Oh I know this one. You can tell the scientists the answer is “yes”.
No looking in the back of the book, cheater.
We’re on the vertical part of the graph now. CO2 concentrations for the last 800k years. We’re fully 25% over the maximum free CO2 over that period. Investments in extraction are still accelerating. Atmospheric methane, while shorter lived, is at the highest we’ve ever seen.
Climate averages are based on 30 year moving averages, generally. But there’s every reason to believe we’re into the hockey stick now. You can’t simply put away atmospheric carbon that took geologic processes millions of years to sequester and we’re not even slowing down. Even while regenerable sources take up a larger proportion of power generation, we’re not drawing down the bad sources. We’re just increasing our capacity for power consumption.
Relevant bits:
As extreme as this year’s temperatures were, they did not catch researchers off guard. Scientists’ … 2023’s heat is still broadly within this range, albeit on the high end. … one exceptional year would not be enough to suggest something was faulty with the computer models … Global temperatures have long bobbed up and down around a steady warming trend because of cyclical factors like El Niño … has intensified since, possibly signaling more record heat to come in 2024. … “I’m not willing to say that we’ve ‘broken the climate’ or there’s anything weird going on until more evidence comes in.” … Until the current El Niño is over, “it’s unlikely we’ll be able to make definitive claims,” he said.
Researchers know we’re screwed, so saying they weren’t caught off guard doesn’t make me feel better.
Yep. Hunting for the drama of a surprise or models being wrong is pretty dumb stuff at this stage.
There’s almost an air of owning the scientists by fucking the climate even harder than they understood.
Apocalyptic climate changes on schedule.
I’d say probably since we stopped dumping sulfur compounds into the atmosphere using all of our cargo ships
Think this may be relevant to that hypothesis:
And in a much-discussed report last month, the climate researcher James E. Hansen argued that scientists had vastly underestimated how much more the planet would warm in the coming decades if nations cleaned up aerosols without cutting carbon emissions. Not all scientists are persuaded.
Beyond the accuracy of the Sulfur aerosols theory, the interesting part in the linked video is the stuff about geoengineering.
Which basically said that if aerosol pollution was accidentally keeping the planet relatively cool and so holding off climate change which is actually at a worse level than we thought, then it raises the unavoidable point of whether we’ll be forced to continue to employ geoengineering in our fight against climate change however uncomfortable and dangerous the prospect is.
Green’s opinion on the video is that there’ll be a lot of resistance but that we’ll probably be directed to in the end and so the more we prepare and think about it the better.
Yes, the article mentions that:
This year, aerosols have been of particular interest because of a 2020 international regulation that restricted pollution from ships
Now this is an avengers level threat!
Spoiler:
Yes
I just drove across BC and the only time my tires touched snow was Rogers pass.
