this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Data from Climate Reanalyzer says that daily sea surface temperatures for January 2024 are higher than they were in January 2023.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’m honestly curious, what science suggests that our current climate models and projected warming are so widely off base?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Our measured data suggests that El Niño is only really a small variation in the rising trend of temperatures. In this diagram, you can see El Niño years as early spikes, of what would become the La Niña plateau a few years later:

Source

2023, as determined by the same organisation and with the same reference temperature, is at +1.2°C. Source

As such, it does somewhat jump beyond the trend so far, but so did 2016, and the hopes that 2016 was just a temporary high, that's now definitely been crushed by 2023.
That's why it would make sense, if it's actually already accelerating. That would explain why we're repeatedly seeing new highs by ever bigger margins...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Except according to that diagram 2016 was a temporary high, as we not only saw colder years since but the temperature tended to hover around the 2016 level, not constantly increasing at the 2015 to 2016 rate. If 2016 is a precedent, that than precedent is that the temperature should hover around 2023 levels for the next decade or so, not continue to increase at the same rate as we saw in 2023.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Oh, yeah, that's what I meant to say. Non-temporary high, as in absolute temperatures. I guess, I missed that you said "temperature increases" in your initial comment...