Of course, it's easier for this energy to dissipate as heat and kill us all.

Ya think ? :)

(no insult intended)

Let's not white-wash the problem.

Now turn up the temperature in your house until it starts moving. You can put it in the oven and crank up the heat if you want

> Note: Before anyone complains, I’ve deliberately conflated energy and power above, because the difference doesn’t really matter for my main point. Power is work per unit of time, and is measured in watts; Energy is better expressed in joules, calories, or kilowatt hours (kWh). To be technically correct, I should say that the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour. The ratio is still approximately 18.

Out of interest, you can also convert it to calories. 1kWh is about 0.8 million calories. So, we’re force-feeding the earth about 2 x 1017 (200,000,000,000,000,000) calories every hour. Yikes.

https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-ener...

Children sometimes confuse the units of speed and distance, but not when they get older.

Does this imply in preindustrial times the net energy was 0, or is this total energy and there’s some number not mentioned of loss?

The rate is important, but so is the final result. A system whose new equilibrium is +10C is as useless to humanity and life and earth whether we reach it in 25 years or 200.

I agree with you that ∆T is more useful for thinking about actual effects (e.g as you noted glacial melt), but my interest in thinking about it in energy terms is (a) I think it highlights the cause more strongly (YMMV) (b) it better accomodates the possibility of the extra energy in the system having effects not so obviously correlated with ∆T

> Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year.

[0]: https://www.overshootday.org/

Water vapor amplifies the effect of other greenhouse gases.

https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relati...

Moreover, we can tackle multiple problems concurrently, no need to make it appear we can only ever do one thing. And as it so happens, climate change tends to correlate extremely well with war and famine. It certainly appears a climate solution is going to help many other big problems along as well.

My understanding is that clouds are inside that part of the atmosphere in which radiative forcing has decreased. This means that while they may reflect radiation so that it does not reach the ground, they do not stop (all) the energy from being trapped within the atmosphere.

> war, famine, poverty

All actual problems that will result from significant climate change, not distinct from climate change (even though they may exist for other reasons too).

Which might sound good for crops but of itself can destabilise ecosystems, African savannahs are already becoming scrubbier with brush and shrubs due to more CO2 enrichment for at least ~1 million and possibly several million years. That will definitely have implications for populations of animals adapted for grassland

Can YOU Fix Climate Change? https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc

and

We WILL Fix Climate Change! https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw

Make sure that you watch the second one if you watch the first one.

It will feel like nothing, because everyone will have conveniently forgotten about these sorts of reports and predictions when the world stubbornly refuses to end. Just like everyone conveniently forgot that in the 50s and 60s scientists were writing to the US President to tell him that the consensus of scientists was that the world was entering a new ice age, and that he should prepare agriculture and industry for the transition.

You wait and see.

Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem in politics.

But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties, incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize the power of other parties, not skills conducive to governing.

And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the political field in their favor, in order to get massive bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might actually have.

It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but it's near impossible to improve the system's design because it will fight that at every step.

It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it came to be.

Even if every single person in the system actually wants to do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.

Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social unrest due to mass migration.

Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large decline in standard of living. And no, it won’t be the “people in capitals” suffering here.

Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will likely be undertaken when the situation is desperate enough.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

1.5C is the (likely to be overshooted) goal. The IPCC report assesses that 2011-2020 is already 1.1C warmer than 1850-1900 (page 7), that the world has been warming by ~0.2C/decade (saw it somewhere), and that current policies (if implemented) will lead to a warming of +3.2C by 2100 (page 23). Page 16 shows various ways in which a +3.2C world will be hostile to humans. For instance most of south and south-east asia, and some of the most populated areas in Western Africa will experience temperatures and humidity levels that are dangerous for human survival >200 days a year. This is now all determined with rather high confidence.

This take is seriously dangerous.

"1.5C is not so bad, chill people"

When the fact is - we don't know the impact - if we go beyond 1.5.

What we do know (because it's already very much measurable) is that much of the worlds glaciers will melt, causing drought.

What we do know is that eventually the sea levels will rise and drown many extremely valuable coastal areas.

Imagine you live in a valley where elderly people die of heat stroke every summer: 100 three years ago, 500 the summer after, 2,000 last summer. Your parents are 70 and 71 and barely made it. You immigrate, with your children, right? To where? The big city with worse heat management?

Repeat with peasants who can’t grow crops without expensive feedstock, or pig farmers whose water supply is dry. Where will they go?

People will want to flock to places that are currently openly considering tall walls and machine guns to prevent immigration — and that’s when thousands are coming at a time.

You think that having several millions every year will not make that situation a lot more tense?

We're going to blow right past 1.5C, 2C, 2.5C...

I'd rather we not find out.

Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

Takes 3 hours of your time to find out.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

> Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques, which regional environmental conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate change effects?

Seems so.

> It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a bit more complicated to model a system where human technology and decision-making is extremely significant.

"Extremely" is a big word. Agricultural yields depend on the weather. A population of 9-10 billion will not be sustained by vertical farms maintained in a synthetic climate.

"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.

Can you predict the average height of all the residents of your city? A demographer can given an answer that is a lot more accurate.

And predictions about life expectancy become easier in aggregate, too.

Source: am data scientist.

For anyone reading this poem who has a strong negative reaction:

Consider it a sign that perhaps there's something more you could be doing in your own life. Take a job in climate (https://workonclimate.org/https://climatebase.org/). Start a startup working on climate solutions.

"Climate deniers" aren't really a problem.

Complacency is bullshit though.

Consider that future generations may look back and judge your excuse of "but alfor on HN wrote a poem that made fun of a climate person" quite harshly.

It's go time :)

If you look at sites like Our World in Data then nearly all metrics of human progress have dramatically improved over the past century, while temperatures increased 1°C.

So it isn't clear that another degree increase will lead to catastrophe. The numbers are round and arbitrary. Our increased wealth and technology has improved lives far, far more than the increased temperature has diminished them, and I don't see why that trend won't continue.

That is simply a hard sell, always has been, and most of us are to blame for the consequences...

Okay then - so how do we get those people to materialize?

Absent "appeals to collective action" which you've already determined is never going to work.

“the environment around us has been degrading faster than scientist have been claiming for years.”

But not faster than science reporting has been claiming, since they have pretty reliably been claiming apocalypse in 5-10 years for 60 years now.

Just like collective farms made Russia and China agricultural power houses.

Carbon capture is completely unplausible. Annual US CO2/capita is ~15tons, we simply can't realistically plant enough trees.

Currently there is no way to do anything that would have sufficient effect to compensate current pollution-- we HAVE to reduce it at the source.

But I completely agree that it is mostly just the will that is lacking.

In that case, I think still harping on the 1.5 degree number is a communications mistake. It is obviously impossible at this point (see the edit in my original comment), and so I think focusing it risks encouraging a "well, this is obviously too late, might as well enjoy our bread and circuses while they last" attitude. I think it would be much better if scientists said "Remember when we warned you about that 1.5 degree limit? Well, y'all f'd that up, so now a lot of these dire predictions are going to come true. Oh, and here is a whole host of even more dire predictions that will occur for every .1 degree you miss the limit, so you better try to limit carbon emissions as much as you can to prevent things from becoming more screwed than they are already guaranteed to be."

I just think that any messaging that talks about things eventually being "too late" is bad from a public motivation standpoint.

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.

I tend to operate with two mental modals because I believe a lot of these divides can be explained by differing educational levels and intellectual abilities.

I think you need to put yourself in the headspace of a 90 IQ dude who has been told his entire adult life that the world is going to end because of climate change. To him the fact that there was snow the other day and the world hasn't yet come to an end is actually a convincing argument that the Earth isn't getting so hot that he needs to be concerned.

Similarly, while this hypothetical person might not be intelligent enough to understand that scientific models are always going to have some level of inaccuracy and there is always some amount of noise in the data, they are intelligent enough to recognise that in the past false claims have been made – and often these claims have been made in a condescending manner.

We've seen similar divides and misunderstandings with Trump, Brexit and the pandemic. We need to find better ways to communicate across social divides – that's what I was appealing to. We have to do a better job at presenting data in a way that's accessible to every while also not being so condescending and overly opinionated that it's off putting to those who remain unconvinced.

Or put another way, a climate denialist isn't going to be convinced by you telling them they're an idiot for not understanding how to analyse the data correctly (even if you're correct). You instead have to recognise the merits of their perspective and try to explain the data in a way that will allow them (hopefully) to come to the correct conclusions.

But like I say, I don't know if this is even possible with climate change. A lot of people I'm referring to here think with their eyes and if they can't see the truth in their own life experiences, and with their own eyes, then they're sceptical of it. Climate change for lots of reasons is unfortunately one of those things that's really difficult to explain to someone who sees snow as evidence of that the Earth isn't getting hotter, but these are the people we ultimately need to convince.

> Do you want to bet your life and the lives of the ones you and we love?

No. That's why I'm saying please stop with the alarmism. It doesn't convince anyone and just causes unhelpful ideological divides.

So 1.5 degrees should be an important target if good models are important. But, it turns out, certainty isn’t what we’re after.

    Temperature is not the only factor the models consider when simulating future crop yields. Higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have a positive effect on photosynthesis and water retention, increasing crop yields, though often at a cost to nutrition.

    Increases in temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase some crop yields in some places. But to realize these benefits, nutrient levels, soil moisture, water availability, and other conditions must also be met.

https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-affecting-crop...

https://climatechange.chicago.gov/climate-impacts/climate-im...

Here (W.Australia) we're busy trialing many wheat (and other) varieties for future use but its better to deal with AGW by reducing C02 (and methane and water vapor) in the atmosphere than by soft selling adaption.

Over threshold things are predicted to tip and get uncontrollably worse.

"Final Warning" "act now or it's too late" sounds like a late-night infomercial selling me something.

If I were running the report I'd try to write it in a manner that is scientific and thus emotionally indifferent to every outcome. Science doesn't care whether any special dies or not (humans or not). If you can't look at climate science with an indifference to the death of the species, you probably can't run statistics neutrally, which gives a lot of room for doubt (fair or not).

We’re seeing crop failure after crop failure. Whole ecosystems are collapsing. Tornados and floods are happening in places they had never happened in.

Europe and the US are going to be impacted way later than everyone else other than the immigration wave they’re going to have to deal with.

It’s a sick joke that the countries with the ability to do something about this are also going to be the last ones severely impacted.

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.

Also nowadays an El Nina more or less pauses the warming.

You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?

What I'm asking is: for the set of actions we have taken due to environmental policy that have led to reduced emissions, what is the effect of those policies compared to if we hadn't enacted those policies? For instance, if LED light bulbs and EV cars are a result of those policies, then where would be if we hadn't done that, and still had cryptocurrency mining operations?

In other words, how much have we bent the curve? Not compared to previous estimates, but compared to what reality would have been if-not-for?

Because, unless the argument is that these policies have actually had more perverse outcomes than beneficial outcomes, it's literally impossible that we haven't bent the curve. I'd like to see more reporting on how much we have bent the curve, because I think it would supply positive motivation.

The initial predictions at the time were for the situation then, but if the situation changes, the predictions won't become wrong, just outdated.

Not that far off from, "We're all doomed in five years," because we definitely did not stop using fossil fuels, and in my opinion, wiping out all of humanity would count as doom.

parent: > [...] they only predict that economic growth will be less because of climate change [...]

Why? Isn't economic activity a very good proxy for normal human life, good living standards, and the capacity to adapt to any conceivable challenges? Limited economic impact from climate change is arguably the most important and positive climate related news you could ever hope to see.

> I would rather follow "number of excess death directly or indirectly linked to climate change." I don't know if that can be calculated somewhere.

Excess deaths due to climate change, or perhaps a ratio of excess deaths relative to the total population, might be a great metric to consider. But how could one even begin to calculate this in a way that wasn't agenda driven? One could spin pretty much anything as directly or indirectly linked to climate change. Maybe you won't, but others will.

If there's bad political policies that screws over the global economy (possibly caused by the attempt to react to climate change itself) and masses starve to death the "experts" can spin it as "Economic pressures from climate change killed these people."

If there's government incompetence that poisons some water supply and kills a bunch of people the "experts" can spin it as "Pressures from a changing climate contributed to a reduction in the fresh water supply that contributed to mass deaths."

If there's some civil war that kills a bunch of people the "experts" can spin it as "Civil strife brought about partially from the social pressures caused by economic inequality due to a lack of climate justice caused this."

If there's any natural disaster that kills a lot of people the "experts" can spin it as "Continued impacts from climate change contributed to the massive death toll."

Voila, climate change directly or indirectly killed 2 billion people over some large time period, depending on how you count it.

Whether you agree with it or not, using that metric is going to feel a lot like Covid where both sides see the "other side's" statistical interpretation of reality as completely untrustworthy.

That will be a negative number.

Because "climate change" i.e. global warming will see increased temperatures and increased crop yields.

It seems obvious that there's a tension between economic activity (aka living in a somewhat developed country) and resource usage.