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Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

public.wmo.int

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Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted you, but IMO: - private cars and their usage are too cheap - air travel is too cheap - producing garbage is to cheap - politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally Yes, this is a political opinion. The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational"…

If your issue is global warming you should be campaigning for electric cars rather than against private cars. But I suspect you actually dislike cars in and of themselves, even if they could be grown on trees and powered by banana skins.

I like driving cars or being a passenger in them. I also acknowledge their importance for society as a whole.

But since you ask:

Cars are not a subject but an object, a tool to me.

"Suspecting" that I "dislike" this tool does not sound like a coherent argument to me.

Yes, I hate cars when being outside them, because they are a major obstruction and source of pollution, noise and overshooting environmental damage.

I hate their artifical abundance, for which I am forced to pay.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with the hypothetical banana car and why you care about my feelings.

Seems like an ideological argument to me.

Do EVs grow on trees?

I agree that global warming is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage we do.

And yes, EVs are marginally better for the nearby environment compared to CEVs. They don't solve the larger problem though and they still impose huge resource costs.

Subsidizing EVs (again) is putting more fuel into the fire.

In my country, there are and were already so many subsidies and benefits for buying a new car, it isn't funny anymore.

It's always being justified by the newer cars ostensively being better for the environment.

Even before there were affordable EVs, the government paid people bonuses to buy a new car and trash/sell the previous one with this justification.

As a person with a license, but without a car: this is disgusting and reminds me of 1984. One of the many subsidies for buying cars in Germany was called "Umweltprämie" (environment bonus). As early as 2009.

It was basically a tax-funded bonus for trashing and buying cars to fund the industry.

That being said, cars of course are only one particularly obvious example of insane policies.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methane tipping points are already met, especially from tropical wetlands and the polar regions. Add to that the conversion of past carbon sinks to carbon emitters, such as the boreal forests and the Amazon and we are looking at a continued rise of both emissions and temps for a long time.

I know about the "flipped s-curve" that is methane emissions (inflection point in 2007) is it really considered a tipping point though? Do you have some good papers on that?

Here's a paper from July https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GB00...

Key Points

    >The rapid growth in the atmospheric methane burden that began in late 2006 is very different from methane's past observational record

    >Recent studies point to strongly increased emissions from wetlands, especially in the tropics

    >This increase is comparable in scale and speed to glacial/interglacial terminations when the global climate system suddenly reorganized
Overall, there is a growing research output although much is still unknown. See for example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00616-x

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01629-0#Sec1

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

> Rising methane could be a sign that Earth’s climate is part-way through a ‘termination-level transition’

https://theconversation.com/rising-methane-could-be-a-sign-t...

>‘Exceptional’ surge in methane emissions from wetlands worries scientists

https://www.carbonbrief.org/exceptional-surge-in-methane-emi...

Dr Peter Carter has a good run down of the rapid rise in methane emissions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oQNrO0fqOA

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earth is indeed not in thermal equilibrium due to the speed of the recent CO2 increase, so warming would continue if atmospheric CO2 concentration would be held constant . However, atmospheric CO2 concentration would not stay constant after emissions stop. It would go down slowly, mainly because it would continue to dissolve into the oceans. This effect cancels out the above point. Which is why the IPCC says that…

Thank you for the details, I have read similar reports about temperatures not changing that much later on. One thing to keep in mind though are aerosols, which can bump the temperature up by a 0.5-1 C (afaik) if we stop emitting them.

Yes. IPCC AR6 estimates about 0.4-0.5C of warming is masked due to anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Given the conservative nature of IPCC estimates, it is probably more.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?

> What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable? It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.]( https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob... .) This will…

You scenario seems to only correlate increasing price with lower consumption.

I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead

A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.

A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.

There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know about the "flipped s-curve" that is methane emissions (inflection point in 2007) is it really considered a tipping point though? Do you have some good papers on that?

Here's a paper from July https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GB00... Key Points >The rapid growth in the atmospheric methane burden that began in late 2006 is very different from methane's past observational record >Recent studies point to strongly increased emissions from wetlands, especially in the tropics >This increase is comparable in scale and speed to glacial/interglacial terminations when…

Thank you so much, I think I might have seen the first paper, will plow through the rest later, it will take me some time!

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#457

How is the metric measured? I read https://climate.copernicus.eu/summer-2023-hottest-record but didn't get a good idea. Maybe I missed something. 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.

I'm in eastern Canada, with the exception of August, it was unseasonably hot in Ontario and Nova Scotia.

Interesting, guess it's just a southern Quebec thing then. August is particularly...cold.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health

You could take a boat. It takes longer but you said it's not an emergency.

The huge amount of time saved with plane vs boat makes the former the superior option. There's no way a ton of CO2 is worth the comparative QALY loss you get from five days in a boat compared to the other things you could be doing with that time (if you're on a properly efficient liner rather than a super inefficient modern luxury cruise liner). Even the extreme upper end of CO2 externalities don't go above $1000/ton with most reasonable estimates below $100/ton.
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