Bump…
Maybe when this issue directly affects people’s hobbies, things might get looked at.
Deniers will move to higher ground
Well, looks like my prediction of 2.5C warming came in slightly below the consensus of experts.
Seems we are headed for 3.0C of warming.
3C by the end of the century? Seems like we are on pace for 4C by 2050.
These articles drive me crazy (and I"m a believer). Science shouldn’t be decided by survey. It just makes me question whether they really know what they’re voting for (how did they decide between 2.5 and 3? is it meaningful at all to have a vote if the top climate scientists don’t agree about 2.5 vs 3? do those voting have the background to understand whether it should be 2.5 vs 3?).
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According to a recent poll of top-scientists, science polling is the best way to do science.
Really, I think polls are okay? Though I’d love to see a history of science polling. Or a controlled meta-study. Or something.
Besides global warming, you see this a lot with like “40% of quantum physicists believe in string theory” or whatever. Okay.
I think there is some value in building a consensus via when you are dealing with very complex dynamic modelling over many years.
Effectively, our current behaviors are an input into the modelled trend, which makes highly precise modelling very difficult. Its good to get a view of how various experts see those inputs, and how they have modelled the trends. You can also go back and see what the actual temperature increase was (going back a few years) vs what you expected (input wise), to see how accurate you were. You can then fine-tune the current modelling to account for this as well.
This is the rub about modern science.
Science’s objectivity means that in principle a single person can evaluate the evidence for themselves. However, science is now too specialized to be able to do this in practice. Instead, an entire community of scientists is needed to understand the full breadth of results.
My guess is that the range in opinions reflects the underlying uncertainty in the change in temperature. This uncertainty is not small, and is stated explicitly in confidence intervals on different papers. However, there are bottom limits on the increase in temperature, meaning we will see some increase.
Unfortunately, public policy IS done by survey. Knowing the differing ideas of the scientists and where they generally do agree can be useful in swaying public opinion.
Of course, it can also give deniers a “well the scientists just don’t know anything” out…
Are those the right lines?
I think you could easily conclude that the increase in the last 10 years should be the smallest 10 year increase we see over any 10 year period between 2014 and 2050 since annual emissions are still trending up.
Eh, still basically a line. It might bend a little, but not like bekham.
If you want to nerd out though, then you’d know that emissions are peaking around now.
Can you link to a source for this?
My understanding is that they are growing more slowly, but they are definitely still increasing year-on-year.
This is a problem now because the effects at the tail-end of the heating effect (1.5C+) are very volatile and non-linear. This is having negative effects of food production (for example), which is driving up prices for staples.
Those are also trends from 2015. I think 2016-2023 look steeper than prior years.
Maybe, how much of that is an artifact of COVID?
My casual observation on headlines almost always suggest warming is happening faster than earlier predictions. There are plenty of reasons why that may be media bias as well as hesitancy that results from researcher polling (who wants to be the outlier).
Note: I would not put money on 4C by 2050, but I would put money on “higher than the median”.
4C would lead to mass migration and hugely affected food production.
Definitely a cocktail for “military and societal conflict”.
Not much? The sanction on Russian oil is causing a little bump. But basically it’s the fact that China is starting to switch from coal to renewables. Last year, they built more solar than we have in our entire history.
Maybe. I can never tell if things like that are actually likely vs rare but concerning. My suspicion is that if we do hit some kind of tipping point, we will cheat and geoengineer our way out of it.
I think my biggest concern is that we got where we are now by luck more than effort, and it feels like we could get distracted by a war or a new dirty technology and blow it all, because we never really cared much in the first place.
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And this was just halted by the City of Alameda… Because they literally didn’t know about it.
Surprise! You just made the national news, because your cutesy floating tourist-museum is secretly conducting a science experiment so controversial that even Harvard couldn’t pull it off.
Oops, says the museum director, who has a BA in art history and an MA in museums, I was pretty sure that conducting top secret world changing experiments is in the lease somewhere.
I see renewables as the source of new supply in China, but a very slow reduction in fossil fuels. Similar pattern in the US. I believe the EU is declining.
India also seems to have peaked, but I only see early 2020, which is likely a COVID artifact. Africa still has a ways to go.
So maybe it all nets out to a relatively constant emissions level as 2020. Is the 2020 level baked in to the temperature trend, or is there a lag? Eventually ice caps melt and you have less snow to reflect the sunlight, so more warming will happen. How much of that is happening now?
I am sure there are climate models for all of this stuff and explanations, but I go back to the sense that we are generally wrong in consistently the same direction. and the effects are sooner or more severe than expected. I hope I am wrong, but I am not terribly optimistic.