Pre-industrial levels when we were still coming out of significant cooling period. In every other period of human history, increased average temperatures have coincided with golden ages. Depending on where you peg your baseline for what "normal" temperatures are, the projections can look more or less scary.
I'm suspicious of anyone attempting to boil down the operations of such a dynamic, chaotic system as climate into simple cause and effect. There's so damn many things that feed back on each other, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we think we understand. Much more research needs to be done.
I'm absolutely certain with governments moving this slow right now, making small goals for 2050, getting courted by lobbies to not push through massive restrictions, probably most of these very dark predictions will come true. I, as a concerned citizen can do nothing against the corporations ruling our society, overruling politicians or outright controlling them directly. We are probably beyond any point of return. The people that yearn for the next payday will get their money and probably will be able to save themselves in an underground bunker or a suite in the mountains, while the rest of the poor and middle class burn in the ashes they leave behind.
People blaming governments and corporations are merely using faceless scapegoats because the truth is too terrible to behold.
Normal every day people don't really believe in climate change, don't really want to do anything and in fact don't have the dimmest clue as to what needs to be done, nor how to do that.
I think dealing with the above fact is too much for people, so instead we simplify using familiar models and tropes.
It's about economics. Climate change keeps being presented as something we need to make huge sacrifices to do something about, and this does not work. The unwillingness to make such sacrifices, we may find reprehensible when it comes from the rich who could easily afford it, and more sympathetic when it comes from people who are barely keeping their heads above water as it stands, and reasonably suspect they would end up in a pauper's grave and never see the future they were supposed to be defending, but whether we agree with it or not, that is people's revealed preference.
So the narrative needs to stop being about sacrifice, and start being about jobs. The immense task of converting the world to renewable energy, has the potential to create millions upon millions of badly-needed jobs. It needs to start being sold that way.
You as a concerned citizen can do plenty on your own. Most people could cut down their emissions and other environmental impacts by 50% easily if they really cared.
The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.
> I, as a concerned citizen can do nothing against the corporations ruling our society
Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace.
Of course more peaceful means are preferable but the option needs to be kept on the table to remember why we have and want democratic solutions in the first place.
We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem.
What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar energy is starting to become incredibly efficient but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves.
What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
What lies do you think we're being told exactly? The talks of solutions have been going on for decades it's just very hard to get different governments to agree to anything even if it's non binding. Have a look at the Paris agreement and the history of failed agreements that preceded it for more information.
I really wish the more popular phrase were "global climate change" rather than "global warming." The delta in the mean might not appear to be huge (a few degrees C over a span of a century or two, perhaps), but the key concept is the variance or volatility of climate patterns.
As man-made climate change progresses, the average recorded temperature will likely continue to climb, sure--but the change in variance is far more significant in terms of the extreme events that will occur with increasing regularity.
I'm worried that this could be just 'the tip of the iceberg' [1]. I have a suspicion that even J. Hansen is still underestimating the issue. Just looking at [2] the variability of current estimates of stored methane is enormous - going from 10E2 to 5x10E4 Gigatonnes! Methane does greenhouse forcing 20-25x as strong as CO2 over 100 years, or as much as ~160x if you only count 10 years. Depending on how fast methane gets released this really matters - if the released methane triggers more methane to come out through warming we may be in big trouble, even without burning all coal, oil and gas reserves currently known.
Further reading concerning methane: [3], [4].
Reason why dismissing this using PETM boundary is probably invalid: There was with high certainty less methane around since PETM didn't immediately follow a cold high-storage period, solar energy was also weaker, and most importantly, PETM was caused by methane alone, not a combination of fossil fuel burning in addition to methane [5].
Just to clarify: If we get the effects of PETM alone, this means around +8C global average on top of what we're doing. But from what I'm reading, PETM effects are not the whole story as pointed out above. Not that it really matters, +10-12C global average is almost certainly a global killer alone (except bacteria), it's just that I don't think it would stabilise there, it would go on to pressure cook earth's surface until absolutely nothing is left.
This stuff has me worried by far the most, especially for my now 2yo son.
This is indeed worrisome, but the evidence I've heard suggests that it won't be as bad as +12C. Also the Earth was at +14C with respect to today at it's hottest point during the PETM, which was very bad for the earth, but life survived.
The earth will one day reach a true runaway greenhouse when the sun brightens by 10% in about 1.1 billion years. But according to J. Hansen in 2013 a complete greenhouse runaway can't happen unless the high temperatures are maintained for several million years, long enough for all the oceans to evaporate, and our own forcing will only(!) last a few tens of thousands. So my understanding is that we won't cause all life to go extinct, if that makes you feel any better.
> I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
That's massively misleading.
The scientists that predicted that predicted it because they forecast that the cooling effect from particulate pollution such as smog would be bigger than the warming affect from greenhouse gases.
Not long after, we actually made fairly strong clean air laws and greatly cut back the particulate emissions, thus changing the assumptions that the cooling predictions were based on. The scientists that had predicted cooling, which had only been a small minority, then agreed with the rest that we'd have warming (assuming we didn't also get the greenhouse gases dealt with).
Back in the 70s there was indeed a concern (no stronger than that) that we might have been heading for a new ice age over the next few centuries. That concern was based on the fact that we are in an interglacial period and ought to start thinking about how and when it might end, and what we might do about it. Ice ages and interglacials are caused by variations in the Earth's orbit and tilt, and calculations suggested that the current interglacial is coming to an end.
However it then turned out that global warming due to CO2 was happing way faster and way more than any potential cooling. The scientists weren't wrong: the cooling effect is still there. Its just completely swamped by all the things we are doing to the atmosphere.
The "global cooling" thing is just throwing sand in our eyes- and you know it.
Everything you've heard about global warming has been true the whole time, and you haven't been listening. I keep trying to wrap my head around the worldview of someone whose commitment to ideology is so powerful that they are willing to condemn their grandchildren to such suffering. It has to be some kind of religious thing.
A few scientists thought global cooling could be an issue. It was an immature theory and was ultimately rejected when more work was done.
The science underpining the theory of global warming on the other hand is far, far more robust. I don't feel the need to recount how robust it is but I'll just note that it has withstood "red teams" funded by the Koch brothers, as well as Exxon and the other major oil companies who now all accept the science behind global warming.
It is highly disingenuous to equate it with global cooling.
I don't know, I've seen what temperatures have been in the past decade in Europe and I can tell that it doesn't get any hotter, in fact, it could be getting colder. Can anyone show some statistics supporting the global warming?
Edit:
I know how to google myself but I am asking people to get a little more involved and not lay out facts out of memory. I thought I could make a good discussion on the topic but kept getting hostility for some reason.
> According to different observational records of global average annual near-surface (land and ocean) temperature, the last decade (2008–2017) was 0.89 °C to 0.93 °C warmer than the pre-industrial average, which makes it the warmest decade on record. Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2000. The year 2017 was one of the world’s three warmest years on record together with the years 2016 and 2015.
> The average annual temperature for the European land area for the last decade (2008–2017) was between 1.6 °C and 1.7 °C above the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. In Europe, 2017 was colder than the previous 3 years.
[+] [-] rntz|7 years ago|reply
A change of 4-5°C is a change of 7-9 degrees Fahrenheit, not 39-41.
[+] [-] 0xfaded|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] megaman22|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
I'm suspicious of anyone attempting to boil down the operations of such a dynamic, chaotic system as climate into simple cause and effect. There's so damn many things that feed back on each other, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we think we understand. Much more research needs to be done.
[+] [-] akuji1993|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martythemaniak|7 years ago|reply
Normal every day people don't really believe in climate change, don't really want to do anything and in fact don't have the dimmest clue as to what needs to be done, nor how to do that.
I think dealing with the above fact is too much for people, so instead we simplify using familiar models and tropes.
[+] [-] rwallace|7 years ago|reply
So the narrative needs to stop being about sacrifice, and start being about jobs. The immense task of converting the world to renewable energy, has the potential to create millions upon millions of badly-needed jobs. It needs to start being sold that way.
[+] [-] avar|7 years ago|reply
The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.
[+] [-] Shoh3pif|7 years ago|reply
Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace.
Of course more peaceful means are preferable but the option needs to be kept on the table to remember why we have and want democratic solutions in the first place.
[+] [-] blondie9x|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spuz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jihadjihad|7 years ago|reply
As man-made climate change progresses, the average recorded temperature will likely continue to climb, sure--but the change in variance is far more significant in terms of the extreme events that will occur with increasing regularity.
[+] [-] gonzo41|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_mueller|7 years ago|reply
Further reading concerning methane: [3], [4].
Reason why dismissing this using PETM boundary is probably invalid: There was with high certainty less methane around since PETM didn't immediately follow a cold high-storage period, solar energy was also weaker, and most importantly, PETM was caused by methane alone, not a combination of fossil fuel burning in addition to methane [5].
Just to clarify: If we get the effects of PETM alone, this means around +8C global average on top of what we're doing. But from what I'm reading, PETM effects are not the whole story as pointed out above. Not that it really matters, +10-12C global average is almost certainly a global killer alone (except bacteria), it's just that I don't think it would stabilise there, it would go on to pressure cook earth's surface until absolutely nothing is left.
This stuff has me worried by far the most, especially for my now 2yo son.
[1] https://www.kairoscanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/PBP2...
[2] http://oceanrep.geomar.de/30683/1/GasHydrates_Vol1_screen.pd...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...
[4] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1246
[5] http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exagger...
[+] [-] fallingfrog|7 years ago|reply
The earth will one day reach a true runaway greenhouse when the sun brightens by 10% in about 1.1 billion years. But according to J. Hansen in 2013 a complete greenhouse runaway can't happen unless the high temperatures are maintained for several million years, long enough for all the oceans to evaporate, and our own forcing will only(!) last a few tens of thousands. So my understanding is that we won't cause all life to go extinct, if that makes you feel any better.
[+] [-] singularity2001|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thegrasshopper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rement|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chatnati|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
[+] [-] tzs|7 years ago|reply
That's massively misleading.
The scientists that predicted that predicted it because they forecast that the cooling effect from particulate pollution such as smog would be bigger than the warming affect from greenhouse gases.
Not long after, we actually made fairly strong clean air laws and greatly cut back the particulate emissions, thus changing the assumptions that the cooling predictions were based on. The scientists that had predicted cooling, which had only been a small minority, then agreed with the rest that we'd have warming (assuming we didn't also get the greenhouse gases dealt with).
[+] [-] PaulAJ|7 years ago|reply
However it then turned out that global warming due to CO2 was happing way faster and way more than any potential cooling. The scientists weren't wrong: the cooling effect is still there. Its just completely swamped by all the things we are doing to the atmosphere.
[+] [-] fallingfrog|7 years ago|reply
Everything you've heard about global warming has been true the whole time, and you haven't been listening. I keep trying to wrap my head around the worldview of someone whose commitment to ideology is so powerful that they are willing to condemn their grandchildren to such suffering. It has to be some kind of religious thing.
[+] [-] thinkcontext|7 years ago|reply
The science underpining the theory of global warming on the other hand is far, far more robust. I don't feel the need to recount how robust it is but I'll just note that it has withstood "red teams" funded by the Koch brothers, as well as Exxon and the other major oil companies who now all accept the science behind global warming.
It is highly disingenuous to equate it with global cooling.
[+] [-] i6mi6|7 years ago|reply
Edit: I know how to google myself but I am asking people to get a little more involved and not lay out facts out of memory. I thought I could make a good discussion on the topic but kept getting hostility for some reason.
[+] [-] mapleoin|7 years ago|reply
> According to different observational records of global average annual near-surface (land and ocean) temperature, the last decade (2008–2017) was 0.89 °C to 0.93 °C warmer than the pre-industrial average, which makes it the warmest decade on record. Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2000. The year 2017 was one of the world’s three warmest years on record together with the years 2016 and 2015.
> The average annual temperature for the European land area for the last decade (2008–2017) was between 1.6 °C and 1.7 °C above the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. In Europe, 2017 was colder than the previous 3 years.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]