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Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

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Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#51
post #22
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points. Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops. The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns wri…

We hit 8 billion in 2022 btw. I think the problem is much worse than people imagine as well. Of those around 5.5 to 6 billion people live in "developed world" conditions (sanitation, water & electricity to the home). Over the next 20 years that's expected to grow to by another 1.5 billion (the previous 20 years was around the same). That alone is going to be a huge demand in energy, for construction and ongoing day t…

Yet Europeans will continue to hamstring their economic activity to lower their footprint which is really not doing anything in the grand scheme of things vs. China/India and what Africa will produce if/when they modernize.

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#52

This is the most important part most people don't get: > And what would 3 °C mean for Germany? > FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts. 3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.

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Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#53
post #21

EU has done its part, but all efforts are just drop in the ocean. Also, can these studies be trusted? EU basically throws money anything "green" (except buying forests and making them protected), so naturally these studies benefit from it.

EU has a lot of historic emissions to make up for.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#54
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points. Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops. The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns wri…

But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically, and those have largely coincided with plant and animal life climaxing. See the Jurassic.

> But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically

Historically? In written human history?

If we're talking the state of the planet throughout the past 4 billion odd years of existence, it once had no breathable atmosphere and had a stretch with a largely molten surface, and got smacked up hard when the moon was spun off.

None of these things are relevant to the planets near future as a direct result of human induced changes of the past century and a half.

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#55
post #8

If we don’t do something about this, I fear future generations will not view us in a positive light.

On the path we're on I don't think we'll have to worry too much about future generations. The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come. A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the pla…

How many excess deaths from cold?

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#56
post #27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy. Or did you mean to do something differently?

Both Europe and US's emissions are significantly (18%-30%) below their peak (which was 20 years ago. The rest of the world is also moving towards renewables.

Global co2 emissions are at an all time high.

Co2 parts per million are a stock, like the level of water in a bathtub. Annual emissions are a flow, like how strongly the water is flowing in.

The tub is fuller than ever before AND filling at the fastest rate ever.

The problem is that carbon energy is useful. So unless something globally beats almost all use cases then somewhere marginally it will be worth burning vs not burning it.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#57
post #16

This is the most important part most people don't get: > And what would 3 °C mean for Germany? > FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts. 3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.

this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.

Are you saying those researchers got their upper bound too low? You should inform them of their mistake.

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#58
If we coat and paint the entire human occupied land surface in white nano-diversely-sized barium sulfate paint, it will reflect the excess heat into space. Most people don't understand that this works or how it works, but science does. We will still have to lower our CO2 and emissions but we will get a break from warming.

Re: Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

#60

This is the most important part most people don't get: > And what would 3 °C mean for Germany? > FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts. 3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.

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Are you being intentionally obtuse? In normal language the quoted text means there is a meaningful chance of record temperatures 10 degrees hotter than current records.
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