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IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

theguardian.com

31–40 of 456 posts

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the hot-fresh super charged activist group called ( edit ) "Climate 350" .. stop those carbon density numbers from climbing before it is TOO LATE less than two years after it was formed the PPM went past 360, then not long after went past 400 PPM iir.. how can those people feel emotionally after that?

Are you thinking of https://350.org/about/#history . As far as I can tell, it was already past their "safe" target when formed, they were just setting a target to aim for in the long term.

> it was already past their "safe" target when formed

no, look how bad it is .. the target was close and ahead of them when it founded. Now from media sources and casual inspection, a person cannot even tell that the atmospheric concentration was less than 350 at that time. Awful.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#32
post #24
post #8

For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise. It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes in birds, insects, crop yields, … Include permafrost melting and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and quite a few other causes and consequences. It's a feedback loop…

What I always find so hard to believe is that, knowing how well we can predict weather and other complicated systems, climate change science somehow is able to make 1/10 centigrade precision predictions on time horizons of decades and centuries.

Do you also find it hard to believe that casino can say your chance of winning roulette is 1/37 (and you're gonna lose money), despite the fact every roll is random? Both are just law of large numbers.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#34
post #4

[flagged]

The IPCC sadly had to accommodate economists, and they went one to do what economists do. However they got cordoned off in a separate section. Of course economic growth of Pakistan has been severely impacted by the floods they recently got, but hey what's evidence and anyway, it's all just a far away 'stan, right? The hard science sections tell it like it is, then the growth of GDP can be gamed in oh so many ways, ma…

The IPCC are the people who wrote the source report in the first place! If you don't trust their analysis of climate change, I'm not sure what we're doing here - do you have some other source you think is more reliable?

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#35
post #18
post #8

For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise. It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes in birds, insects, crop yields, … Include permafrost melting and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and quite a few other causes and consequences. It's a feedback loop…

Overstating impact is detrimental to the cause. > decimated 1.5C will be bad, but it won’t directly kill 800+ million people in a short timeframe. People simply don’t respond to harm spread across 100 years the way they react to harm concentrated into a few large events.

[deleted]

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#36

It always makes me sad how scientists have to put on a brave face and try to tell us there's still time . Sadly, they know the most likely outcome puts us blowing past 3C by the end of the century, and 'carbon capture' isn't going to save us. If you guys are planning to see the natural world in retirement, don't wait. Better to see it as it is now than what it will become.

It's not a brave face. The science tells us that we're on a better and improving track. It's not without hope. A decade ago we thought we were on track for 6C by the end of the century.

That said, it's still going to be worse than we all want it to be. Like many things, the truth lies in the middle and all we can do is push hard on the margins.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#38

To start, yes, I agree with all the rest of the comments. Of course if you look at the action needed to start within the 1.5 degree carbon budget, it's simply impossible. It's kind of like saying how much better humanity would be if there were no wars - a nice thought, but also not going to happen. I'm curious, though, and I admit I haven't read the report, but what is it about 1.5 degrees that the scientific communi…

The point wasn't not only hitting that limit, but not hitting it before some date (end of century originally). The planet will continue warming up as long as we have an excess of greenhouse gases, even if we reach some kind of cooked up "net zero" of emissions. If we warm faster, feedback loops will have more effect earlier, tipping points may be reached in shorter time, biodiversity will drop a lot, and our ability…

Thanks for your answer, but to be clear, I understand all that.

My question is what, specifically, the 1.5 degree budget signifies, and why it seems like there will be such a discontinuous amount of harmful effects if we blow past it. What is the significance of 1.5 vs 1 or 3?

Also, I'm not some sort of "climate skeptic" - I totally understand there will be severe negative consequences for continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere. I'm just genuinely curious on why scientists landed on the 1.5 number.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#39
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to make a bet with you, and I'd be willing to, but I really don't think I'll get to collect.

Would you actually be willing to bet that world population drops by 800+ million people within 10 years of 1.5C?

800M is 10% of the current population - the OP's point is that if he's right, there's a non-trivial chance that he, and you, may be dead, making the prediction moot.

In terms of EV, it never pays to bet on the apocalypse since you can't collect. Markets can't price in their own demise. (it would actually be quite interesting if they could).

(Also, given how often people make predictions online, how often do you see people saying "mea culpa, I was totally wrong about that one!" It's close to zero. Guessing wrong, even in earnest, about important things, doesn't matter anymore, and doesn't pose even a minor threat to one's reputation. This lack of social/cultural corrective has made our zeitgeist is so remarkably polluted with utterly ignorant, bad faith BS like bets about the apocalypse that it doesn't even register any more. How fascinatingly horrible!)

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#40
post #24
post #8

For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise. It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes in birds, insects, crop yields, … Include permafrost melting and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and quite a few other causes and consequences. It's a feedback loop…

What I always find so hard to believe is that, knowing how well we can predict weather and other complicated systems, climate change science somehow is able to make 1/10 centigrade precision predictions on time horizons of decades and centuries.

If climate models were predicting the temperature of your city on March 21, 2120 then your intuition here would be wise. But that is not at all what these models are predicting. They are predicting global average annual temperatures and other gross, planet-scale statistics.

"Average annual global temperature in a given year" and "temperature in my city tomorrow" are fundamentally very different types of predictions.

Often it is easier to accurately forecast gross dynamics on a long time frame than it is to forecast precise dynamics the exact same process over a short time frame.

You don't even need to understand the math or physics to see why this is intuitively true.

Consider e.g. predicting minutiae about the behavior of a fetus over the next week ("how many fist clenches", "how many kicks") vs. predicting which week the baby will be born -- the latter is substantially easier than the former despite the longer time frame.

Or, more to the point, consider forecasting the position of a particular cloud of molecules in a pot of water being bought to boil vs forecasting the temperature of the water in the pot in 5 minutes. The latter is hilariously trivial -- a small child can be taught how to do this with excellent accuracy. The former is some horrendously difficult phd level fluid mechanics and even then hard/impossible.

In some sense, an educated intuition is exactly the opposite of yours -- it'd be surprising if we were this good at extremely fine-grained weather prediction but couldn't guess the annualized average temperature of the entire system in 50 years. The latter is a much simpler statistic because the timescales and physical scales take a lot of the difficult stochasticity out of the forecasting problem.

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