Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[Typhoon Tip]

11 hours ago, chubbs said:

Here's a blog article on the "acceleration" paper that you linked above by a climate scientist who wasn't involved. Good discussion of what is known and not known about recent global temperature trends. Bottom line, we already knew that warming was accelerating; but, we don't know why with any precision which makes it difficult to extrapolate forward. Not a good position to be considering the amount of warming we have already experienced. 

 https://diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/07/for-a-rainy-day/ 

 

  

+That bold statement of yours is the very reason the world should be very afraid.   

It still does not resonate enough with people that enormity of raising an entire planetary system, air, sea and air-sea coupled, unilaterally, by a whole degree C, over span of time that is virtually instant in geological scales - but frankly, disturbingly fast even for the single life span of a human being. 

If that can happen without warning and those zero extrapolated expectation, ... good luck

[chubbs]

14 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

+That bold statement of yours is the very reason the world should be very afraid.   

It still does not resonate enough with people that enormity of raising an entire planetary system, air, sea and air-sea coupled, unilaterally, by a whole degree C, over span of time that is virtually instant in geological scales - but frankly, disturbingly fast even for the single life span of a human being. 

If that can happen without warning and those zero extrapolated expectation, ... good luck

There's no doubt that warming is accelerating. The blue line in the chart below is the warming rate over the previous 30-years using GISS. The 30-year warming rate started to increase at the start of the 2015/16 nino and has been increasing steadily since then. The latest 30-year warming rate includes a little over 10 years of faster warming and roughly 20 years at the slower pre-15/16 nino rate, so the chart is completely consistent with the 0.35/decade rate for the past 10 years estimated in the paper.  Note that it would take until 2045 for the current warming rate to be fully reflected in the 30-year rate, assuming it continues. When warming started to increase in 1970, the 30-year warming rate didn't stabilize until the 1990s.

The red line takes the current 30-year warming rate and extrapolates temperatures in 2050 under the assumption that warming will continue at the same rate as the last 30 years. The projection is conservative as the faster recent warming rate isn't fully reflected in the 30-year rate.  Warming will have to slow down somewhat to hit the latest 2050 number. Of course we don't know the future. The main factor determining 2050 temperatures is our emissions. The recent increase reflects increased man-made forcing as greenhouse gases continue to increase; while, cooling aerosols have dropped. We have agency, but our ability to influence 2050 temperatures decreases as more and more of our emission trajectory gets baked in. Our odds of staying under 2C are decreasing.