Global warming has accelerated significantly (opens in new tab)

Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:

> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.

They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.

I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.

[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:

> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.

I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

I'm literally in the plane flying back from Shanghai right now, where cars have blue plates for petrol cars and green plates for electric ones.

Easily 70% of the cars on the road are electric, and basically all of the scooters used for deliveries.

The roads are so quiet it's sometimes dangerous because you don't hear the scooters come behind you.

They'll undoubtedly be the world leaders in clean energy.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

Meanwhile the Paris Accord seems to bludgeon Europe and America (who are reducing their CO2 emissions significantly), with the net effect of accelerating the deindustrialisation of the West (thus helping industry grow in China).

The Accord should focus on moving industry away from China to countries where electricity predominantly comes from renewables.

That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.

We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.

I think the flaw in this thinking is thinking that burning things is the cheapest way to get energy.

Oil processing and extraction is a complex industry which requires a huge continued investment. Coal requires massive mining operations. Natural gas is probably the least intensive of the burny things, and it still requires a pretty advanced pipeline to be competitive.

Renewables are relatively cheap one time purchases. Save energy storage, the economy that is most competitive at this point is one powered by renewables.

That transition is already happening in the US without a massive government regulation/mandate. In china, it's happening a whole lot faster because the government is pushing it. And the chinese economy is at no risk of being outbid by smaller economies burning fuel.

The main reason burning remains a major source of fuel is that for most nations, the infrastructure to consume it has already been built. It's not because it's cheap.

They need to apply overall, on all goods and services.

And emission limits need to be progressive over time, with a limit for each year, not just "x% at year 2030".

Who's getting fined, here? Me, because mining the stuff is inherently dirty (without, probably, significant research and capital investment)? You, because you need the stuff to build other stuff? Joe and Jane because they're the ones ultimately driving the production of the stuff? If you fine me into not producing the raw materials, what, ultimately happens to your economy and Joe and Jane's? If I don't sign up, where are you going to get the raw materials, if I'm tariffed into oblivion?

Sorry, I'm not trying to like, doom this away - but there are so many interconnected pieces, that I don't think it's a problem that can even start to be solved from an internet comment. At some point, voters in democratic societies need to decide that they care as much about the world their children will inherit as they do a ten cent difference in gas prices ten minutes from now. It's unclear that they ever will on a long term, consistent basis.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.15000001

It's essentially a carbon tax on local production and a corresponding carbon tariff on imports. Countries that already have a carbon tax or equivalent don't get tariffed. IOW, they're part of the club.

Usually a carbon rebate is also included in the plan, although that's not strictly necessary.

Germany was spear-heading an effort to create a carbon club, but it fell apart, unfortunately. At the time a club that didn't include the US seemed infeasible.

In 2026 a club that doesn't include Trump's America is a good thing, not a bad thing IMO.

"The economy is a wholly owner subsidiary of the environment"

Many people use the 'but the economy' argument (including my mother in law, maddeningly) without seeming to have any remote clue as to the truth of the quote above.

Or quickly develop to the point where solar, wind, and hydro is cheaper than getting dead fossils out of the ground and processing them.

I am not familiar enough with the economics of this to know whether we are close to that point, but I can imagine once we cross it, combustible fuel burners will be at a disadvantage if they haven't invested in infrastructure needed for renewables.

In my opinion one of the reasons why European economies have been struggling for a long time is because energy has been much more expensive than elsewhere. Part of it is the excise tax on gasoline because it drives up the price of everything.

Even to this day EU countries where people earn less than a third of what Americans earn still pay more for gasoline.

The way our economic systems are set up is inherently anti-human and only benefits a tiny fraction of the population anyways.

It's time for a fundamental rethink.

From a political perspective, I think the problems of global warming and wealth disparity go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to solve one without solving the other. To the extent that the ultra-wealthy own the politicians, or actually become politicians themselves, there is little hope for environmental regulation.

Consumers don't need or necessarily even want unlimited economic growth. That only "helps" consumers if they're relying essentially on trickle-down economics, where we have to allow the ultra-wealthy everything they want in the hope that they'll spare us some change. A more equitable distribution of the current wealth would reduce the pressure to produce ever more, more, more.

Consumers usually want products that they own, not rent, products that last for a long time and don't need to be constantly updated or upgraded. Coincidentally, this is also better for the environment. Producers often want the opposite of that, in order to maximize profit. So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers. This is where consolidation and monopolization become a major factor.

A lot of the "convenience economy," dominated by temporary, disposable goods, is predicted on consumers having no free time, because they're constantly working. Despite vast improvements in worker "efficiency," we haven't seen comcomitant reductions in the number of hours worked. The future of leisure facilitated by technological advances, which everyone was imagining 50-60 years ago, never became a reality. The technology did advance, but the leisure did not. The other day (or night) I noticed Amazon delivery drivers arriving for neighbors after 9pm; this is a dystopia.

You can’t change the world with plans that last no longer than a presidential term.

I have this gut feeling the world had finally got to the point it decided to fix this pesky warming issue among other things, with a nice and cozy nuclear winter.

(/s, obviously)

That blank will not be filled in with today's technologies, but with technologies we cannot conceive of today and with an energy abundance that we can hardly imagine.

Even in this apparently dire predicament, optimism is warranted.

Your personal website has an expired certificate.

Seems like it expired end of Feb.

Of course, people should do everything they can to reduce or offset their own emissions. But the solution is going to have to be societal, keeping up with energy demand by adding more nuclear, solar, and wind to the grid.

The USA has uniquely high emissions (matched only by a couple oil states). This is not solely explained with affluency.

In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.

Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.

Daily commute represents 20% of CO2 emissions, it's an insanely high number, and it has an incredibly easy, already tested thanks to COVID, solution.

People will say "but what about the shops that will close". They won't, they will relocate in residential neighborhoods where people now live AND work.

All the potential issues people might raise actually disappear as WFH becomes the new normal and not a potentially temporary state like it was during COVID.

Even if only 50% of jobs can be done from home, that's an instant 10% reduction JUST from commute. But in reality it'll lead to a much larger decrease, with less spending on fast-fashion, more proximity businesses, etc.

I can't afford it. For context, I paid £500 for my current vehicle back in 2020. My bills have only gone up since, but my salary has not.

> Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)

I can't afford that either. When I got my home assessed, switching to heat pumps requires replacing all the radiators in my house and extra insulation, etc. My gas boiler does have a built-in electric induction system, but it's only used when the tank is cold.

> If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar

I can afford the solar panels, but I can't afford the battery storage, nor the installation, and my area does not allow for an inverter connected to the main grid.

Most people can't afford one

> -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)

Electricity is considerably more expensive, people that leave paycheck to paycheck would not be able to afford it

Here are somethings YOU can do personally to help:

- Never fly in an airplane again

- Never use ANY vehicle again, walk everywhere(yes EVs also pollute)

- In the winter, don't turn on the heat.

- Eat only vegetables and things you don't need to cook

- etc

If you are not doing ALL OF THESE you have no right on telling other people how they produce their CO2.

They're literally mentioned by the first IPCC report already.

my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

I hope writing this out jinxes it.

And grow new trees in their place of course.

I think it's important to mention the effects we're seeing today are caused by the emissions from decades ago.

Second, not sure if the paper in the OP touches this but we've reduced aerosols in the atmosphere. These previously were masking the effects of climate change by cooling the temperature.

In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.

Where is this new figure coming from? It seems about 60X what's being published elsewhere.

Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.

If you have detailed calculations, please feel free to cite them. But my back-of-the-envelope reasoning: NOAA gives an average sea depth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html) of 3,682 meters. You propose that this could increase by nearly 2%. But the density of water only exceeds that of ice by about 9% (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice); the thickness of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet is only about half that average sea depth; and it covers only about 4% of the water-covered area of the planet (14 million km^2 vs. 361 million km^2, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) which is not even all oceanic.

Great! That means we dont need to reduce emissions, cuz the magic bullet will just take care of everything. No need to change anything.

Why is it always never 'burn less fossil fuels'.

Anything but the oil company bottom line huh?

We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.

- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations

- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars.

Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy.

Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.

65M seems a lot bigger than the 3.6mm/year rise we are seeing today (with +1.5C in warming already happening). Where did you read that we will get 65M of sea level rise with 1.5-2.5C more warming?

We're going to have to resort to geoengineering alright, but it's gonna likely be stratospheric sulfate injection given how cheaply that can be done. Is it ideal? Nope. Better than global warming itself? Time will tell.

Now on all continents and islands most of the big animals and plants are humans, domestic animals and cultivated plants. The wild animals and plants, even if they are much more varied, with many thousands times more species than the domestic ones, are much smaller in quantities, with only a few kinds that are non-negligible, e.g. ants, termites, rodents.

So if we will return in a short time to the Paleogene climate, the main question is how this will affect the few dominant animal species, like chicken, humans, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs and the main cultivated plants, all of which are not adapted to a Paleogene climate and which will not be able to adapt in such a short time.

It is likely that places like Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Antarctica might become nicer places where to live and practice agriculture, but the few people who live now there would not welcome invaders coming from places that are no longer habitable.

I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.

The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.

Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.

The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.

we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.

Warming is here and will continue.

Our decisions from here on could vary the outcomes between massive disruption and movement of people to a wholly uninhabitable planet.

They do not have to repeat our mistakes. We can help them build out renewable energy instead.

We don't want your disgusting lifestyle. We want you to stop being so bloody infantile and greedy.

Apologies for the strong words but the current state of things has me pissed off.

> And I'll never ever take a single lesson about pollution from anyone who had two kids or more.

Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.

There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.

And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.

Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.

1. What causes global warming

2. Who produces most of these chemicals

3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...

For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.

Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.

Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.

Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.

This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.

- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this

- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes

- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots

- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one

I expect "change" when people form unions or union like organisations and withhold or redistribute their labour, both waged and in more subtle forms, such as attention, and unwaged but socially important labour (e.g. women refusing to be servile homemakers and instead get guns and start soup kitchens).

What rich countries do is they just export their factories to other countries and say: look we do not pollute.

It's just not enough and it's very hard to convince the public to accelerate when the US not only gave up but it actively reversing to fossil fuels.

There are two clear parallel points to this:

   1. Over the time frames we're discussing (even the next 50 years) how many "poor" countries will there be left? We're seeing substantial progress on economic, educational, and other fronts over the past 50 years.
   2. Will there ever be a time when the change occurring is direct and over a short enough time frame to matter to "rich" countries? Yes, it will suck if most of Florida is underwater, but this process has already started, and has been going on for 20, 30, 50 years? And most people care very little. If it takes a century for the state to completely submerge, that apathy will continue.

If some extreme weather event hits you you may lose your only house, your savings, your health, maybe a good percent of the population of rich countries are vulnerable ot that. In the other hand if someone rich and powerful in those or even somewhat poorer countries, they may buy another house, have more already, lose some money and goods but that's it.

Until those extreme weather events, floods and so on affect enough of the people those people have around, to eventually affect their business and them. But by then it will be far too late.

I'd argue that many lower and middle class folks already feel the effects of GW, even if they may not be able to articulate it. The flip side is that developed rich countries will hurt because of this but the people in power won't care because it probably only (visibly) affects the lower class, and they can always take their jets and rockets to countries (and eventually planets!) that haven't been fucked.

And they'll spin it to blame it on immigrants somehow.

Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.

Now every summer day is 30c+.

Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!

You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.

The power company is now preemptively shutting off our power. Which is really fun in the winter.

I’m honestly not sure about the future of my hometown Boulder. The odds of it fully burning to the ground seem to increase significantly every year.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/26/key-findi...

On the plus side, I think we'll solve global warming, with technology, in a few generations.

Well Spain, 12th largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest in Europe, isn't exactly poor and yet seems to hurt quite a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Spain#Impact... ... but I bet the wealthiest Spaniards have air conditioning, heating, bottled water delivered at home by staff, etc to isolate themselves. That does include politicians.

So... IMHO until the richest of the rich countries hurt, then nothing will change. They (we?) are very sheltered precisely by leveraging their wealth to abstract away from the lowly difficulties of life, like the weather.

TL;DR : yes, but the more insulated feel it less and consequently, rationally, think they have more time thus postponing the process.

The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.

Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.

It's also why I've sort of resigned myself to a cynical optimism that the worst won't come to pass. The rich are not going to tolerate losing money. They will force through geoengineering stopgap measures that will save us from catastrophic warming, at the cost of unknown consequences.

This is why I vehemently disagree with those who say we shouldn't be conducting research on geoengineering. It will be done. The only question is, will we have done enough research to understand the potential consequences, or not?

Things have already changed!

They already are. China does whatever it wants en mass meanwhile.

More specifically, nothing will change until the politicians and billionaires personally get hurt.

The negative effects of climate change need to come for them personally for them to care.

These are all related. All of them are connected to humans pushing the planetary resource limits from various directions. We're attacking Iran now in part because climate change has dramatically increased the water stress conditions making the population more susceptible to political collapse. It's also happening because it puts energy stress on our geopolitical adversaries (same with Venezuela). Trump emerged in the first place because declining American prosperity (despite GPD numbers) drove a large portion of the population to nihilism.

Fixed

Capitalism will actually save the day, because a bunch of capitalists advanced renewable technology to the point where it was cheap.

The biggest impediment to change right now is actually political interference in deployment of cheaper renewables. You see this all across the US both in intentional and unintentional ways. Trump explicitly cancels permits for wind, tries to ban solar on federal lands, and forces coal plants to keep running even when they are super expensive and raise the cost electricity.

Unintentional political impediments are also endemic in the US; permitting and interconnection of residential solar makes it 5x-6x more expensive than places like Australia, even in places like California that should be accelerating residential solar and storage.

There's a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to climate change, in addition a lot to be scared about.

Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?

The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.

If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.

Not during our civilization's existence.

We tried top down. Didn't work.

We tried bottom up. Didn't work.

There's more than one aspect to the environment. Plastic pollution and global warming are two separate concerns with separate ways of dealing with them.

So yea, no way is oil stopping or even dipping slightly any time soon.

Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?

And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.

Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.

https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...

The intention of the United States and the world is divided.

We love our money too much to care about the Next generation, In my view.

From their About: “Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.

Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.

AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.

Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.

/s

It amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?

"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0]

[0] https://imgur.com/EELDM6m

Do you know how can fertilizer be produced without animals ? Oil

Since manuscripts are written for those working in the field, and need to be, it's one of the big challenges of science communication. In the past these articles would be in a library and mailed out to the subscribing specialists, which minimized the confusion. In the age of the internet, even our dogs can read highly specialized scientific pre-prints that haven't even been peer reviewed yet.

"This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."

The actual abstract reads: "Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted data show that after 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945."

And if the voters were just a bit smarter and not bought into the “China bad” narrative, we might even get proper, nice, affordable EVs in the US.

People really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:

- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)

- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)

- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.

- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.