The New York Times reports today that the world has officially warmed by more than 1.5°C. This is based on the Copernicus ERA5 estimate for 2024, which I'm unable to confirm because the Copernicus folks won't let me download their annual data unless I register with a 12-character password—which I did—and then respond to an email confirmation—which they refused to send.
However, I can show you the more conventional NASA data:
According to NASA, we're at 1.47°C above the pre-industrial baseline, so we still have some time before we hit 1.5°C.
How much time? That depends. If you extrapolate from long-term trends it looks like 2032 or so (and around 2046 to hit 2°C). But temps have been skyrocketing recently, and if you extrapolate from that we're only a year away.
So it's anywhere between now and soon, depending on whose data turns out to be most accurate. Happy New Year.
UPDATE: Apologies. I used the wrong numbers for this chart originally. I've corrected it, as well as the text.
I think the actual measurement is maintaining an average of 1.5c increase or more over a decade.
Big deal. As Chris Matthews disdainfully on Joy Reid’s show Carter wore that sweater. Apparently our mainstream media thought that was a very important sign that we needed to throw Carter out and elect a B list movie star (whose first wife was an A lister).
Which somehow now seems reasonable after electing a d-list reality star con artist felon.
I'm just hoping we can land somewhere between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius warming (about 4-6 F). Trump's second is going to functionally be a lost couple years even if they don't hollow out the IRA completely and let astroturf campaigns paralyze the rollout of wind and solar.
Just read the term 'climate change' was popularized by Frank Luntz who found it was less alarming sounding than 'global warming',
https://old.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/1hxbuh8/the_term_climate_change_was_engineered_by/
No
James Hansen
↑↑ https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-climate-change/ ↑↑
It's saying Luntz is the more important factor in promoting its' use, not that he invented it.
Well, "climate change" polls well with the right wing, because any time a lib mentions it, the response is always a breezy "Well, the climate is ALWAYS changing! (big deal)" So the Left get suckered in again.
Four things:
- That data in your chart uses a baseline temperature mean of 1951 to 1980.
- They explicitly state"Earth was about 2.45 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.36 degrees Celsius) warmer in 2023 than in the late 19th-century (1850-1900) preindustrial average."
- We can extrapolate to determine that the 2024 average temperature anomaly from 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline is in fact, +1.47°C
- The original Paris IPCC projection for 1.5C was 2040.
It's funny. Not only did they get us to use the softer term "climate change" in place of the more accurate term "global warming," they somehow got us Americans using the otherwise unAmerican metric system for measurement. I guess 2 degrees Celsius is not as alarming as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, partly because we have no visceral idea what 2 degrees Celsius even feels like.
Also correct. Degrees C means nothing to Americans. Of course, the IPCC is an international org and most countries outside the U.S. use degrees C. But it's really dumb for the U.S. media and science communicators to use it here. This is not the time to demonstrate how superior the metric system is.
Incidentally, I always found it funny that Americans use the "British system" while the British use the metric system. I guess that's why we have now gravitated back to being ruled by a king.
"Get used to disappointment." -- Princess Bride
Look, you've all see pictures like this:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
It's clear that nothing we do in the US is going to change the emissions profile of the planet, which is now being driven by Asian emissions.
Given the ramifications of melting the polar icecaps, possibly changing important ocean currents as well as just raising sea level (if Antarctic sheets melt) I think we're nuts not to be planning some sort of geoengineering ASAP.
The real problem is that reducing emissions involves major cost and major lifestyle changes, which is not an easy thing to do politically. That Carter-sweater comment above is the perfect illustration, Carter said "just put on a sweater" and the electorate said "f-you, we'll choose that guy who says we don't have to". Fifty years down the road, Carter was a man way ahead of his time and we still don't want to hear the message.
Trump voters chose to not change, they want cheap food, cheap housing and cheap appliances. Those things come at a cost to long term resilience. Much like our corporations, we as a people are addicted to quarterly returns and living in the now. They ask why they should give anything up when China clearly isn't going to. When China has a devastating environmental disaster or pandemic, that will come home to roost.
In the end, our greed will be our undoing.
I'd say that the real problem is that reducing emissions requires major cost and lifestyle changes *in China, India and the rest of SE Asia*. They have to give up any chance of moving most of their population out of poverty any time soon.
They're not going to do that. But look at the graph I linked to -- the EU and US could drop their emissions by 50% and it would barely help.
We're way past the point where giving up plastic straws will help. We're past the point where moving the entire country to electric cars will help.
The US is the third largest band on that chart, it's not nothing. Yes, we could do *everything* right and it will not equate to China, India, and the rest of Asia. Nobody wants to curtail economic activity, it's a sure way to get fired as a politician. Even in China where they can't be fired, telling a bunch of people that the middle class is cancelled and growth is down is just not going to be popular.
Everyone wants the benefits of what they see on videos and TV from the first world nations. Big homes, big cars, plenty of food, comfortable lives. You can't stop people from wanting that lifestyle or even (it seems) curtail them from getting on dodgy boats and attempting to reach the promised land by any means possible.
Hello world! China is doing WAY more than we are to fight climate change. Of course, their emissions are twice as high as ours -- they have FOUR times as many people. And they are building renewable energy about 10 times faster than we are. That's not because they're better people -- it's because they are WAY more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Sea level rise will wipe out all of their coastal cities, which is pretty much their whole economy, and they get almost all of their fresh water from glaciers on the Tibetan plateau.
+1
We've outsourced a lot of manufacturing, and associated CO2 emissions, to China. Changes in our lifestyles will affect their output.
And per capita, we reign supreme!
We need to lower emissions and get developing countries to skip over fossil fuels when building out electricity generation.
Adding more is adding more, regardless of source. We ALL need to do our bit,and eventually those bits add up to significance.
There's a bit of bounce in the numbers. Turns out, El Nino years run hot, La Nina, cold. We're now seeing the hottest temps on record during La Nina. That's not good.
Actually, 2024 came on the tail end of a really big el Niño, so 2025 could be a big cooler. But see my earlier post about why the whole notion of a global temperature benchmark is wrongheaded. We need to keep our eyes on the CO2 concentration. When that peaks and starts to decrease, then we can breathe a sigh of relief.
We're screwed. Even when we have the legislative means, we haven't done what needs to be done. Four years of this administration will not do anything to help.
At this point, we would be lucky to slow down the rate of increase in temps significantly. Stopping the increase is not likely anytime soon, and there is always the hance of some catastrophic cliff like mass release of methane from permafrost melt-off.
I suspect that we are going to need some powerful geo-engineering and carbon sequestration and even with that, there will be lots of human suffering, especially (as is so often the case) among the poor. I tell my kids that the best way that they can personally prepare for climate change is frankly to make as much money as they can.
1) China and India each have about 4 times as many people as the US. If their emissions are now about twice as high as ours, that means the median Chinese or Indian person’s emissions are half the median American’s.
2) Much of China’s CO2 is producing stuff for us. If I buy a Chinese-built dryer - perhaps from a US company that moved or outsourced its production to China - whose emissions should that count against?
3) CO2 stays In the atmosphere for about 200 years, and is rapidly mixed worldwide. The greenhouse effect now of a molecule of CO2 is the same if that molecule was produced by a cow in 1830, or by my car last month.
So what matters is not who’s emitting now, but the cumulative emissions of a country or process over the past 200 years. We’re way ahead! The US+EU have put out about 2/3 of the big pile of CO2, China about 1/6.
The bottom line is that unless we demonstrate meaningful action, no foreign leader can possibly agree to measures that keep their people from enjoying our level of mobility, shopping or convenience (like AC). They’d be out of office in a flash.
It isn't worth arguing over which one did what and how much. It's a global problem so it's everybody's problem.
But that doesn't matter anyway since we can't even agree that data is right. In principle, it won't matter much to me. I'm old. Even so, I guess I'm in the minority and most people don't much care about what happens after they're gone, not even if it happens to their children.
I think civilization is a good project and it ought to continue.
It isn't worth arguing over which one did what and how much. It's a global problem so it's everybody's problem.
Yes. It’s not about who did it but about how to get the world to agree to do anything about it. If we - who very clearly caused most of the problem - aren’t taking any serious action, how can we expect any other country to ask their citizens to make any sacrifice? Maybe they should, but they won’t.
The recent two years of off the charts ocean temps have been definitively linked to the reduced sulfur emissions of Atlantic shipping from the 2014 IMO agreement. Hansen warned of this in his 2016 and 2023 papers, where he argued that standard IPCC estimates far underestimate actual climate sensitivity because of exactly this phenomenon. He also predicted the slowdown and eventual stoppage of the AMOC, which was initially dismissed but is now accepted as in process and effectively certain given rapidly increasing Greenland ice melt, perhaps within very short time frames. Hansen's warnings of climate sensitivity have been dismissed before. He hasn't been wrong yet.
The warming we're experiencing now is the effect of CO2 levels of 30 years ago; without drawdown and sequestration temps would continue to rise for decades even if all emissions ceased today. Global CO2 emissions are increasing at an increasingly accelerated rate. Methane emissions have been accelerating dramatically since 2015, in part due to large increases from sub-Sahel African wetlands, and methane emissions from energy production continue at near record highs. The global tundra is melting at rates far exceeding predictions; this massive carbon sink contains more carbon than all human emissions combined since the advent of industrialization. Tropical forests are decimated and disappearing, in Brazil under Luna at reduced rates, but the remaining Amazon rainforest is showing reduced resiliency across vast areas, is now a net carbon emitter, is no longer creating its own precipitation climate, and is experiencing large scale and endemic drought where large tributary rivers have become mudflats. The world is not going to stop using carbon based fuels to industrialize and reach for first world living standards. The US is not going to reduce its consumption levels in any meaningful way; we just elected our avatar and permissor for social gluttony. Every sane analyst and observer warns we are at an inflection point in global warming, both in the physics and our response to it, predictably at the same time as reactionary forces are expanding worldwide. So precisely when we need globally coordinated changes in lifestyle and consumption patterns, reduced population growth, increased resource sharing, and changed economic models, right on cue the haves and have mores and their ground troops show the true face of privilege, the ineluctable, implacable narcissism at the core of "self interest." Even more predictably, the US chooses exactly this point in history to turn decisively towards our particular - peculiar, even - iteration of corporate/capitalist dictatorship, elevating to the White House throne the embodiment of what this country truly is, deep down, underneath all the wishing and hoping and positive thinking, what this country actually is when you tear away the curtain and look, really look, at the golem homunculus of privilege and narcissistic self esteem, and what humans will do to not just protect but aggrandize this without restraint.
That’s what global warning’s all about, Charlie Brown.