Paris Agreement thresholds crossed

https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/08/paris-agreement-thresholds-crossed.html

by doener • 2 years ago

86 86 2 years ago

arctic-news.blogspot.com

delichon• 2 years ago

In the first graph, the "Lowess Smoothing" line seems to me to not intuitively be a smoothing of the "No Smoothing" line. Is that just me, does it look like a good fit to you? Maybe "local polynomial regression" is not a good way to extrapolate from a low number of widely scattered plot points.

timmg2• 2 years ago

I think a lot of "smoothing" algorithms don't work at the ends of the data. Smoothing usually takes in past and future data. At the end of the graph there is no future data. (Maybe that's not the case for this type of smoothing?)

I've always thought the smoothed line should be truncated (so that it doesn't show present-day estimates where data is lacking.)

partitioned2• 2 years ago

It depends on the type of signal. If it's non-linear and chaotic, sure. If its periodic, or has sustained trends, this approach is the basis for most engineering and science.

crubier• 2 years ago

The signal is very noisy, but there is much more past data that is not shown on that figure, supporting the trend line. The trend line is not just fitting data visible on the time interval of the figure, but also fitting past data.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

It's much worse than that, since the next paragraph completely negates that finding with "the anomaly has been at about the same level for over the past 13 months".

And then there's the next graph. A bit confusing because it uses a different baseline, but where you can see the very recent trend becoming horizontal. (And can't really see any early trend because you can only distinguish 2 years.)

Honestly, I'm not sure what to take from that article. But after a needless sensationalistic introduction, I don't think I can take it at face value.

An edit: here's a much clearer view of the anomaly, from a different source, with yet a different baseline:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/temperature-anomaly

Very recent values have a really large error bar that the source on the article shouldn't have. But you can't use one to fill the missing data on the other.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

The image below, created with NASA data while using a 1903-1924 custom base, illustrates that the temperature anomaly through July 2024 has been above 1.5°C for the past 13 months.

Surprise to no one.

The way things are going I believe we will hit +2c by 2040. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living, it is human nature. Because of that, many of the young will be forced into a bad condition.

The only thing that could probably stop this, but will be just as bad, is a Yellowstone Event :(

voisin2• 2 years ago

No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living

How about we just get out of the way of renewables? Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment.

oezi5• 2 years ago

Absolutely right!

It isn't really clear that fundamental and drastic changes to lifestyle is needed. It just needs some investment in climate friendly energy technologies. On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.

This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.

Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive.

mezyt• 2 years ago

Many jurisdictions are downright hostile and obstructionist for any renewable investment.

Right, as long as energy prices are not guaranteed no one is going to invest massively. No one want to be the one having to eat up a 8000$/mwh price like in Texas in the Winter. The 3 month mean volatility of energy prices in Europe is 350% (with peak of more than 1500% in 2009 and 2021). For comparison Bitcoin volatility is 54% in the last 10 years.

ximus• 2 years ago

at this point we should be pulling on every thread. Individual change is one of them, it should be promoted as well.

The amount of frivolous waste I observe at the individual level, multiplied by the millions, is not insignificant.

melling• 2 years ago

“No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living”

Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?

In 2024 why are we worried about AI using too much electricity? Because we never decarbonized the grid. 25 years of saying “let’s use nuclear power “ was shot down. Not to worry, global peak fossil fuels by 2030.

vlz5• 2 years ago

Please explain to me, why individual sacrifice is not a solution to the problem. I really am interested what people are thinking here. Naively it would seem that individual sacrifice is surely one possible (though certainly not the only) solution or at least an important contributor. Simply because less consumption directly translates into less greenhouse gas emissions. However, a lot of people dismiss this out of hand. I never fully get why.

moreofthis• 2 years ago

> No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living
Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?

Not the OP, but I think the statement holds even when talking about systemic solutions.

We're reaching breakpoints with climate change faster than expected, and we only started to decouple _some_ country's economic growth from CO2 in the last 10 years or so. Even if we can in theory decouple growth from CO2 completely (or near completely) and in so doing maintain the standard of living we enjoy in the global north, in practice we aren't doing it fast enough.

If we want to get emissions under control fast enough to not hit 2 degrees of warming I think it's reasonable to say that the solution will involve a reduction in some standards of living, and that is something no one wants to say because of how hard a sell it is.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

Here in Germany lack of individual sacrifice is absolutely a big part of the problem. NIMBYs protest the construction of new transmission towers at every step because "it ruins the landscape". And when the power company caves in and decides to burry high-voltage transmission lines instead the NIMBYs still fight them because the waste heat might turn some grass brown and reduce some crop yields. The end result is that when there's lots of wind in the North of the country the South still has to run coal or gas plants because we can't transport enough electricity across the country. And don't even get me started about the silly opposition to wind energy, and regional politicians that make ridiculous minimum distance laws to appeal to those voters.

I'm not demanding that everyone only bikes to work and lives off their garden and locally grown produce, but it would be nice if we could all agree on a level of personal sacrifice that involves not sabotaging the decarbonization of the grid for selfish reasons.

flessner• 2 years ago

We are at the point where the energy grid is hampering EV adoption and technological (AI) progress - optimistically there is a real economic incentive that renewables will pick up the pace now, pessimistically it's too late.

delfinom• 2 years ago

We have been working on decarbonizing the grid and were making great progress.

In 2024, we now have coal plants being restarted to power AI and cryptocurrency datacenters.

ZeroGravitas• 2 years ago

Or maybe, for those not totally lost to climate change denial propaganda, there was always low hanging fruit that would have made our lives better and saved money and we just didn't do it because of climate change denial propaganda?

Insulating houses?

More efficient hybrid cars?

A carbon fee that is returned to the people, mildly diverting the market incentives towards cleaner, greener while putting money in ordinary people's pockets?

Fixing pipeline leaks, moving from coal to methane, from gas boilers to heat pumps, solar water heaters, better urban planning, public transport, modern agriculture, recycling food waste, better landfill design, the list goes on and on.

Imagine the head start we'd have had, and how the market for solar wind and batteries would have been expedited. But no, we spent decades pretending there wasn't a problem and that those who believed there was a problem were Marxists trying to undermine capitalism.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Global peak CO2 is expected in 2025, not 2030. It's not enough, but it is progress.

_uhtu• 2 years ago

There is no real prospect of a "Yellowstone event": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts

We could effectively geoengineer one by pumping things into the upper atmosphere ourselves, but there's a lot of questions about that and we have no idea if this would help more than it hurt.

brightball2• 2 years ago

Is it possible this is temporary?

https://eos.org/articles/tonga-eruption-may-temporarily-push...

vladms2• 2 years ago

The standard of living is something very dynamic though. It's more about perception than anything.

It's normal that people want "better" than what their parents had, question is what is "better". If lots of people would see "better" (for example) as "less polluted town, where you enjoy walking" and NOT "more place to be in your car", things would fix themselves given some time.

My favorite example: why did Netherlands adopted bikes? Because there were killing too many children with cars (ref: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...)

Nowadays there are many opportunities (high speed trains to replace some flights, e-bikes to allow bikes in non-flat cities, insulation to reduce heating, rather cheap renewable energy), so it's not all lost UNLESS people want specifically something very bad (exaggerating: "I love my coal plan!")

xethos2• 2 years ago

Respectfully, your favourite example depresses me. Pre-2013 or so I would have agreed, but North America, when faced with "Too many parents are accidentally running over their children in driveways and parking lots", chose to mandate backup cameras instead.

FanaHOVA2• 2 years ago

Passenger road transport amounts for <10% of global emissions. Going on another tirade about using bikes instead of cars is just a waste of time.

brightball2• 2 years ago

It's entirely possible that this is temporary due to the Tonga eruption because what is being reported is exactly in line with what the study said was going to happen...temporarily.

Here is the study from Nature Climate Change in 2022.

"Tonga eruption increases chance of temporary surface temperature anomaly above 1.5 °C"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01568-2

gmuslera• 2 years ago

"Bad condition" is an understatement. We are already being badly hit by stronger, more frequent and more extended extreme weather. Massive heatwaves, flooded cities or cities running out of drinking water are seen as the new normal by now, and that was a process that took relatively few years. And that will be worse in ways that we might not imagine yet, even if we could label them as obvious in hindsight.

A higher global average temperature is not just a few tenths of degrees higher temperature in your normal day, it is the global climate system with a lot of extra energy, the triggering and empowering a bunch of positive feedback loops that push the change pedal down, and the impact that all of that have in other systems, like agriculture or economy.

It is a so complex system that the warming could even trigger an ice age, or quite the opposite of that, but in either case, it will be far worse than just bad for the people living through it. Disrupting a complex system we depend on is simply suicidal.

api2• 2 years ago

If we'd started converting coal power entirely to nuclear in the 1970s and not stopped, we'd have had a chance to avert this. At this point we can still maybe blunt the effect but it's too late.

The big thing is that if the US and Europe had gone fully nuclear by 2000 or so China would have copied that instead of powering its ascent mostly with coal. They're building a lot of solar, wind, and nuclear now but again too late.

Oil for land transportation had to wait until batteries were good enough for cheap practical EVs, but coal fired electricity generation is by far the largest single contributor and is the one that had to be phased out first.

locopati• 2 years ago

if we could have trusted companies running nuclear power plants, maybe that could have happened, but you can't combine deregulation with nuclear power and think that's going to turn out great for people.

fsflover• 2 years ago

This is FUD. Even with the worst entity running nuclear (The Soviets), the death toll is lower than for other sources.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Not much point in bemoaning what wasn't done in the 1970s. (I've done it myself, but it's not really productive unless someone solves time travel and the grandfather paradox.)

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

There is when most political groups making noise about climate are still against the technology that could have solved a lot of it.

oezi5• 2 years ago

No point in talking about the past. What is the best way forward today?

Investment in renewables seems to be the cheapest and best way to reduce Carbon emissions.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

Those governments that like to spend their billions in useless climate agreements could try doing something useful for a change and work out a carbon tax with punishment for defectors instead of putting random targets on a dart board.

Electricity generation is kinda of a solved issue, but a tax would really speed-up industry electrification and grid storage. It could also come with subsides for open-air capture and synthetic fuels, or maybe some direct spending on those.

lainga• 2 years ago

Sure there is. Many of the politicians from the past are politicians today. One of them is president (for the next 5 months).

RandomThoughts38• 2 years ago

If we'd started converting coal power entirely to nuclear in the 1970s and not stopped, we'd have had a chance to avert this. At this point we can still maybe blunt the effect but it's too late.

It's never too late.

I don't understand why people only want to see the social part of climate change and somehow refuse to look at it from a technical point of view. I blame ecologists for that because a lot of political movements which declare themselves ecologists actually have a social agenda which is not related to ecology and there is often a weird, seemingly catholic inspired, moral overlay on top which emphasis sacrifice and suffering for redemption - completely pointless.

The fact is warming happens because we have put too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The obvious solution to this problem is to, first, stop adding more which is what we generally discuss, then, remove the excess - perfectly doable if costly and energy consuming today.

What we need is more research into how to efficiently scrub CO2 for the atmosphere and how to do it on a large scale. Defeatism is a waste of time.

RandomThoughts38• 2 years ago

I wish the submission was pointing directly towards the NASA data which are the interesting part of the submission. The rest is not very good. Arctic news critic of IPCC is frankly weird and misguided.

The whole point about what constitutes the pre-industrial baseline doesn't really make sense. The threshold of 1.5°C is completely arbitraty and was taken on the basis of the 1903-1924 base. Obviously, you can show a bigger increase if you go further back but that doesn't fundamentaly change the issue.

The point about ice cover decline is also weird. The IPCC regularly builds models based on the state of the art for climate modelisation as defined by its working group on the basis of publications. These models are not set in stone. If 2024 shows that ice cover was under taken into account during the last report, that will be corrected in the next (provided it was - I'm far from convinced).

The IPCC is not an observatory publishing warning, nor is it pretenting to be the sole authority about climate change. It is a group of experts publishing a synthesis of the state of the art and multiple models illustrating likely trajectories (note the plural - they publish multiple models). These models can obviously be criticised but at least they exist, are based on consensual science and state their hypotheses clearly. That's the strength of the IPCC.

mike_hearn5• 2 years ago

Maybe, maybe not. The Paris Agreement doesn't actually have a threshold: although it clearly intended to specify one, it's not worded precisely enough to actually do so.

Sabine Hossenfelder has done a video on the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dqz7P-mORs

Climatologists fight with each other in public over whether the threshold has been crossed or not. They often can't even give a straight explanation of their own position. Sabine shows a clip from a recent video call by Michael Mann where he presents a temperature graph that shows 1.5 of warming, but with a baseline of 1970. He claims the baseline doesn't matter and you can "quibble" over it! Unfortunately for Mann he's talking to someone who is switched on, and they point out that 1970 isn't pre-industrial so the Paris Agreement must have been voided years ago according to that data.

Mann gets confused, starts stuttering, starts scrolling through his Twitter feed, points to another graph with a 1970 baseline and then claims the true baseline is actually 1900-2000. Again the guy he's talking to calls him out on it, asking if that's 1950 then it's still not pre-industrial times? Then Mann claims the official baseline is "late 19th century" and there has been only 1.4 degrees of warming since then. The video ends with the guy in the audience saying "Now I'm totally confused", which is reasonable because what Mann is saying isn't internally consistent.

As Hossenfelder and many of the YouTube commenters point out, it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter. Those two positions aren't compatible.

matthewdgreen2• 2 years ago

There are dozens of ways to look at the increase in temperatures that make it obvious it’s happening. The fact that humans can find some way to quibble about the exact baseline measurement and then convince themselves they’ve done something useful, that’s more an argument about the intellectual quality of (some) people than any point you should be making to win some argument.

RandomThoughts38• 2 years ago

it's absurd to claim there's an important threshold of increase whilst also claiming the baseline doesn't matter.

Because neither is true and neither is claimed. There are no important threshold and baseline will obviously shift what you are looking at.

The threshold put forwards in conference (1.5°C or 2°C) are a communication device because it's easier to draw a line and explain that to people. They are only targets and are not the most important objectives set during climate conferences (the Paris agreement would absolutely not be voided by crossing 1.5°C by the way, that's nonsense).

The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.

mike_hearn5• 2 years ago

1.5 degrees is not only written into international agreements, it gets saturation media coverage. The UN claims that above 1.5 degrees there are multiple tipping points that get triggered. It's universally presented as being of critical import, whether you agree with that or not.

The fact is warming is obviously a continuous effect and the higher you go the more impact it has.

Are you sure that's a fact, or is it a communication device someone used on you? Look at the graphs Mann presents in the Hossenfelder video and you'll note that temperature increase isn't continuous, it's more like a step function with long plateaus, with the steps aligning with factors like El Niño.

The problem with making up scientific-sounding thresholds for communication is that it's a form of the noble lie and it always ends badly. As Hossenfelder points out, the fighting over whether this threshold was crossed or not is a "science communication disaster". It's like the manager who pretends the company will go bankrupt on December 10th if everyone doesn't ship the product by that date, when in reality no such bankruptcy will occur and he just likes seeing everyone run around in a frenzy, increasing profits. The people doing it believe it's justified but that doesn't change the core dishonesty of the approach and inevitably, when it's revealed that the claims are lies, they will assume all such claims from you are lies. Why fret about any deadline ever again once you discover one of them was fake?

southernplaces7• 2 years ago

I would make a cash bet with anyone who wants it that by, say, 2050, barring some major singular catastrophe like a nuclear war, a supervolcano or an asteroid event, the metrics of environmental and human well-being globally will be better than they are today, and that we also adapt with only modest, possibly even minimal suffering (demonstrable by solid evidence of a causal chain) from the warming we've already caused and likely will continue to cause in the intervening decades.

Climate change has its dangers, but it's not and need to be an extinction level catastrophe on the scale that much of the hive-minded preening, fetishism and virtue signalling here likes to claim in the comments. It's largely a gradual process that our extremely adaptive and innovative species will adjust to, just as it has to many other changes in history with far fewer technological and social resources at its disposal.

Also, the arguments about individual people feeling guilty for not doing their small part to effect global change on greenhouse gas output are idiotic. They're a misguided deviation of blame against those who it's easiest to browbeat for the sake of feeling morally superior (one's neighbors, friends, family and so forth) with no realistic mechanism for turning such brow-beating into a meaningful global change.

Historically, the big sea changes in social habits have been brought about by specific, personally and measurably visible incentives to adapt those changes, either positive or negative. If people and their societies will behave differently for the sake of mitigating global warming, they'd need the same sort of incentive structure, or a personally beneficial willingness to wide adaption of real, beneficial innovations which reduce some aspect of our environmental impact. Urbanization and industrialized agriculture are two imperfect but usable examples of this. Both reduce our destructive footprint to smaller percentages of the world's surface, and both happen because concrete self-interest, measurable on an individual level, drives them.

Paris Agreement thresholds crossed

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