Comment by inigyou
1 day 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.
> 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.
This is an incorrect way to frame the impacts of temperature increases. 1.5, 2, 3C makes extreme events like the one you stated significantly more likely in a probabilistic sense. The ability of adapt is in part driven by frequency of extreme events as much as it is adaptability to specific thresholds. We are already experiencing deadly heat bulb events at current warming levels, the impacted areas and frequency of these events will strictly increase.
I agree, but what we aren't currently really seeing (at least I've not seen it) is a heat dome killing off a herd of cattle or a crop.
That's the sort of event that becomes much more likely if not inevitable as the temperatures increase.
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Bad? Things are already fucking bad.
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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.
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.
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.
…and from here, it’s turtles all the way down.
Yes for temperature but what about CO2 ppm?
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So ... It's turtles all the way down?
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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.
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)
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?".
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Does anyone knows how much more the oceans can absorb heat?
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
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.
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.