Paris Agreement thresholds crossed

>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 :(

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.