UK at least has a bigger grant for air-to-water systems. I've been doing some research into this, because I would ideally like to get this system so I can make use of the existing radiators in my old house, but I do also want to have the option of cooling my home. It does seem like Fan Coil Units (FCUs) are an option for this. Anyone have experience with these? Are they really inefficient compared to standard air-to-air units?
    • thyristan 2mo ago
      The problem is, if you feed cold water into your normal heating pipes, all the piping and radiators will get wet from condensation. So you would have to have a regulator that measures air moisture and temperature in all your rooms and only feeds water with a temperature above the dew point. This is possible, but inefficient and (especially on hot+wet days) doesn't cool very well. The possible real fixes are either to section off your water circuits in summer, and only run the properly cold water through FCUs, wall or ceiling loops. Or to get a multisplit heat pump, use a normal refrigerant-air indoor unit to cool and a refrigerant-water indoor unit to heat the water loops.
      • dom96 2mo ago
        Yeah, I wasn't planning to run the cold loops through the existing radiator piping. I just want the ability to cool at least 1 room by reusing the air-to-water system, even if that means the FPU requires its own piping from the outside. In that scenario, are FPUs a good option? Are there other drawbacks?
        • spockz 2mo ago
• sdeframond 2mo ago
  So we've been stupid "solar oven" buildings for 50 years while climate scientists were warning against extreme weather events and, now that said extreme event arrives, the best we find is to rush to aircon. Seems pretty short-sighted to me.
  • bamboozled 2mo ago
    I feel every comment section related to weather and climate seems to have the same winging about buildings. Cold? Europe has amazing buildings, hot? Europe has been building ovens... it's interesting psychology. Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. We knew it and we collectively ignored it. I get your point, we could've "planned ahead" but if you build something that wasn't suitable / cost effective for the time it was built, you'd be out of business. 50 years ago no one was going to pay extra for a building that might be important in 100 years because we didn't stop burning fossil fuels in time.
    • sdeframond 2mo ago
      > you'd be out of business. Correct. And we'd be "out of business" too as a country if we decided alone to fix emissions. Other economies would have passed ours because burning oil is so damn useful. Thing is, I don't feel we are changing much in this respect. Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...
      • queenkjuul 2mo ago
        > Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon... I mean really what else is there? We can't undo the warming, we can't rebuild every building in Europe (even if we could, would it work? Winter will still happen too). We can install solar panels and air conditioners, though.
        • sdeframond 2mo ago
• bcoughlan 2mo ago
  I don't mean to be divisive, but this meme-like stream of news articles and comments about Europeans being silly about air conditioning, from the drill-baby-drill nation that refused to even try to do anything about climate change, really grates on me.
  • tshaddox 2mo ago
    I didn’t see anything meme-like in the comment you responded to. Or even anything related to environmentalism. To me, it just looked like good health advice.
    • otherme123 2mo ago
      In case you don't know, there is a meme in the US that Europe don't know/don't have A/C. We do, but in some coutries there are laws banning A/C below 25°C (77°F) in public places, so (US) tourist don't get the cold air hit when entering a building like a musseum, leaving with the impression we don't know A/C. No general A/C might be the case in regions that never needed it before (mild summers, cold winters), but their presence is increasing.
      • stasomatic 2mo ago
        I've only heard of this "meme" on this forum.
      • ValleZ 2mo ago
        It was fairly impossible to find a restaurant in Paris that had an AC not so long time ago. It’s totally not an issue in states.
        • cromka 2mo ago
          That's because Europeans are more of nonconformists and could deal with some 7 to 10 super hot days in a year. It's now weeks in a row.
• delusional 2mo ago
  I live in Europe. We have in fact invented air conditioning here too, but I am not concerned with what we should be doing next year. That's a trivial matter. I'm concerned about what will happen if this trend continues another 5-10 years. How do we make sure that doesn't happen?
  • spwa4 2mo ago
    > How do we make sure that doesn't happen? That's the neat part, you don't. Europe has saved on CO2 emissions by moving production to China, and more recently to India and Southern Asia, moving energy generation for factories onto coal power, significantly INCREASING the rate at which climate change occurs. China and India have made it very clear that, first, they will continue to do this. Also adding solar power, but not lowering coal power. They added that it is "inappropriate" to even ask them to do so (that was China). Oh and thanks to reliance on Russian gas, and the Ukraine war, the EU is forced to move to coal and LNG supplies, which are even worse than coal. Plus, of course, that means that it's not just coal plants getting worse for climate change but almost all power plants in Europe. To do something about it, due to Jevon's paradox the only countries that can lower CO2 emissions are the ones digging up fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, US, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain. You have zero chance to convince any of them to stop doing it, burning and selling oil, not even Norway is doing that. And any oil or gas dug up and sold will be burned. There never was any serious intent, not even on the part of the greens (at least not in Germany, I mean, they even published an article on the subject: eliminating nuclear power was more important than climate change in 2003). And if even they weren't willing to make it a priority, who exactly are you supposing will do it? Even in 2026, even Germany, increased it's reliance on coal (they're keeping 10GW of additional coal power at the ready, on top of the 20% of Germany's power that's constantly using coal), similar measures have been taken in Japan, Italy, and India has even delayed maintenance on existing coal power plants to increase electricity production from them. And of course, there's the basic physics part. Aside from a small rounding error climate change is cumulative. Which means once fossil fuels are burned the temperature will rise accordingly. Even if we stopped burning it won't get better. To merely stop climate change from getting worse, just that, nothing more, we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 99.7 (and some models say 99.97%, there's a surprising range there). That will just stop it from getting worse. It won't make it better. Anything less is not "a good effort" it simply makes things worse. All policies taken so far to stop climate change have not just made things worse, but increased the rate at which it's getting worse. Doing nothing at all would have been a lot better (because it would have kept factories in the EU going, on much cleaner power). Oh, and by the way, this was all perfectly clear and known 10 years ago, and nobody changed course. So ... There is no remotely realistic solution in the current policy directions. And geoengineering ... is not really allowed to be discussed. Or this argument is being put forward at the UN. Any (successful) geoengineering will have dramatic negative consequences for some states and people. And since that is considered unacceptable, because large portions of the human race are currently dependent on global warming continuing. We won't do that either. People's lives, jobs, work and so on depend on things continuing and we cannot demand they change. So yeah, I'd get some solar panels and an air conditioner.
• sdeframond 2mo ago
  > I would absolutely be looking into how to get [...] at least one window air-conditioning unit if not a heat pump before next summer Before you do that, do the cost effective thing: shadow and wind. Then you can add an aircon iff thats not enough. For shadow, reftrofitting adjustable sunshade is pretty effective. Sunlight brings about 1kw per square meter of window. That like having your heater at full power when its already hot. For wind: fans, preferably ceiling fans. Lowers perceived temperature by about 3.5 °C.
  • carlosjobim 2mo ago
    Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity. Only an AC can lower the humidity, by conditioning the air.
    • sdeframond 2mo ago
      > Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity That is not correct. Heat, wind and humidity all contribute. In a dry air with no wind, your body creates a "hot and humid" bubble around it if you are not moving. A fan helps. Humid but neither cold nor hot air may not feel great, but not that bad. Hot and humid air with no wind, now that's bad. Edit: I know because I added shades and fans.
      • carlosjobim 2mo ago
        27 centigrade with 80% humidity is a lot more uncomfortable for the human body than 33 degrees with 40% humidity. Likewise if the temperature is low, it's worse with high humidity and vice versa. The worst heat is the humid heat, and shade and fans cannot do much about it.
        • sdeframond 2mo ago
          Shades will bring your 27C to 24C so yeah, it would do much about it. I don't even get your logic here. Edit: you can still use an AC or dehumidifier on top of it. You will consume less energy with shades. Letting the sun in is like letting your heaters on. You would not turn on both heaters and aircon in summer, would you?
• xyzsparetimexyz 2mo ago
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