I don't find that graph scary at all, Marsden. It's just a lot of lines wiggling around some mysterious value. The only scary thing for me is that I don't understand much of what it presents. I was trying to recover the "easily accessible" data from the ICOADS several times in vain. Even if I got it, I still wouldn't know how much, so to speak, cooked it was, e.g. the WW2 cooling adjustment is just one of multiple questionable practices.
All I know is that Earth's climate is, in the first approximation, a heat and density-driven oscillatory system, which has natural multidecadal frequencies. That's why it's worth looking much farther into the past, and such data has been recorded by sailors since the Age of Discovery for practical and scientific purposes.
Having said that, I do believe in a destructive impact of human activity on the environment, but I'm not cheering up the morons destroying our cultural heritage (only Mona Lisa was fully protected in its "bunker" from the climate activist happening - at least that's what I learnt from an expert) or populist politicians and their cronies rubbing their hands to make a new "green deal". Why isn't 350 mln tones of plastic per year, massively disturbing the ecosystem in multiple ways - including the potentially massive impact on climate by inhibiting carbon sequestration, on the agenda? Because it would cost - not earn - money to do something about it. Why ultra-rich companies like DuPont can poison literally the whole global water system and get away with it? We still don't have instruments and executable laws to control and enforce the norms on pollution. Etc. I do believe in climate change, but I think the whole climate change debate is a toxic red herring with plastic in its guts. From enforcing EVs to reduce fossil fuel consumption to clueless farming policies - it reminds me of the centralised planning in USSR, driven by greed for money and power disguised as a socialist ideology. The more I think about it, the more it fits.
I guess you buy into some conspiracy theories at least to a small extent, kat, and that's too bad.
But if you accept that the wiggling lines actually represent what they claim to represent, and that the people who produced them made every effort to make reasonable adjustments to them to minimize one-off effects, then this gives us a little bit of a look at second order effects of global warming.
Now, the first order effects of global warming are undeniable (well, maybe some here would deny them, but no one who should be taken seriously): a greater concentration of carbon dioxide with the earth's atmosphere as your starting point raises heat retention; human activity -- particularly combustion -- releases an immense amount of carbon dioxide as compared with natural processes; and carbon dioxide concentration as measured over the last 75 years has been climbing.
So the earth's atmosphere can be expected with a lot of confidence to warm up.
But that's just the first order effect, and it's almost always the higher order effects that kill you. (Quants like to pretend that things can be reacted to instantaneously, so higher order effects can be ignored, and thus they might have trouble with this reality. But still.)
One of the second order effects is changing weather patterns. Some of them are predictable: the northern polar cold air mass becoming unanchored, for one. But local issues are matters of -- what was your term? -- "complex system dynamics." If we could count on d²y/dx² being constant for most considerations -- or better yet, negative -- maybe we don't need to worry too much about things.
But here we have the "North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly: 1982 - 03.21.24 (Difference from 1991-2020 Mean)," and it shows 2023's temperatures as a pretty seriously anomalous outcome ... and now 2024 is accelerating the anomaly of the prior year. I hope everyone here understands the significance, as well as the limits to the significance, of this.
That's just, essentially, a second order effect, though. What I think is the real danger to life as we know it, and a danger that is probably already a reality, is a tertiary effect: climate-driven refugee crises. Probably the earliest thing we will see in great scale is migration driven by the failure of glacial melt-dependent agricultural regions, and that ship has mostly sailed. Even Paul's postage stamp generator won't stop that.
And more to follow.
I don't get your tangential noting of other environmental issues. It makes little sense to me. I live in an area where we are advised not to eat fresh water fish caught locally more than once a month, due to age old mercury fallout from unscrubbed coal burning in the Ohio River Valley. It's bad, but we deal with it, and the origin of the problem is apparently mostly contained. And yes, plastic pollution is awful, but we can kind of do something about a lot of it, can't we? Global warming is a different animal; what we need at this point in addition to Paul's postage stamp generator is a means of carbon recovery that we can set thousands of those generators powering, and I don't see us rolling out significant capacity of that for decades even if we set our minds hard to it.Statistics: Posted by Marsden — March 26th, 2024, 1:25 pm
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