5 ms·

When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degree

by lbriner 1mo ago

When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth!

larsfaye 1mo ago
>I am glad that I live far away from the effects Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.
- ceejayoz 1mo ago
  There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.
  - bix6 1mo ago
    Not for long.
  - mullingitover 1mo ago
    And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them.
    - hackable_sand 1mo ago
      You can't own land, so that solves that issue.
  - consumer451 1mo ago
    Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that. Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WW III," were replaced by "avoiding WW III."
  - Muromec 1mo ago
    Luckily the residents of the regions that fare worse will not know what those other regions are.
  - geraneum 1mo ago
    Do you happen to source everything you consume locally? From the phone and computer to building materials, clothing, food, healthcare equipment, etc.? If not, you’re in for a surprise when shit hits the fan.
  - AlecSchueler 1mo ago
    The bad news is we're all reliant on global supply chains. And even ignoring the human side your ecosystem is probably reliant in some way on things like the migrations of birds and fish etc etc
  - grougnax 1mo ago
    [dead]
- TiredOfLife 1mo ago
  I live in a region where due to global warming our winters are colder than usual, also summers are colder (except for like a week where it was much hotter)
toomuchtodo 1mo ago
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on. Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck. https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners-find-horrendous-cracks-in-homes-after-heat-waves https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026 > “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers. > 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfires/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026 Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-change-is-already-making-the-affordability-crisis-worse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026 Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-heat-strains-us-power-grid-in-need-of-off-season-repairs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026 US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spending-on-climate-damage-nears-1-trillion-per-year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025 (Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years)
jimt1234 1mo ago
This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida.
- kenhwang 1mo ago
  From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings. It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.
- ElProlactin 1mo ago
  Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.
  - Terr_ 1mo ago
    Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system. Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today. P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week.
  - ColdStream 1mo ago
    You know we might just be seeing the starting seed of the future legend of the Merica Atlantis. The fabled sunken land of Mar-a-lago where the King in Orange's folly took his treasures to the dark depths. Although after a few hundred years and many verbal re-tellings it might be the forgotten lands of Margaritaville. King Trump was a fan of a Cheeseburger in paradise. ;)
- twothreeone 1mo ago
  I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures. Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106
triska 1mo ago
> "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference.
- charcircuit 1mo ago
  The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - groby_b 1mo ago
    This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value. Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - charcircuit 1mo ago
      It's like saying the sea level's altitude is important because if a drone assumes it is off by a few meters it can crash into the ground. It ignores that the altitude of a drone is based off of the output of a control system. If you just ignore the control system and adjust the altitude of the drone to the point where it crashes it is just ignoring what happens in reality and is not representative of what is trying to be discussed.
- Isaackoz 1mo ago
  Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy. It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.
wcfrobert 1mo ago
It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage
yodsanklai 1mo ago
> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice
- Windchaser 1mo ago
  And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet. The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.
  - ColdStream 1mo ago
    Not only are we heading there it might be a lot quicker than we anticipate. The warming is accelerating quickly as the CO2 is cumulative and the feed back loops get more intense. The last decade has seen a 0.48c increase in temperature and due to the decade base line shifting every year and it is increasing in pace. https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration-2026/ https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration... The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 and emissions growth has yet to stop despite all the additional renewables being built. This is why many have said next year with the flow on effects of El Nino that we will be getting a preview of 2035.
    - Windchaser 1mo ago
      > The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 I keep hearing this, but not from the climate science community, but from laypeople. I don't understand it. I haven't yet heard reasonable physical mechanisms that would push us past 3C by 2050, when the mean expectation from major models is still ~2.7C by 2100. We haven't even hit 1.5C yet, not as a running decadal-ish average, using "1.5C target" the way that climate scientists traditionally meant it. How are we going to add another 1.5C in the next 25 years? That'd require 0.65C/decade. I don't understand it. The math ain't mathin'. For what it's worth, the link you cite talks about the reasons for the acceleration. But some of those reasons (El Nino, aerosols) lead to one-off pops that don't translate to higher long-term trends. Meaning, it would be reasonable to guess that the recent acceleration will taper off some, and we'll head back towards 0.2 - 0.25 C/decade from the current 0.35C/decade. But even if we keep up the current 0.35C/decade, we aren't getting to +3C until ~2075.
giarc 1mo ago
I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.
cameldrv 1mo ago
Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem. If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable.
- N_Lens 1mo ago
  I like the 30 year mortgage analogy, something people can connect with. 2% increase in mortgage rate likely means low 6 figures difference in total interest paid.
cmrdporcupine 1mo ago
> I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth! I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought. But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land. And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year. Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless.
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago
  > Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. There are no climate refugees... Yet.
  - infinite8s 1mo ago
    The collapse of Syria was partly due to an extended drought causing famine. A lot of the current xenophobia in Europe is due to the small amount of refugees escaping the effects of this famine and subsequent civil war.
- ColdStream 1mo ago
  Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right? No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal. Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism. What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future. We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones. This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong. I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.
fragmede 1mo ago
It's a marketing copy thing. If instead of 1 degree, they said 1.4 million TWh, which is the amount of energy needed to heat the Earth by 1 degree, it would hit better extreme number emotional buttons, but I'm not in charge of things.
- stouset 1mo ago
  Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.
ColdStream 1mo ago
Someone I know who worked in the climate sciences once put it so clearly to me. An increase of 1 degree is global, and with 70% of the world being ocean that raises much slower, the temperature rise over land is effectively doubled. So 1c degree is 2c. A 2c world is 4c. That when CO2 was 100 point less than the 280ppm baseline we had an ice age with glaciers down to the 40th(ish) parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. We have now pushed it 150 above the baseline in effectively 150 years and fast accelerating. What seems like something trivial, is actually forcing on an unbelievable scale. Also a fun visualization, roughly speaking 1 part per million in water vapor is what a cloud looks like. If CO2 had the same visual properties as water, it would be pitch black on the ground. People keep looking to the past for answers, and yes it does provide valuable context. But what we are doing now has never happened on this planet, we are blindly rushing into a future that is beyond comprehension. Some things will go worse than expected, some thing will go a lot better, but nobody really knows just yet. Also to the last line "I am glad that I live far away from the effects", alas, this isn't like empires of the past that are geographically limited. Those that can collapse but there is still plenty of untouched lands and civilizations. We now live in a global system, a six continent supply chain. We will all be impacted.
flakeoil 1mo ago
I think this talk about 1.5C or 2C degree increase is confusing and make the issue look less alarming. Firstly this is a global average, including both land and ocean temperature. The land temperatures will increase much more than the ocean temperatures and the oceans cover a higher surface. So with a 2C incease on average globally could mean 6-8 degrees more on land on average. And we are also talking about averages and globally at the same time. So at specific instances and specific places it will get even warmer, say 10-20 degrees during days or weeks. So GIEC, researchers, magazines and others should more clearly describe what this means and stop talking about these 1.5C and 2C degree increases and instead talk about how much warmer it will be on land or some other more useful measure.
- olmo23 1mo ago
  Eurostar has upgraded the technical specifications for its new fleet of double-decker trains to operate in temperatures of up to 55°C (131°F).
AlecSchueler 1mo ago
> I am glad that I live far away from the effects I've heard it said that we'll all be watching a series of disasters play out on our phones until it comes time to see one play out through our windows.
ainiriand 1mo ago
Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.
prime_ursid 1mo ago
If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.
meta-level 1mo ago
reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1379/ https://xkcd.com/1379/
tsoukase 1mo ago
I am also in a convenient place expecting more heat (mountainous region with cold nights/winters, enough water). I admit I enjoy the warmer months and wait for people come visit me for Coolidays.

by lbriner 1mo ago

larsfaye 1mo ago

>I am glad that I live far away from the effects Are you not on planet earth? Unless you're on Mars, you're not far away from any effects.

ceejayoz 1mo ago
There are regions on the planet that will likely fare better than others, though.
- bix6 1mo ago
  Not for long.
- mullingitover 1mo ago
  And we can tell ourselves that those regions which fare better will be left entirely alone. No one is going to, say, kill all the inhabitants and take the land from them.
  - hackable_sand 1mo ago
    You can't own land, so that solves that issue.
- consumer451 1mo ago
  Maybe you will require less insulation reconfiguration than some other regions, but it will be hard to escape the effects of billions of people suffering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis edit: To be clear, I still think there is time to react, and stop the worst impacts. We just need to get way off the rails of the route that we are currently on. If we put half of the heroic engineering + global capital that we put into fossil fuel extraction into better things, we could get most of the way to the goal. Fossil fuel extraction is like many simultaneous Manhattan Projects. It's nuts what we put into that. Would be super cool if some of the breakout sessions titled "surviving WW III," were replaced by "avoiding WW III."
- Muromec 1mo ago
  Luckily the residents of the regions that fare worse will not know what those other regions are.
- geraneum 1mo ago
  Do you happen to source everything you consume locally? From the phone and computer to building materials, clothing, food, healthcare equipment, etc.? If not, you’re in for a surprise when shit hits the fan.
- AlecSchueler 1mo ago
  The bad news is we're all reliant on global supply chains. And even ignoring the human side your ecosystem is probably reliant in some way on things like the migrations of birds and fish etc etc
- grougnax 1mo ago
  [dead]
TiredOfLife 1mo ago
I live in a region where due to global warming our winters are colder than usual, also summers are colder (except for like a week where it was much hotter)

toomuchtodo 1mo ago

“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian nuclear reactors no longer have enough water to operate. The Colorado River Basin will only continue to dry out. And so on. Some will be impacted more than others, but everyone will feel some impact, and it potentially will only worsen over time. If you believe in climate change, do your best to mitigate the impact for the remainder of your lifetime. If you don't believe, oh well, good luck. https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 https://x.com/ZackBornstein/status/1877055187241594986 Londoners Find ‘Horrendous’ Cracks in Their Homes After Successive Heat Waves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners-find-horrendous-cracks-in-homes-after-heat-waves https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/londoners... | https://archive.today/koMaT https://archive.today/koMaT - August 23rd, 2026 > “The impact that climate change is having is undeniable.” -- Laura Hughes, Head of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers. > 20%-25%: The average property devaluation as a result of subsidence, according to the Federation of Master Builders The Age of Unstoppable Wildfires Has Reached Europe - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfires/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-europe-summer-wildfi... | https://archive.today/OjDZH https://archive.today/OjDZH - July 30th, 2026 Climate Change Is Already Showing Up in the Cost of Living - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-change-is-already-making-the-affordability-crisis-worse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/climate-c... | https://archive.today/EYTqo https://archive.today/EYTqo - April 24th, 2026 Heat Strains US Power Grids That Need Off-Season Repairs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-heat-strains-us-power-grid-in-need-of-off-season-repairs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/rising-he... | https://archive.today/K9VF0 https://archive.today/K9VF0 - May 19th, 2026 US Spending on Climate Damage Nears $1 Trillion Per Year - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spending-on-climate-damage-nears-1-trillion-per-year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/us-spendi... | https://archive.today/9IJWo https://archive.today/9IJWo - June 17th, 2025 (Texas night time temps are staying high enough [~78F] that the utility equipment does not get time to cool off and cycle, leading to more faults, for example, and the manufacturing supply chain for transformers has a backlog measured in years)

jimt1234 1mo ago

This is exactly what I hear from my MAGA relatives: Why should I care if the ocean rises a few inches? I don't own beachfront property in Florida.

kenhwang 1mo ago
From what we've seen, so far the (not projected to be underwater) coastal areas might be the areas spared in this scenario too, because being by the water still moderates temperature swings. It's everywhere else that'll be getting record breaking heat/drought and snow, which have been far more damaging. The disaster radius of hurricanes reaches far more inland than just the coast.
ElProlactin 1mo ago
Your relatives clearly aren't MAGA if they're not concerned about what rising sea levels will do to Mar-a-Lago.
- Terr_ 1mo ago
  Careful, that's a pitfall there if we assume MAGA words reflect an internal belief system. Too often the words are whatever they have to say in order to secure continued membership in the group: The Emperor's New Clothes are a glorious blue today. P.S: Also, we have always been [about to start|recently victorious] in the [illegal war|undeclared "excursion"] against Irania, and the tariff-free chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes per week.
- ColdStream 1mo ago
  You know we might just be seeing the starting seed of the future legend of the Merica Atlantis. The fabled sunken land of Mar-a-lago where the King in Orange's folly took his treasures to the dark depths. Although after a few hundred years and many verbal re-tellings it might be the forgotten lands of Margaritaville. King Trump was a fan of a Cheeseburger in paradise. ;)
twothreeone 1mo ago
I mean they're right, rising oceans will be a drop in the bucket for the majority of us. Unless we act together, human civilization will end through the combination of breakdown of global trade, mass migration due to heat and resource wars, and collapse of our food chain. Ocean levels are just one of the side effects that goes along with rising global temperatures. Beef production in the US is already down from 30 years ago. At some point you won't be able to raise cows anywhere, less alone feed them. Corn and wheat have seen tremendous fluctuations in the past and will likely continue to fall. Imagine corn yields dropping by more than 80% in the US [1]. Of course MAGA people will probably only notice once the shelves aren't being restocked. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0906865106

triska 1mo ago

> "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Maybe this helps: Think about when we have a fever of "a few degrees", say, instead of 37 degree Celsius, we have 40. It shows that also a few degrees can make a huge difference.

charcircuit 1mo ago
The temperature of a fever is not measuring the temperature outside.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- groby_b 1mo ago
  This may be hard to understand, but that was an illustrative example on why sometimes a few degree difference have bigger absolute impact than you'd expect from the purely numerical value. Nobody (well, almost nobody, I guess) considered it an explanation or model of climate change.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - charcircuit 1mo ago
    It's like saying the sea level's altitude is important because if a drone assumes it is off by a few meters it can crash into the ground. It ignores that the altitude of a drone is based off of the output of a control system. If you just ignore the control system and adjust the altitude of the drone to the point where it crashes it is just ignoring what happens in reality and is not representative of what is trying to be discussed.
Isaackoz 1mo ago
Think even bigger. 1 degrees inside your house? Not noticeable at all. But on a planet-wide scale? A 1 degree difference requires a LOT of energy. It's like boiling a cup of water vs an Olympic sized swimming pool. The latter is going to take a lot more energy than the former.

wcfrobert 1mo ago

It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year mortgage

yodsanklai 1mo ago

> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice

Windchaser 1mo ago
And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet. The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.
- ColdStream 1mo ago
  Not only are we heading there it might be a lot quicker than we anticipate. The warming is accelerating quickly as the CO2 is cumulative and the feed back loops get more intense. The last decade has seen a 0.48c increase in temperature and due to the decade base line shifting every year and it is increasing in pace. https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration-2026/ https://www.intelligentliving.co/global-warming-acceleration... The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 and emissions growth has yet to stop despite all the additional renewables being built. This is why many have said next year with the flow on effects of El Nino that we will be getting a preview of 2035.
  - Windchaser 1mo ago
    > The more realistic climate scientists think we will blow past 2c by roughly 2035. We are on track to 3c by 2050 I keep hearing this, but not from the climate science community, but from laypeople. I don't understand it. I haven't yet heard reasonable physical mechanisms that would push us past 3C by 2050, when the mean expectation from major models is still ~2.7C by 2100. We haven't even hit 1.5C yet, not as a running decadal-ish average, using "1.5C target" the way that climate scientists traditionally meant it. How are we going to add another 1.5C in the next 25 years? That'd require 0.65C/decade. I don't understand it. The math ain't mathin'. For what it's worth, the link you cite talks about the reasons for the acceleration. But some of those reasons (El Nino, aerosols) lead to one-off pops that don't translate to higher long-term trends. Meaning, it would be reasonable to guess that the recent acceleration will taper off some, and we'll head back towards 0.2 - 0.25 C/decade from the current 0.35C/decade. But even if we keep up the current 0.35C/decade, we aren't getting to +3C until ~2075.

giarc 1mo ago

I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.

cameldrv 1mo ago

Honestly I think American scientists not speaking in Fahrenheit units to an American audience is an incredibly simple and stupid, but very significant cause of the problem. If I tell you the Earth is going to get 2 degrees C warmer, Americans are going to think, "2 degrees, not that much, barely noticeable." If you tell them it's 4 degrees F, they'll think, that's not a ton, but it's definitely noticeable.

N_Lens 1mo ago
I like the 30 year mortgage analogy, something people can connect with. 2% increase in mortgage rate likely means low 6 figures difference in total interest paid.

cmrdporcupine 1mo ago

> I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth! I thought this too, feeling a bit more smug living in southern Ontario, safer than my family in BC and Alberta next to raging forest fires and potential drought. But seems we now get a few weeks of forest fire smoke every year even down here in lush green great lakes land. And the number of tornadoes and ice storms seem to increase every year. Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. Blech. I love my kids but I think my perspective would be much different and positive if I'd just remained childless.

TacticalCoder 1mo ago
> Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world. There are no climate refugees... Yet.
- infinite8s 1mo ago
  The collapse of Syria was partly due to an extended drought causing famine. A lot of the current xenophobia in Europe is due to the small amount of refugees escaping the effects of this famine and subsequent civil war.
ColdStream 1mo ago
Cortisol is the hormone that creates tight social bonds. It is what make you love your kids so much. So the secret to a loving and kind society is to just pour this stuff in the drinking water supply, right? No it strengthened social bonds, both toward family and friends and equally against others. It makes people VERY tribal. Cortisol is also released in long term stressful situations. With a rising tide of poverty and climate blow back, I suspect stress will increase and so too will said tribalism. What we see today with the rising popularist and isolationist political parties is but an echo of the future. We see some of these tendencies when a few thousand or tens of thousands of refugees turn up in a country. What happens when this becomes millions? I have said it for years, many will be welcomed with open arms - those arms being machine guns, bombs and drones. This is the dark future I fear and I hope I am wrong. I do not have kids, it wasn't by choice. But what looked like something of a negative might actually turn out to be a near miss in future. Just keep your kids safe and try to have peace and compassion to others that are trying to do the same.

fragmede 1mo ago

It's a marketing copy thing. If instead of 1 degree, they said 1.4 million TWh, which is the amount of energy needed to heat the Earth by 1 degree, it would hit better extreme number emotional buttons, but I'm not in charge of things.

stouset 1mo ago
Frankly I think expressing it in Celsius has made Americans think it’s less of a problem than it is. It took me awhile to realize that it’s basically 4°F, which is enormous.

ColdStream 1mo ago

Someone I know who worked in the climate sciences once put it so clearly to me. An increase of 1 degree is global, and with 70% of the world being ocean that raises much slower, the temperature rise over land is effectively doubled. So 1c degree is 2c. A 2c world is 4c. That when CO2 was 100 point less than the 280ppm baseline we had an ice age with glaciers down to the 40th(ish) parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. We have now pushed it 150 above the baseline in effectively 150 years and fast accelerating. What seems like something trivial, is actually forcing on an unbelievable scale. Also a fun visualization, roughly speaking 1 part per million in water vapor is what a cloud looks like. If CO2 had the same visual properties as water, it would be pitch black on the ground. People keep looking to the past for answers, and yes it does provide valuable context. But what we are doing now has never happened on this planet, we are blindly rushing into a future that is beyond comprehension. Some things will go worse than expected, some thing will go a lot better, but nobody really knows just yet. Also to the last line "I am glad that I live far away from the effects", alas, this isn't like empires of the past that are geographically limited. Those that can collapse but there is still plenty of untouched lands and civilizations. We now live in a global system, a six continent supply chain. We will all be impacted.

flakeoil 1mo ago

I think this talk about 1.5C or 2C degree increase is confusing and make the issue look less alarming. Firstly this is a global average, including both land and ocean temperature. The land temperatures will increase much more than the ocean temperatures and the oceans cover a higher surface. So with a 2C incease on average globally could mean 6-8 degrees more on land on average. And we are also talking about averages and globally at the same time. So at specific instances and specific places it will get even warmer, say 10-20 degrees during days or weeks. So GIEC, researchers, magazines and others should more clearly describe what this means and stop talking about these 1.5C and 2C degree increases and instead talk about how much warmer it will be on land or some other more useful measure.

olmo23 1mo ago
Eurostar has upgraded the technical specifications for its new fleet of double-decker trains to operate in temperatures of up to 55°C (131°F).

AlecSchueler 1mo ago

> I am glad that I live far away from the effects I've heard it said that we'll all be watching a series of disasters play out on our phones until it comes time to see one play out through our windows.

ainiriand 1mo ago

Sea water temperature here in Valencia was something crazy this year. I do not remember anything like this before.

prime_ursid 1mo ago

If the climate effects don’t get you, the political fallout of a million climate refugees showing up at your borders will.

meta-level 1mo ago

reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1379/ https://xkcd.com/1379/

tsoukase 1mo ago

I am also in a convenient place expecting more heat (mountainous region with cold nights/winters, enough water). I admit I enjoy the warmer months and wait for people come visit me for Coolidays.