Half a degree rise in additional warming will triple area of Earth too hot for humans, scientists warn

8 comments

1. We don’t have time to read these articles. We are too busy watching a new trade war start up between the US and apparently everyone else.
   Getting prepared for WW3 and a possible new cold war , combined with a posturing and scrabbling to secure natural resources alongside a war against woke culture distracting us from a class war so far down the road we now have capitalistic feudal lords making policy in their own interests.

   Climate change can wait until after we nuke each other
   MASSIVE /SARCASM.

   Depressing time to be alive.

2. Its not a warning, it is inevitable, due to orange man, and among other things.

3. Part of the issue is that the public in general underestimate just how drastically the climate is changing, and the reluctance to accept that the preindustrial climate is long gone. A lot of this is down to not being able to appropriately contextualize what’s actually occurring. Based on present atmospheric carbon volumes, we’re currently analogous to paleoclimates under which northwestern Europe had a humid subtropical climate, and when we account for CO2-eq it’s even worse – based on that metric we’re analogous to paleoclimates under which Europe was much hotter and much more humid. I’d argue that there’s two stunning details here; 1) the reason we haven’t seen such climates develop yet is that the rate of anthropogenic warming has simply been far too fast for a proportional climatic response, and 2) carbon volumes will more than likely continue to rise at an absurd rate for the next few decades. Like, unprecedented rate. Ten times faster than the onset of the PETM, which was already considered destructively abrupt. By the end of the century, based on atmospheric carbon volumes alone and according to the more optimistic but realistic RCP scenario, we’ll see atmospheric carbon volumes comparable to the Paleocene-Eocene. Carbon sensitivity and its correlation with the climate is the crucial factor, and the PETM analog illustrates this exceptionally well. During the PETM, Europe was very hot and very humid, with tropical biomes stretching well into the polar regions. This extreme level of upper latitudal heat was achievable without the AMOC or any comparable poleward oceanic heat transport. Basically, once you achieve such a high volume of atmospheric carbon, the exceptionally high levels of heat it traps becomes the fundamental factor in sustaining hothouse conditions. If that’s not scary enough, the earth has seen such conditions for the vast majority of its existence. The present Cenozoic icehouse is an unusually cold and stable one, but such icehouse epochs represent around 10% of earth’s entire geological record. Permanent glaciation is the climatic anomaly, and is a fragile ecosystem that depends on a continually low atmospheric carbon volume. If none of that was enough of an existential crisis, the threshold for the present icehouse sat at ~300ppm, which hadn’t been breached at any point during the current quaternary ice age before the Industrial Revolution.

4. What about an additional 4.5 degrees?

5. Unfortunately the majority could care less. 😢🤦‍♂️

6. It’s just another feedback loop.

   Climate change spurs migration.

   Migrants make people afraid.

   Politicians seize the chance to demonize an “other”, and are gleefully backed by oil companies.

   Politicians do nothing to stop fossil fuels.

   Climate change gets worse, causing more migrants. Repeat.

7. Were fine, nuclear winter will be here in like a week

8. More man bear pig nonsense.

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