1.5 is dead: How hot will the Earth get?
1.5 is dead: How hot will the Earth get?
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1.5 is dead: How hot will the Earth get? | Climate & Capitalism
2024 was the warmest year since records began being kept 175 years ago. According to the World Meteorological Organization’s latest State of the Global Climate report:
- Each of the past ten years set a new global temperature record.
- Each of the past eight years set a new record for ocean heat content.
- The 18 lowest Arctic sea-ice extents on record were all in the past 18 years.
- The three lowest Antarctic ice extents were in the past three years.
- The largest three-year loss of glacier mass on record occurred in the past three years.
- The rate of sea level rise has doubled since satellite measurements began.[1]
There is no room for doubt: Earth is getting hotter. The question now is how hot will it get?
Important to understand that these projections have in fact gone down in the last decade, due to the unexpectedly quick roll-out of solar and battery tech.
1.5 was never going to happen, but between
22.5 and 5 there's still everything to play for. And22.5 will look an awful lot better than 5.PS: realistically, 2's not happening either. But the point is that runaway warming is not a certainty and every bit of progress will count.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false
According to this paper, the paleorecord for our current atmosphere is 10° of warming. So over some period of time, in the future we will reach 10° unless the atmosphere changes before that point. We will reach an equilibrium at 10° hotter than preindustrial. That's based on today's existing CO2.
Eventually. There is a very slow lag time. The lag has confused a lot of the science also (because it makes change hard to measure and there are confounding factors). The response time to reach the full amount of temperature change is around one century!
Luckily, we can avoid the warming if we just remove the CO2 before the temperature rises.
Unluckily, we don't have the technology nor energy sources to remove the CO2.
Or, second solution space: geoengineering / blocking sunlight / other energy interventions that happen at a global scale.
Something I read 10,000 years ago talked about putting solar panels on bodies of water. We capture energy via the panels, and the panels cool the water via shading which helps the entire ecosystem of the lake to prosper.
This on large scale could be an aspect of a solution - not a solution on its own but a piece of the puzzle.
Then again, it’s not oil so, no.
The IPCC targets are for the current century. Predicting human technology or even human existence any further than that is a bit of a fool's game. And the rest of the planet will obviously go on without us, 10 degrees hotter for a while until feedback systems kick in. Having taken the hit to biodiversity.
But sure, that's interesting information.