> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin.
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
I seem to recall that the first and second IPCC reports (I haven't read the newer ones) indicated that increases would continue for about 200 years, even if emissions went to zero.
On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky.
From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.
How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.
This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"
Depends where you live. I live in Vancouver, BC, and the effects here are very, very significant. It used to be that wildfire smoke in the city was super rare, but for the past ~10 years there’s been massive amounts of smoke in the city almost every summer. Weeks each summer where the air is filled with smoke, your throat itches non-stop, and it’s not healthy to be outside for extended periods. Virtually everyone agrees this is due to climate change, and it’s a pretty major negative impact on quality of living here, and pretty much everywhere along the west coast of North America.
Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.
It depends on your location I guess? I for one can definitely tell from my own experience, and I'm not even 30 yet.
Proper winter starts much later and is milder than before, it was 10+ degrees Celsius for the past five or so NYE (didn't even need a winter jacket), summer heat waves are more unbearable and last longer, we went from no serious issues with floods in the spring to a number of entire-towns-are-underwater levels of flooding...
Now some of these did happen before, but as an anomaly, definitely not something that happens multiple years in a row.
This is a fair point. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the temperatures in my area the year I was born. Our highest temperature of the year was 96F ... on September 24! Let me tell you, if we hit 96F two weeks from now, it'll be front page news and evidence of climate catastrophe.
I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.
I can experience it here in North Texas. We've had a lot more snow events in the past few years than the over a decade preceding. It used to be an every few years kind of thing, now there's a couple big ice storms every year. Massive difference.
And it swings the other way in the summer too. Yeah, it's Texas, its hot. Upper 90s most days in the peak summer time. Every now a bad summer with a lot of 100F days. Now every summer has streaks of well over 100F days. This summer alone has been the hardest one for me to experience here in my over thirty years in Texas.
Well, I'm not keeping records, but here (Czechia) the heat waves were really different from the past: twice in one summer for more than three weeks (in total), that simply never happened (I believe I remember reliably - public records agree -, because I don't have AC, so I have to consistently measure temperature and manage it by closing windows at 6 AM, closing the drapes, and during night by creating draft).
The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.
You are right, the changes are small and usually hard to see directly.
But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.
It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.
If policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that).
Separately, I wonder if a geoengineering megaproject is more likely to be funded than small incremental changes due to politicians perceiving more immediate ROI, peer clout, and poll ratings.
What's even better is that net zero isn't doing anything for _already emitted carbon_, or the already accumulated heat energy. We can get to net zero and average temperature is still going to keep rising.
I think there are solutions, question is when these will be implemented. I'm referring to planting more trees to cool down cities so that avg temp will decrease, routing rivers/water through city to increase even more the cooling effect (like city of Bishkek)
My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period.
Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.
I'm not ready to predict, but based on what I saw in Europe in 2015[0] and how things[1] are developing[2] lately[3], I see this as a very plausible outcome.
The US and EU countries get more migrants than they can handle; resentment grows; attempts to solve the problem with bureaucracy and policing fail spectacularly; calls for outright violence grow louder; and the well-meaning citizenry agrees that Something Must Be Done!
Geo-engineering is something, and it will be done.
When we can burn fossil fuels to impact the atmosphere that cause climate change then we can also pump other gasses that will have a cooling effect. We aren’t doing much at the moment because there aren’t economic incentives to do so, but that can change if we have policy changes.
> My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached
People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".
But let's be fair - "reducing fossil fuel consumption" and "artificial weather manipulation" are on completely different levels in regards to dangers. Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy. We don't know what kind of bad things can happen with artificial weather manipulation, because we haven't really done that before, and you can't really test the impacts in a closed experiment.
I've been vegan for decades, and I would love to see humanity move on from meat, but the idea is so incredibly offensive to people that I find it far easier to imagine the the Amazon razed and replaced with cattle feeding lots before that will happen.
It's not incredibly offensive; those are rhetorical tactics and you are falling for them: Act crazy and the other side will give up; it's a simple as that.
They don't care about meat; they care about defeating liberalism. They will shift their belief in a moment.
I'm discouraged that politics ever even comes into this. It makes as much sense as the left likes masks and the right doesn't like masks. I wish everyone could admit this is an issue and move forward.
I’d remember that this didn’t happen by accident. The fossil fuel companies knew this was coming in the 1970s and poured billions of dollars into delaying action and securing their political power. You used to be able to find Republicans opposed to pollution and Democrats who were in the pocket of fossil fuel companies - Manchin is a relic of that era – but the fossil fuel companies managed to get enough control of the Republican Party to make it difficult for anyone opposed to pollution to remain a member. By the time Bush ran against Gore the contrast was stark: someone saying urgent action was needed and an oilman saying the scientists were all wrong and we needed more cheap oil.
What really sealed our fate was electing Obama. I know a Republican lobbyist who used to work on various environmental issues, which wasn’t as oxymoronic as it sounds: he used to get the coalitions of hunting and fishing groups and sometimes farmers who were in favor of things like clean water and air, and ecosystems which were healthy enough to support game. As he describes it, once Obama was elected the Republican leadership were bitterly determined not to give him any wins and told their members that those old deals were off-limits. Their successors don’t even have a tradition of collaborating like that.
Of course it's a political issue. Politics is fundamentally about a struggle for which interests should be given priority over other interests. There are lots of people with a whooooole lot of power who have a lot to lose from taking climate change seriously, how could it not become political?
Reason I ask is because strangely we got a very cool summer for the previous 3 months in Eastern Canada. But that's part of earth so I'm asking about the method, how the weight is distributed, etc.
Our region still has cooling from Greenland glacial melting. The catches are that the reflectiveness is going down and worse ice takes lots of heat to melt but way way less for that melted water to heat further. The previous climate shifts including 5 major extinction event major climate shifts happened over maybe a dozen years. El Nino is just starting now in September the records of the last three months were just when the cool phase La Nina was over before the coming few super heated years. And the civilization collapse tipping point from massive Arctic methane release may happen in the next few years. This climate scientist has been warning of mass human extinction by about the year 2026 for awhile now! https://arctic-news.blogspot.com
Clearly we need to solve this problem, climate change is real, and it's here.
However, we can't just stop using oil. It would lead to the death (by starvation) of most of humanity, mostly in the poorer parts of the world.
We need a well managed transition away from fossil fuel inputs. One of the first things that should be shifted, as much as is possible, is from Industrial Farming which uses massive chemical inputs, and burns up the soil.
Regenerative agriculture can eliminate the need for tilling, capture carbon into the soil, which both then improve water retention, and decrease soil temperatures. These reduce the need for irrigation, increase the ability to absorb rainfall without run-off.
The addition of ruminants to the mix produces fertilizer and meat at the same time.
About 20% of the carbon we've dumped into the atmosphere could be recaptured if widespread adoption of regenerative farming were to happen. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot cheaper than trying to use machines to do it.
The single best move we could make would be progressively taxing it: tell everyone that today is the cheapest a gallon of gas will ever be, with guaranteed 20% annual price increases with the tax revenue devoted to assisting low-income households decarbonize. That would tell every business to start investing in alternatives or efficiency improvements, homeowners would shift towards things like heat pumps to save money, and you wouldn’t have as many auto buyers locking in 15-20 years of pollution buying a heavy industrial truck so they can cosplay as a rancher on the way into cubicle land. Toss in credits for carbon sinks and you’d have a good way to support the kind of farming you mention without constantly being underpriced by farmers relying on subsidized cheap oil.
Around the turn of the century, that was a Republican idea but since the fossil fuel industry successfully managed an ideological purge that’s now too politically incorrect to even mention in those circles.
Gasoline use is just a small fraction of the demand for oil, most of it has other uses, and those aren't as flexible on demand as fuel for cars. I'd be willing to bet that they'd start flaring it off if demand collapsed, just to keep the refineries going.
Fertilizer is a major sink of petrochemicals, and there really aren't any substitutes available on a large enough scale.
Suburban middle class guy switching from driving an F150 to the Safeway to using an e-bike to get his groceries will not cause anyone to starve, but it will make a measurable dent in CO2 emissions. Do not frame this as an irreconcilable tension between starvation and plenty. The question is whether the average American consumer-bot can be coerced into not squandering the atmosphere at a rate 100x faster than the average human.
The guy is living in the suburbs, which means they aren’t going to the store very often as they probably live far away from it. That means they are getting more than a few bags of groceries, they don’t need an F150 for sure, but they probably aren’t getting to carry this with an e-bike.
Better for the suburban guy to become a city guy and walk or bike to the grocery store a few times a week. They get better veggies that way as well.
One more example occurred in the four days since this post was published:
- "By 06:00 UTC on September 8, Lee's maximum sustained winds reached 165 mph (270 km/h), an increase of 85 mph (140 km/h) in 24 hours, making it the third‑fastest intensifying Atlantic hurricane on record, behind only Felix and Wilma.[12]"
It seems to me that the "alarmist" scientists have been erring on the side of caution so much that the events have been unfolding faster than even some of their most conservative predictions.
Readit News
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
However, to be clear, it’s unlikely we get to net zero in 27 years. We haven’t reached any of our goals so far and the goals only get more difficult
From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.
How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.
This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"
Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.
Proper winter starts much later and is milder than before, it was 10+ degrees Celsius for the past five or so NYE (didn't even need a winter jacket), summer heat waves are more unbearable and last longer, we went from no serious issues with floods in the spring to a number of entire-towns-are-underwater levels of flooding...
Now some of these did happen before, but as an anomaly, definitely not something that happens multiple years in a row.
I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.
And it swings the other way in the summer too. Yeah, it's Texas, its hot. Upper 90s most days in the peak summer time. Every now a bad summer with a lot of 100F days. Now every summer has streaks of well over 100F days. This summer alone has been the hardest one for me to experience here in my over thirty years in Texas.
The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.
That used to be a common claim, but it's past its expiration date. Extreme weather events are happening all over.
But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.
It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.
[1] https://berkeleyearth.org
Separately, I wonder if a geoengineering megaproject is more likely to be funded than small incremental changes due to politicians perceiving more immediate ROI, peer clout, and poll ratings.
Dead Comment
Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.
The US and EU countries get more migrants than they can handle; resentment grows; attempts to solve the problem with bureaucracy and policing fail spectacularly; calls for outright violence grow louder; and the well-meaning citizenry agrees that Something Must Be Done!
Geo-engineering is something, and it will be done.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_European_migrant_crisis
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/us/migrant-crisis-massach...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-us-mexico-border-cr...
[3]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-migration-pol...
- we make an AGI or find a human genius that figures out a way to make it work, in which case we're all good
- we try it with known methods, it fails and we possibly go extinct faster in the worst case scenario
Fun times. No pressure.
On the bright side I suppose it only makes sense to plan for success though, since if we fail then we're dead anyway.
The whole problem is we aren’t capable of doing what we know needs to be done.
People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".
I've been vegan for decades, and I would love to see humanity move on from meat, but the idea is so incredibly offensive to people that I find it far easier to imagine the the Amazon razed and replaced with cattle feeding lots before that will happen.
Corporations are "people", my friend - while being absolved from any social responsibility.
They don't care about meat; they care about defeating liberalism. They will shift their belief in a moment.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
How do you get from that to less than 0.1%?
What really sealed our fate was electing Obama. I know a Republican lobbyist who used to work on various environmental issues, which wasn’t as oxymoronic as it sounds: he used to get the coalitions of hunting and fishing groups and sometimes farmers who were in favor of things like clean water and air, and ecosystems which were healthy enough to support game. As he describes it, once Obama was elected the Republican leadership were bitterly determined not to give him any wins and told their members that those old deals were off-limits. Their successors don’t even have a tradition of collaborating like that.
Dead Comment
Reason I ask is because strangely we got a very cool summer for the previous 3 months in Eastern Canada. But that's part of earth so I'm asking about the method, how the weight is distributed, etc.
Deleted Comment
However, we can't just stop using oil. It would lead to the death (by starvation) of most of humanity, mostly in the poorer parts of the world.
We need a well managed transition away from fossil fuel inputs. One of the first things that should be shifted, as much as is possible, is from Industrial Farming which uses massive chemical inputs, and burns up the soil.
Regenerative agriculture can eliminate the need for tilling, capture carbon into the soil, which both then improve water retention, and decrease soil temperatures. These reduce the need for irrigation, increase the ability to absorb rainfall without run-off.
The addition of ruminants to the mix produces fertilizer and meat at the same time.
About 20% of the carbon we've dumped into the atmosphere could be recaptured if widespread adoption of regenerative farming were to happen. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot cheaper than trying to use machines to do it.
The single best move we could make would be progressively taxing it: tell everyone that today is the cheapest a gallon of gas will ever be, with guaranteed 20% annual price increases with the tax revenue devoted to assisting low-income households decarbonize. That would tell every business to start investing in alternatives or efficiency improvements, homeowners would shift towards things like heat pumps to save money, and you wouldn’t have as many auto buyers locking in 15-20 years of pollution buying a heavy industrial truck so they can cosplay as a rancher on the way into cubicle land. Toss in credits for carbon sinks and you’d have a good way to support the kind of farming you mention without constantly being underpriced by farmers relying on subsidized cheap oil.
Around the turn of the century, that was a Republican idea but since the fossil fuel industry successfully managed an ideological purge that’s now too politically incorrect to even mention in those circles.
Fertilizer is a major sink of petrochemicals, and there really aren't any substitutes available on a large enough scale.
Better for the suburban guy to become a city guy and walk or bike to the grocery store a few times a week. They get better veggies that way as well.
You want to have an impact on the suburban middle class guy/consumer, start with less jet set Davos/Aspen environmentalists.
Coercion or deception by any means will only make them (and others) dig in deeper.
- "By 06:00 UTC on September 8, Lee's maximum sustained winds reached 165 mph (270 km/h), an increase of 85 mph (140 km/h) in 24 hours, making it the third‑fastest intensifying Atlantic hurricane on record, behind only Felix and Wilma.[12]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Lee_(2023)