You could compare it to COVID. Scientists/actuaries/etc. knew right away that it was going to be an unforgettable disease. And we played at guessing the death toll here on the AO. 10k? 100k? 1M? 10M? Others (conservative pundits and politicians) pretended it wasn’t happening, even when it was happening in real time.
Then the window of uncertainty narrowed, and it became what it is-- just a shitty thing that has happened, and that we probably could have handled better. Not the end of the world, but also not nothing.
I’m not sure why any of this is surprising. It matches oil company suppressed findings and predictions they did in the 1980s.
People have been trying for 20+ years (almost 40 if you go back to the original congressional hearings in 1988) and we still haven’t moved on to the “Now What” phase.
The identification of the problem goes back a lot further: extract from Wikipedia is below. When I became involved with environmentalism in the 1960’s my focus was on clean air and water: alarm over warming was not on most folks’ radar until later.
“The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth’s energy balance and climate. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing.”
There’s a recent Financial Times article on Global Warming that sounds interesting based on snippets the author is posting on Twitter, but unfortunately is behind a paywall and that pdf trick didn’t work on it. If anyone can gift an article, I’d like to read it.
The gist of the article is that we are emphasizing the wrong numbers when we talk about an average rise in temperature of 2 degrees C. The increasing average is driven by increasing extreme events, and we should focus more on the increase in extremes rather than the straight average increase.
Some pieces he’s shared on Twitter.
Searing heat is killing hundreds per year in AZ. Granted over this whole period population has gone way up, but that recent uptick is striking.
The number of extreme heat days in major metro areas has grown significantly in recent years:
I like the second graph as it is less prone to things like changes in how causes of deaths are reported. That said, one does need to be careful in analyzing temperature trends. I know in some cities they used to measure downtown and now it’s more common to measure at a major airport. Which actually would understate a warming trend since downtown will virtually always be warmer than out by the airport.
But even with that imperfection in the data, it’s usually just a one-time switch that will have a very small impact on the data, and as I said, actually understate a warming trend.
The serious climate effects are much closer than people think.
Once you enter the tails of the distribution (which we have now due to 1.5C heating), the effects of further heating are magnified. (Analogous to the effect of moving from the 99.6th percentile to 99.7th percentile of the distribution being much greater than moving from 99.1 to 99.2 due to larger scaled impacts)
I don’t like how “extreme heat” is 30C (86F). I would call that “pretty warm”.
I would rather define extreme as maybe 40C (104F), which London has had one of.
I do like the focus on extreme events. Though it’s just hard to aggregate effectively. Counting heat-wave deaths is a good way to do that. Heat waves really didn’t used to be a notable “cause of death”, and now they are.
On the other hand, it’s confusing because we could adapt to some heat waves. For example, Phoenix (which has now had 25 days in a row of 110F), doesn’t need to be a growing city and well known golfing hub.
It’s also tough because if we’re talking about extreme weather I want to include hurricanes, floods, and droughts. All of which will have a bigger impact on the future. But are hard to estimate.
and maybe we should be moving closer to “Now what?”
