Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
The thing that doesn’t get called out enough is that many greenhouse gasses have a lag time before they actually start causing heat. CO2 for example takes about 20 years if I recall correctly. So we are seeing the results of what was emitted years ago… not necessarily the current emissions.
Really? I’ve never heard of this, and I’m a climate scientist… Not saying it’s definitely wrong, but a citation would be good.
Edit: Huh, seems it’s true: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001 although that is for large pulses of CO2, I don’t know how that translates into a constant stream of emissions…
How fucked are we?
My intuitive answer is that the collapse of globalised industrial society seems fairly likely (as a result of the end of cheap liquid fuel if nothing else). What that looks like is highly dependent on how we respond - it’s not a climate problem, it’s a social problem.
I don’t think humans are going to go extinct, but a population crash seems likely. And we’re taking out a tonne of other species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis