from the more-good-news-for-your-children-and-yourself dept.
It looks like the Paris Agreement is as dead as the fried chicken at my local deli.
At Paris, in 2015, the World agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latest report of the EU's Climate Change Service shows (summary pdf) that this target has been royally breached, at least for Europe. Temperatures there, averaged over the last 5 years, have increased by 2.2 degrees celsius.
Europe, at least, has a climate change service to measure these things. As for the rest of the world, an extrapolation of the pattern shown in Figure 1c, here, indicates that, there too, demand for swimming pools and flood insurance will grow.
To illustrate the complexity of the problem, the heatwave in mid-July of 2022 was caused by hot air from the Sahara moving into Europe, driving temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. By mid-August, a stationary high-pressure system with clear skies and weak winds took hold, and caused a second heatwave, which was made worse due to the soil being dried out by the mid-July event, and no rains since.
Events above the Sahara might have come a second time in play, here. Increasing temperatures lead to a stronger evaporation over sea, while the land heats up more. This results in a stronger temperature gradient, which draws rains deeper inland: heavier rainfalls now are reported in the central Sahara, in summer, with formerly dry valleys being put under four meters of water. This causes less Sahara dust in the atmosphere, and hence shields the land less from solar radiation: the EU's report mentions that 2022 surface solar radiation was the highest in a 40 year record, and part of a positive trend.
To end with a positive note, the EU ain't doing so bad, compared to Greenland: three different heatwaves in 2022, and an average September temperature more than 8 degrees Celsius higher than normal.
(Score: 4, Informative) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday April 21, @05:34PM (1 child)
I don't want to make light of the serious and ongoing climate change problem, but the summary is making an apples to oranges comparison. The temperature change in Europe is not the same as the average global temperature change. Just because the temperature in Europe increased by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius does not mean that average global temperatures have increased by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
I guess that is kind of a nitpicky comment for me to make, given the evidence that the problem is getting worse and we are not doing what we need to do to stop it. But I just feel like being honest is part of the solution, and misrepresenting the state of things is part of the problem.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @06:02PM
It's not nitpicking at all. The typical standard for defining climate is a 30 year average. Saying that average temperatures across Europe have been far above normal during the past few years is quite concerning, for sure. But a severe multi-year drought and temperatures far above normal does not necessarily indicate a long-term trend. A good example is the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains, where severe drought conditions occurred over a period of several years. It was driven by human activity, namely the agricultural practices of that era. But it was regional in nature and did not indicate a long-term trend toward the Great Plains becoming hotter and more arid.
As for this being regional in nature, you're correct about that as well. If we're picking specific regions, the 1.5 degree Celsius target was breached a long time ago in the Arctic. It is a big problem, particularly because of the many positive feedbacks associated with decreased albedo and the effects of thawing permafrost. But it doesn't mean that the 1.5 degree Celsius target has been breached globally.
Now, I agree that the Paris Climate Agreement is quite dead, just not for the reasons cited in the summary. The real problem is that many of the biggest polluters have little interest in making an honest effort to curb their emissions sufficiently, in no small part because of political reasons. I don't think the data cited in the summary show that the agreement has failed. However, when we look at the policy decisions in many of the countries that pollute most, it is pretty obvious that we're nowhere close to a trajectory that will avoid breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius target.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gnuman on Friday April 21, @06:01PM (1 child)
You are only correct on the first sentence. Everything else is irrelevant to the actual Global Warming, because Global, not regional warming is the issue.
The reason it's dead is right here -- https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/mlo.html [noaa.gov]
Does anyone see any inflection point in this data? I sure not anything. Talk is cheap. While you can make whatever BS agreements you like, actually walking the path and implementing them is another thing. The only positive we have recently have reached a tipping point in renewables [ft.com]. For first time, renewables are starting to curtail fossil fuels in electricity production. That is, fossil fuels are started to be replaced by renewables even when energy consumption increases.
1.5C is dead for sure. 2+ degrees by end of century. And 2-3C is most likely landing spot by time things stabilize in next 200 - 300 years.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday April 24, @07:37AM
The figures about Europe are a bellwether, and a very important one at that.
First off, because the data there are most detailed: a dense network of meteorological sensors, long-term institutionalized knowledge and heavy investment in climate modelling. The only other nation that approaches or exceeds the same level of investment in weather and climate prediction is the United States.
Secondly because the large majority of Europe is situated in the temperate climate agricultural goldilocks zone. The data there can be used as a prediction of trends in other such zones in the world, like the Great Plains mentioned in another post, which are important for a substantial part of the world's food supply.
Thirdly, because there's a large geographical variety, with mountain ranges and river valleys all over the map, and in general a close proximity to a sea or ocean. This is what actually surprised me the most: you would expect these factors to have a strong moderating effect, like the difference between a walk in a densely built city centre, and a stroll along a leafy avenue. The most scary thing of the summer fires in France last year [lemonde.fr] is that they started, and continued -- for weeks -- right along the Atlantic Ocean coast.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @06:05PM (13 children)
Prof. Susan Solomon of MIT, a chemist who established chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the cause of ozone depletion, tells her story in a lecture titled, The Antarctic Ozone Hole: A Global Success Story of Science and Policy. After various clues began to appear earlier, in the 1980s she was part of the first survey team to really nail the ozone hole problem. She goes through the history as she lived it, the scientific method in first person.
Among her slides are some that include recent maps of world temps and generally a very positive view of the future. Here's a link, I've started it after all the introductions (the occasion was an award ceremony), https://youtu.be/k23a27A8pSU?t=500 [youtu.be]
I didn't watch that version all the way through, because she gave what looks like the same talk last night to an alumni group. One thing interesting that I didn't know--while methane is a potent greenhouse gas (along with CO2), methane degrades in the atmosphere relatively quickly, half life something like 10 years. While CO2 is thousands of years.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gnuman on Friday April 21, @08:25PM (11 children)
The difference between CO2 and CFCs are,
1. politicians were told that 0 ozone by 2020 and UV Index at 60+ if nothing is done, this affects them and their kids and grandkids directly
2. there were replacement technologies already
3. it was just for aerosol propellants and refrigerants
In all these cases you have immediate problem with limited scope... CO2, on other hand, is the basis of the entire economy for last 100+ years. The magnitude of the problem is magnitudes larger. It will be generations to fix. And everyone talking about "offset this" and "sequester that" is mostly just greenwashing.
Methane oxidizes to CO2. When you dig up and release carbon into the atmosphere, it becomes part of the biological carbon cycle. It doesn't degrade. It's there forever, at least on our civilization timescale.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday April 22, @04:19AM (10 children)
Except that 65-80% [theguardian.com] of it allegedly dissolves into the oceans over 20-200 years. We get this game played all the time. It stays in the air forever - except for all the processes that take it out of the atmosphere. My bet is that they're understating the short-term sinks too.
The big reason climate models are running hot in the short term is because they overestimate the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere given a set level of emissions. We're even seeing some underestimating [soylentnews.org] of emissions of greenhouse gases. For greenhouse gases to be so low in light of elevated emissions, there must be elevated sinks as well (from the link, I mention both CO2 and methane examples of elevated emissions).
Keep in mind that when CO2 concentrations cease rising, we will likely want them to stabilize at an elevated level for two reasons - first, because we and our environment will have adapted to the higher levels, and second, because there's a lot more livable habitat at warmer temperatures. The losses from sea level rise are more than compensated by the increase in northern hemisphere habitat - to a point, and sea lanes through the Arctic Ocean will be a big deal too.
(Score: 3, Touché) by pe1rxq on Saturday April 22, @07:27PM (3 children)
Last century called, they wanted to let you know you can keep their arguments. They were flawwed anyway.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday April 23, @12:00AM (2 children)
My argument wasn't the one with a freshness problem. At some point, you have to take in account facts and stuff. CO2 gets removed from the biological carbon cycle in large amounts, that fact didn't change over the century boundary.
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Sunday April 23, @08:20PM (1 child)
You will need a lot more straw men before they sequester enough CO2 to matter.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 23, @09:53PM
I replied to a real world claim.
And that in turn was a reply to
It's not a straw man when people frequently make this argument. Here, two different posters made the claim that CO2 stays in atmosphere for a really long time - and the argument has shown up elsewhere. It's easy to observe present concentration of CO2 equivalent (in water and atmosphere) and its rate of change in the atmosphere, but much harder to observe its sources and sinks. But we already know o significant sinks. And when sources are underestimated, then so are those sinks - because you can't otherwise get the two to generate the rate of change you actually see.
Also, on your silly "last century" red herring (wonder if your big bag of fallacies will ever run out), a typical climate time scale is 30 years. That's still partly in last century.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22, @07:53PM (1 child)
Arguing but no interest in the truth.
Jordan Peterson’s ‘zombie’ climate contrarianism follows a well-worn path [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Sunday April 23, @12:01AM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @12:03AM (3 children)
CO2 concentrations wouldn't be rising if the carbon cycle was in balance. The fact is, we're emitting CO2 faster than it can be absorbed by carbon sinks. No matter how much you deceptively try to spin the situation, the fact is that the oceans aren't absorbing CO2 as fast as we're emitting it.
Yes, it's true that oceans do absorb a significant amount of CO2. Unlike what your post suggests, that doesn't mean the oceans are some magical solution to solve our problems with carbon emissions. When the oceans absorb CO2, the result is ocean acidification, which is harmful to a lot of marine life. We already see the effects of that, such as the destruction to coral reefs and the impacts to ecosystems that depend on those reefs. We depend heavily on marine ecosystems, so it's a horrendously bad idea to ignore the problems with ocean acidification.
Even if you ignore that altogether, there are two other massive problems. Gas dissolves into liquids best under cold conditions. Warmer temperatures decrease the amount of CO2 that can be dissolved in the oceans. There's also the problem that warming the upper layer of the oceans leads to ocean stratification, meaning that water doesn't circulate as much between the surface and the deep oceans. Sequestering CO2 in the oceans depends on the exchange of water with the deep oceans. This means that warming temperatures will make it considerably harder for the oceans to absorb CO2. As I said before, the oceans aren't just some magical way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere with no consequences.
As for your idea that temperatures should be stabilized with warmer conditions, that is also absurd. You're assuming that life will be able to adapt and migrate as habitats change, and that extinctions won't be a serious problem. At best, it's far from certain that this will happen, and human-caused changes to land use and land cover have made such migrations considerably more difficult. Your comment implies that plant and animal life will just magically adapt to warmer conditions, but somehow they would be harmed if the planet cooled back to mid-20th century levels. Not only are you assuming that life will adapt to a rapid warming, but you're saying that a cooling climate would somehow be harmful, even though the rate of cooling achieved by natural processes would almost certainly be slower than the warming. This makes exactly zero sense.
Paleontologists study the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) [wikipedia.org] as a possible analogue to our current situation. The warming associated with the PETM was considerably slower than in the present day. Even so, there was substantial ocean acidification, and extinctions were more severe in the oceans than elsewhere. The PETM isn't a mass extinction event, but the warming was also slower, and the lack of human changes to the landscape made migration easier on land.
Assuming that the oceans will just absorb the CO2 and everything will be okay, which is what your post suggests, is weapons grade stupidity. There's abundant geologic evidence and plenty of signs in the present day that basically everything in your post is a horrendously bad idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 24, @01:06AM (2 children)
That's true on rising CO2 (and methane) concentrations, but my point remains. When you underestimate the sources, you underestimate the sinks. The concentrations and their rates of change are the firm numbers. Everything else is estimates. The big thing here is that with these larger sinks, we probably are seeing sinks that scale with CO2 concentration, meaning we'll probably see even larger errors in those climate change models in the future than what we've seen to this point.
At some point, climate change will be a big problem, but there's so many problems with claiming that point is now or in the near future.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday April 24, @08:58AM (1 child)
Intriguing. Isn't the general rule that, as a model becomes more sophisticated, its error variance becomes smaller?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 25, @02:08AM
First I've heard of this rule. Sophistication which is just a variant of precision is orthogonal to accuracy.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday April 24, @07:56AM
In the last part she answered questions from the public, including the effect of climate change on the ozone hole. Two factors she mentioned were that stronger convection could draw up biomolecules (produced by marine biota) into the upper atmospheric layers. Some of these biomolecules would function comparable to CFCs, destroying ozone and delaying the repair of the ozone hole. She didn't estimate this as a very serious effect, though -- a few years delay in ozone hole repair. A more serious impact could be by the increasing number of dust particles reaching the ozone layer, due to the number of wildfires.
I must say that I didn't see any encouraging temperature diagrams, but then I didn't watch the whole lecture. She is a very positive, hopeful, influence, and I'm looking forward to the book she's currently writing.
Thanks for your link.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday April 21, @07:58PM (3 children)
Nothing will be really done to stop climate change, at least not until all other options are exhausted. And the reason is that every single player is faced with the following choice:
1. Do everything they can to reduce CO2.
...A. If most everybody else that puts out a lot of CO2 does this as well, then climate change is slowed significantly so you don't pay the costs of dealing with the problems it creates, but you also spent a lot of resources on that that you could have spent on something else.
...B. If other major players don't go along with this, then picking this choice gives you the expense of addressing climate change with none of the benefits, and you're both broke and boned.
2. Do nothing, or do half-assed levels of work that have minimal to no impact on the problem.
...A. If most everybody else that puts out a lot of CO2 instead chooses to reduce their emissions, then climate change is still slowed significantly, so you get most of the benefits of doing something without incurring any of the costs.
...B. If the other major players also do nothing, then you're still boned, but at least you have the money you would have spent on trying to stop climate change to instead spend on dealing with the effects.
For each player of this game, option 1A is worse than option 2A, and option 1B is worse than option 2B, and the best option is 2A. Ergo, every single player is motivated to do nothing themselves while trying to convince other people to do the work for them. Which means going to diplomatic conferences, saying all the right things, making big promises about what you definitely will do by decades from now, and not delivering on any of them. And that's exactly what nearly every player of this game has been doing since the 1980's.
The one exception to this until recently was Europe, and the reason they were doing things had basically nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with trying to reduce their reliance on Russian fossil fuels in anticipation of having their supplies cut off (Russia has threatened this several times, including actually cutting the pipelines at least once for a brief period to prove the point). Once the EU powers were cut off due to the Ukraine War, and managed to figure out how to get enough oil and liquified natural gas to keep things at least functional enough, they became less worried about it. So now absolutely nobody is motivated to actually solve the problem on a scale that matters.
If you're young and haven't done so already, you might want to visit coastal areas now so you can tell the kids what those places were like when they still existed.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 22, @04:01AM
My take is that the better strategy is to accept warming of up to 5 C, adapt to that environment - including migration as needed, and work on viable economic strategies that will reduce our emissions and how rapidly we approach that heat level. For example, I still don't hear about the low lying fruit like ending coal seam fires. Yes, they are difficult to contain, but we're getting to the point where we can put those fires out or reduce their burn rate. Then there's supercritical coal power plants. They still burn coal, but at a higher temperature - getting more energy out of the same amount of coal. The developed world may not want them, but they'd be great in the developing world which will burn coal anyway.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday April 24, @08:25AM
I've got a different take on Europe and renewable energy.
Renewable energy here (the Low Countries and Germany) started out as a grassroots efforts at the end of the '80s. (The main influence there could well have been an American: Lester Brown, of the WorldWatch Institute.)
First attempts to plunk down wind mills were made in the Netherlands in '88/'89 (if memory recalls correctly), but failed commercially, and kept failing throughout the 90s. Somewhere around the turn of the century was the tipping point, where power from wind mills started turning profitable, helped by government subsidies. (I got in in 2003.)
Russian gas was sold as a cure to climate change, a quick and easy win to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and not the other way around. Note that the plans for NordStream I were only made in 2005 -- or 7 years after the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to which Western European countries were signatories.
Note that new heating installations based on oil or gas are forbidden since 2021 (i.e. before Russia's invasion of Ukraine) in my region. A similar measure is being negotiated in the Bundestag in Germany now.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday April 24, @08:54AM
What you're describing, in short, is the prisoner's dilemma.
There's also emergent norm theory though, which posits that the behavior of a crowd is determined by the guiding actions of a few distinct, leading, members.
That is what we're actually seeing right now, and have seen in the past. The driving forces behind treating the ozone hole as a serious problem were the United States and Europe. The same reasoning as you mentioned could have been followed: if the United States and Europe unilaterally stop their production of CFCs, they'll cut in their own flesh, to the benefit of competitors. The enforcing stick there were import controls, blocking any products using CFCs from the wealthy consumer markets of the United States and Europe. It worked.
We see the same process playing out now with regards to climate change. Both the United States and Europe are the horses pulling the cart. Enforcing, though, happens in stages: a first stage was an obligation to show energy efficiency labels on consumer goods being sold here. The next step was a carbon emissions pricing system -- now being implemented in China too. And the next step after that might be a carbon border tax.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Friday April 21, @10:51PM (1 child)
I suppose that sounds better than, "Self appointed representatives pretended they would limit the temperature".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22, @07:57PM
"Nobody knew
healthcareglobal agreement could be so complicated?!"