Here's the latest from the IPCC on our progress toward reining in climate change:
Bottom line: Current policies "lead to warming of 3.2°C." That's about 6°F for real Americans who don't use the metric system.
I sometimes think that this whole business of using temperature rises to describe climate change is misguided. In the US, of course, you have the problem that most people see 3° and just vaguely think it's 3°F, which doesn't seem like much. So summers used to 78° and now they're going to be 81°. So what?
Of course, I'm not sure what would be better as a single, all-around metric. Grain production? Acres of land flooded? Expected heat deaths?
We lost over a million people in the COVID-19 pandemic and the biggest effect seems to have been a huge national temper tantrum over mask wearing. Do you think a country like that is going to be even slightly moved by the prospect of 80,000 extra deaths several decades from now?
I'm stumped. If we could figure out a way to correlate temperature with gun availability or number of abortions, maybe we could get somewhere.
Actually, there should be data on the increase in miscarriages (“spontaneous abortions”) in conditions of extreme heat. If you can find it, Kevin, we can use it!
This is a huge temperature difference! 103F in the hot tub feels tepid, and 104F is intolerably hot. Multiply that difference by 6 and it seems obvious the world as we know it is over.
Some $ measure. If people think it’s going to cost them something they might respond.
These estimates already exist, and have been touted at various times. They move some people, a little bit. It’s not a panacea, but it’s good that these estimates have been put out there.
Unfortunately, taking action to reduce climate change costs money now, but the benefits are in the future, which can make it a hard sell. Presumably most parents, regardless of political persuasion, care about their children's future, so that may be a way to get people to think about the long term benefits.
It is impossible to stop because there will be more and more developing nations that will rely on fossil fuels to get there. The last few summers, we have seen a couple of days in the Bay Area around the 110 mark and it is a way different experience once you above 105. Each additional degree can be felt in a visceral way. Need more air conditioning, which is more fossil fuels. Hope tech can reverse or a wide scale adoption of nuclear. Or adapt the best we can. We won’t be able to stop third world countries who will need abundant energy to become second world countries
air conditioning use aligns quite well with solar pv electricity production...
Except for the lag. Daytime high temperatures do not occur at noon, when solar output is at max, but several hours later, near sunset, with temperatures remaining high for hours after sunset. That lag is the reason why, for instance, California was asking people not to charge their EVs between 4:00 pm and 9:00 pm.
Can't mention sea level rise in FL--just market your place in Orlando as soon to be sea front property.
Isn't the weather great! You'd never think it was Feb. in Chicago. And there were a few cold days in March, so there can't be global warming.
An now the big question, will AI fix this?
The climate change thing vaguely relates to yesterday's lesson on exponential growth. Since climate change efforts began, we have been at the "one drop of water in Lake Michigan, two drops of water in Lake Michigan" stage of mitigation efforts. However, we're approaching the "knee" on the curve, and climate change mitigation efforts are beginning to appear on a large enough scale to make a perceptible difference.
I don't think the curve is actually exponential, but it's definitely rising rapidly. I'm optimistic that it will continue rising, and total CO2 emissions, which are the other side of the same coin, will fall rapidly. Mind you, net zero needs to be merely an interim goal. We really need to get to net negative, so the atmospheric CO2 concentration can be reduced to the pre-industrial 300 ppm.
Kevin, are you still pinning your hopes on some technological cure-all coming over the hill like the 7th Cavalry?
Inflation and the cost of everything. The hotter it gets the more reduced water and food production occurs. Which means inflation continues. Why aren't we discussing the Ukraine War's inflationary costs and the unseasonably warm weather? Why aren't we talking about famine from Somalia to Pakistan? The central banks keep solving for the last war on inflation. So what is happening? Fewer investment dollars to solve the big shifts in available resources, do we just continue this death spiral?
Warmer should mean more rainfall, not less. I don't think climate change is going to mean reduced water production.
Depends on where you live. There's more precipitation as a global average, but it's not delivered as the average.
Dry regions are expected to get drier; wet regions wetter; and heavy rainfalls that run off rather than soak in are expected to be a larger proportion of total precipitation.
I think you've characterized the maturity of this nation constituents quite well.
Expected increase in climate refugees coming across the border might wake up a certain segment.
You would think but really all they’ll call for is taller walls and stronger cages.
Can temperature rise be correlated with expected sea level rise? Maybe lucky ducky oceanfront property owners can see the logic in that?
I think the real problem is old politicians with money blindness. It is a terrible disease that afflicts so many bureaucrats around the globe.
It is useful (and honest) to note that crop yields in many place (especially the US) are up significantly because of CO2 fertilization.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29320/w29320.pdf
This is just one aspect of "we're not fucked." Telling everyone we're going to die is causing more suffering in the western world than climate change will cause. I talk about it much more: https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Happy first day of Spring, everyone!
"Finally, we emphasize that the strong fertilization effect we find occurs under current
CO2 levels and current environmental conditions. Given that the experimental evidence
shows a tapering of the CO2 fertilization effect at increasing levels, a linear extrapolation
of our estimates into the future must be considered with caution."
"Current environmental conditions" being the big caveat there. Not great for your wheat crop if it's getting roasted in 100+ degree temperatures for a month at a time or more.
Did you actually read the paper? Here is the final conclusion “ We reiterate that climate change will likely have a negative impact on agriculture in aggre- gate, especially in regions exposed to extreme heat, and that CO2-driven yield increases may be offset by effects on food nutrition and quality (Loladze 2002, Taub and Allen 2008, Myers et al. 2014). Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that marginal increases in CO2 can also have a strong countervailing fertilization effect—and that such effects may account for a material proportion of historical productivity improvements in US agriculture with impli- cations for climate modelling and the literature on agricultural productivity and structural development”.
The authors looked at past CO2 levels and agricultural,productivity and, as the conclusion states, this does not mean that the benefit of past increasing CO2 levels/temperatures will continue with ever more increasing levels of CO2. Indeed, they in no way factor into their analysis any projected future climate change effect on crop production. Indeed, they state quite explicitly that increasing temperatures/drought may negate any further positive effect. The paper is explicitly about MARGINAL increases in CO2 in the past.
And still there is no discussion* about reining in population growth, which, if implemented, could lop off 1/3rd of the expected rise in CO2.
Anyone concerned about global warming who excludes population trends is not being honest about what can be done.
* okay, there are a few out there, but very, very few.
Well, Dana, where is that population growth happening?
https://www.worlddata.info/populationgrowth.php
The first "first world" country on the list is Luxembourg, which is 31st on the list. And I seriously doubt that Luxembourg is a significant contributor to world population growth. Now that you've looked it up, how do you propose to "rein in" population growth in those top 30 places?
Fund projects to increase education of girls and women.
While China and Japan, having achieved negative population growth, are now in a panic about it.
If they were really in a panic, they would be strongly encouraging immigration.
With China, in particular, there is an issue of scale. China's population declined by just under one million people last year. The demographics mean that a rising rate of decline is already baked in. It won't be long before China is going to see population shrinkage of ten million or more people a year. There may not be that many immigrants available.
Altogether I think they'd rather die than encourage immigration.
Population growth has pretty much reined itself in. The number of countries with negative population growth is large and steadily increasing. Available extrapolations indicate that the world population will peak within fifty years and then start to fall.
We could, of course, put more foreign aid effort (money) into assisting the countries that still have high birth rates in bringing those birth rates down. One of the biggest world-wide obstacles to that is the American Christian right-wing. It seems that every time there's a Republican president, there is an immediate ban on using foreign aid funds to provide birth control. The best thing that Americans could do to bring world-wide population growth down is to render the Christian right-wing politically irrelevant.
The Amazon produces 6% of the world's oxygen. If the rainforests are eliminated and general desertification sets in around the world it's not only drinking water we'll no longer have, it will be oxygen.
How much less oxygen can you live with?
We are pretty much fucked. I’ve thought this for a while. It didn’t have to be this way. We had the resources and technology to avoid this, but we didn’t have the will to do it. This has been hashed over a lot. It is the tragedy of the commons. We can maybe take care of our own homes, but it is really hard to take care of the shared spaces. Even if 90% of us are well behaved it only takes a small number of people to lobby for gas guzzlers, fossil fuels, reduced regulations, etc.
This really can’t be solved by us individually. We just built a home with lots of solar, heat pump HVAC, heat pump water heater, no gas hookup at all. But so what? Most of my neighbors don’t, and outside of California even fewer do. When I did this I got substantial pushback. The builder wasn’t sure about codes and sourcing. My wife worried about costs.
What we needed was political leadership. However, enough politicians are owned by fossil fuel companies and others that will make huge amounts of money in the short run that it is really hard to make progress. Individuals can’t do this. Companies can make a dent (Apple seems to be doing well at decarbonizing and using recycled metals). We need leadership to take us in the right direction. (Managers maintain the status quo, leaders take us in new directions.)
If Carter had beat Reagan and then started a Manhattan project to deal with AGW we would have had a chance. We needed the Feds to finance the research to figure out what to do and then some national labs could have written example regulations to make it easy for communities to do the right thing.
For example, we have Energy Star ratings that give you some idea of how to rank products. Without them it would be hopeless.
The Feds could have written sample building codes so that builders could have guides and manufacturers could make appliances to fit the codes. Maybe there would be three tiers (good, better, best) to accommodate different climates and costs.
The Feds could offer rebates to help you along. You could still buy a wasteful house if you wanted, but you would have to work at it. The default would be something that wasn’t too wasteful.
The national labs could have also done a lot of research into making as much of our “stuff” as possible compostable. Instead of going into the landfill all sorts of packaging, wrappers, some clothing could all get composted.
I bought a box of apples. When I opened the box it broke my heart to see that it was packed in a mountain of foam rubber. Yes, the apples were well protected, but the apples are gone and now this volume of fossil fuels is in the land fill.
We have so much momentum going in the wrong direction and I don’t see much on the horizon that will help us. So, yes, we are fucked.
We're so very, very fucked. In the countries with tons of resources and technology and even some political will to act, emissions of greenhouse gases continue to increase year-on-year. In China over a billion people need heat and light and electricity. Every percent increase GDP there results in greater and greater energy use, in a country building a new coal-powered generating station a day. Same in India. Affluence leads to an increase in resource depletion and energy demands and production of garbage. Whatever the trend lines we saw in North America from 1950 to the present, those are the trend lines we'll see in the emerging markets.
It'll take a collapse of the whole industrial system to make any kind of difference, and probably a giant reduction in the sheer numbers of acquisitive humans too. It's just the Tragedy of the Commons x 8 Billion. No country's government is ever going to abandon the mantra of "more jobs, more affluence, more growth, more industry".
So we watch the car speeding towards the cliff edge not knowing exactly when it will head over the precipice but absolutely unable to influence its trajectory beyond maybe shaving a few pointless percentages off its velocity.
I haven’t had time to read more carefully, but I’d like to understand what “implemented policies” means exactly. Does that mean, for example that energy systems would be assumed to maintain their current green/dirty mix for 50 years, or that our additions to energy maintain their current mix. Or do they maintain their current rate of change. Ie. 6% of new US cars are electric, but with current policies that will clearly be much higher very soon
It’s hard for me to understand how co2 levels stay to steady given current trajectories, so I wonder if that line really is pretty much the worst case.
But honestly I don’t know, so maybe Kevin could do a little more legwork and follow this post up? Pretty please?
I think you're more or less suggesting that even though nearly all national governments won't commit to banning sales of internal combustion engines, phasing out coal-fired power plants, and instituting new building codes... they won't commit because they can't see that these will be affordable policies.
That heatwave death graph seems off. Did we really have 20,000 heat-related deaths in the US in 2020?
I don't find any source data that comes anywhere near that.
Here's the cdc, stating that the average heat-related deaths per year between 2004 and 2018 was 702, although the rate is increasing:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6924a1.htm
I'd guess that the y-axis is off by one order of magnitude.
Even worse, it's temperature change *since the Industrial Revolution*. I don't even think it requires the misunderstanding of Celsius. We've been warned about 2° C (3.6° F) global average increase over the past 150 years. I think most people just think it's a few degrees over a huge planet over a long amount of time... it's way too abstract and vague a measurement. Heck, our summers have already increased by a few degrees... so what?
I agree we need a better measurement. Unfortunately, I suspect that what that truly means is one that measures the real impact on the individual, practically on a case by case basis. Even now, as waters flood and forests burn, it's still too abstract. I fear that until each person is affected personally, we won't figure it out.
If we could make it about freedom and liberty, we might have a chance.
Anything that increases peoples' cost of anything will always be politically a non-starter, expand that to the entire world and it has always been obvious that nothing would ever be done.
Eliminating excess wealth of the upper 2% worldwide would go a long way toward offsetting this cost, but I don't see anyone thinking that can be managed and that's really the only thing that might help.
Emissions from the developed world peaked in 2005, and are down 10-15% in the US and 20-30% in the EU, depending on what you look at. That's in spite of substantial population and economic growth. The developed world started cleaning up a generation ago.
It's not the problem. China is. It emits more than the US, EU and Japan combined, and is still climbing. They're still building coal plants, FFS. India is coming on strong too, and for the same reason.
That's the issue. The developed world is de-carbonizing because it's already cheaper and cleaner to NOT use fossil fuels. LEDs never need replacing, EVs are faster and more fun than ICEs, and heat pumps provide uniform heating and cooling. We've already switched to LEDs, are switching now to EVs, and will switch to heat pumps. Those have each been exponential adoption stories, and went and will go quickly. We'll do trucking, air travel, and shipping with green hydrogen, steel-making with electrolysis, and fix concrete and fertilizer.
Almost all the tech is here, but the autocratic rulers of China and India have to be persuaded to use it. They believe that their positions are only secured by economic growth, but may change their tune when all their crops fail.
In 2021, the United States produced 14.86 tons of carbon per capita, while China produced 8.05 tons per capita. It's true that the United States is trending in the right direction (lower carbon emissions per capita), whereas China is trending in the wrong direction (higher carbon emissions per capita), but not fast enough that the levels are likely to equalize in the next few years.
It may be humans just aren't wired to manage risk at the level of decades, but of course that didn't stop us when it came to nuclear weapons (or energy), and seemingly still doesn't (the trust costs/risks of nuclear are never properly measured, especially considering always baked into that is the presumption of social and civilizational order).
Yeah… no one cares. Heck, no one even noticed!
“About 43,000 people died last year from the drought in Somalia, according to international agencies and the government, which on Monday released the first official death toll about the record drought devastating the Horn of Africa nation. At least half of those deaths were children under the age of 5 who had been living in south-central Somalia, the center of the drought crisis.”
The media should use the Fahrenheit number when talking about it in the US, and also provide the estimated change for summer and winter temperatures if that's possible. 6 F average doesn't seem like much - it will more potent a message if you tell them that they'll have more 100 degree days, and their winters will have very few days below freezing.
How seriously do you take AR6 and the scientists involved in it?
I ask because figure SPM.7 lays out the most cost-efficient most impactful strategies to reduce GHG.
Nuclear and CCS are not at the top of the list and some of you claim to know better about these two strategies.
I agree that temperature is a very STUPID way of expressing the problem, and especially temperature at the "end of the century," which might as well be the year 9999 to most Americans. The correct metric is ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. And being a scientist, I know exactly what the IPCC scientists were thinking: "temperature is a familiar metric and 'ppm CO2' is not." That, of course, is exactly wrong because, as Kevin notes, expression of panic over "2 degrees" sounds nonsensical to most ordinary people. Scientists can't get it through their heads that the right way to engage the lay public on a scientific matter is: (a) pick the RIGHT metric, and then (b) explain the metric and why it matters. Another reason is that what the IPCC calls "temperature" is not what most people think, but is actually "global mean surface temperature (GSMT)." That is a very complicated number to calculate and make sense of because it's (a) not local, but global, (b) not constant but seasonal, and (c) it's some statistical average of thousands of measurements all over the world. And to make it even worse, the number is very noisy from year to year.
The CO2 concentration, on the other hand, is very EASY to measure and it is not noisy but follows a very smooth curve (seasonally adjusted). Besides, it's the thing that is actually driving climate change, so it's the key metric.
Crash Florida real estate.
Point out that much of the state is going to be underwater in 30 years.
Point out that banks who lend against property that is going to be underwater are pretty stupid.
Point out that anyone who is paying their mortgage in hopes of owning Florida real estate in 30 years is pretty stupid.
Geoengineering, probably in the form of sulphur dioxide aerosols sprayed into the upper atmosphere. Increasing the reflectivity of clouds. It's cheap, it's fast, no one can really say if it's safe (volcanos!)... But it will be what we do, for better or worse.
Feels like it's already a little bit too late. Onto Plan B.