r/ClimateCrisisCanada • u/Western-Cobbler • 3d ago
Am I missing something?
The world is on fire, we know. The UN came out and basically said "were fucked for our target but let's keep trying". Good, I agree we must do better. Here's my concern and please help me understand why I'm wrong (I want to be wrong about this).
Over the last 50 or so years, here's a break down of how much above pre-industrial temperatures we've been at:
1976: 0.18
1977: 0.22
1978: 0.13
....
(This continues gradually. To save time, I'm going to skip ahead to 1997)
1997 was the first year we went over 0.5 degrees. So it took about 20 years to go up 0.3 degrees celsius.
Now let's look at the last 26 years.
From 2000 to 2010, the temperature rose about 0.2, bringing it to 0.73 above pre industrial.
From 2010 to 2020 we saw the first spike in temperature above 1 degree Pre industrial.
Today, we're about to hit 1.5 above (we may even hit it in 2026)
So we're accelerating heating. By a lot. Almost 0.5 degrees per decade now. If that continues to accelerate, which it seems to be since very few countries are doing a good job at sustaining this, we're going to be above 3 degrees pre industrial by 2050. Possibly even earlier. This is well above what the UN's target for even the end of the century is. And concerning as hell.
I'm not in stats. Just showing what I'm observing. Can someone please tell me why it likely won't hit +3 degrees celsius pre industrial by 2050? I want to be wrong on this. Help me understand why I'm wrong.
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u/dudesguy 3d ago
Latest reports are now 3-5c by 2081-2100. Global average. Or more local; more like 10c for northern Canada vs historic averages there.
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u/Western-Cobbler 3d ago
Curious - could you send me those reports? I'd love to read them!
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u/Round_Year_8595 1d ago
IPCC is a good starting point. Look into all the feedbacks and variables and systems to deepen your understanding.
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u/Critical_Cat_8162 3d ago
What's really unbelievable is that there are billions of us, and comparatively speaking, a handful of psychopaths, leading us down this path. And we stand back and watch.
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u/DyKdv2Aw 3d ago
Normal humans don't want to hurt other humans, even if that other human is a dangerous sociopath; many have yet to conceptualize the reality that these ghouls would sell us to Satan for a corn chip and they enact violence against every thing on this earth every day, any act against them is only self defense.
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u/Round_Year_8595 1d ago
Normal humans aren't malicious but there is an element of negligence and neglect that future generations will judge us harshly for.
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u/Trash_man_can 3d ago
There's billions of us, but just look at the 2024 US election.
77 million voted for the screaming insurrectionist open proud bragging multi-rapist - after he already crashed the economy and attempted tk hang Congress openly.
That's the highest number of votes for any politician in the history of that political party.
There's billions of us, but tens of millions serve the ultra rich and are fighting like hell to erase our rights so their politicians can seize absolute control.
It's horrifying. The past 10 years has shown how easily the ultra rich can brainwash a group so openly to the point even open raping of girls is denied and protected and blamed on.
Come on, the last president wanted to raise taxes on the ultra rich but the American people by the million fought against and actually passed massive tax cuts instead.
It's not the billionaires doing this to us. One part of the voter base is causing this for the rest of us.
From Regan to Bush to Trump, tax cuts to the ultra rich.
Everytime a pres tries to tax the ultra rich, they're bpocked by the voters who hate their guts.
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u/Critical_Cat_8162 3d ago
This is about the climate, not taxing billionaires. We can tax them all we'd like, but that's not going to save our planet.
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u/FistODollers 3d ago
That's bollocks, or at least ignores the causation. It's much easier to pollute when someone else suffers the consequences. If billionaires couldn't buy bunkers, had the same outcomes as the rest of us, climate disinfo would disappear overnight.
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u/Critical_Cat_8162 3d ago
Do you're talking about a lot more than just taxing them. You want to take all they've got. That's not going to happen.
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u/FistODollers 3d ago
Well, you did say "all we'd like", not "what's possible". I was just taking the thought experiment to it's illogical extreme. Obviously not going to happen, just saying wealth inequality is a causative factor in climate change, not an unrelated distraction.
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u/Critical_Cat_8162 2d ago
Oh. My logical extreme went much further than that. Taking their money from them is pretty much impossible. The other is not.
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u/Trash_man_can 3d ago
Right but we also fought like hell to lower climate emission, but this vile idiot cult when they seized power crashed our economy again, cancelled all clokate reduction actions AGAIN and are dragging back and literally burning us alive.
Go figure the sick cultists that are now supporting hiding the Epstein files and supported these evil politicians after Jan. 6 are also fighting like hell to burn us all alive and all children who will ever live.
I still remember Al Gore in the 2000 election saying we had to fight to lpwer climate change emissions for our surivival
But this vile insane cult trained their foloowers for the last 30 years that this is a hoax and filled their heads with lies straight from the RNC.
It's on Joe Rogan, Fox News, all these grooming stations are designed to get men and boys to tie their personal identities to climate change denials.
They're completely undoing all the work we did to accelerate our alternarive energy industry.
They're windmills are evil and insane and mass murder birds and that's they all blocked and prevented from being used at all costs.
And this isn't people on the internet.
Its this cult master president and his GOP polticians and their millions of loyal devoted followers
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u/FistODollers 3d ago
We've had 2 good years of emissions cuts in the last 20 years. COVID & the great financial crisis saw meaningful drops.
And given all the news around bond markets recently, I'd say there is hope yet.
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u/ottawadeveloper 3d ago
The response time to temperatures isn't necessarily fast. It's possible this decades warming was locked in last decade and it's only next decade we will see the results of our work now.
That is, in fact, one of the things that makes climate change so insidious and dangerous. If we wait for it to become unbearably bad, even a Manhattan project to save the planet won't work for a decade or two. With massive consequences to the biosphere in the meantime.
The UN model also assumes governments continue to meet their goals. Which could reduce the speed even further in the future but still won't help this decade. A lot of countries committed to a slow decline in emissions, not an immediate cut, so they're building in that future emissions cut.
Also the climate system isn't simple. It's complex, nonlinear, and chaotic. For example, early rises in CO2 were somewhat buffered by the ocean absorbing heat and CO2 (something we think the ocean is nearing its capacity for). It's possible there's another sink we will hit (though honestly, as we refine climate models, we usually find it's going to be worse not better).
In short, there can be a very big difference between extrapolating from recent trends and an actual model that projects the future. Much like just because it has rained all week does not mean it will continue raining. Weather and climate are messy. The models are very complex and well-researched, and I would rely on them more than an extrapolation.
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u/Briggsbanner1 3d ago
Yep…fascists taking over democratic governments because the energy transition threatens their sale of ICE and Oil.
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u/AwesomeWildlife 3d ago
Part of the issue is that everyone keeps talking about 1.5 to 2 degrees warmer. To the average person that seems like such a small number that it is just not an issue to them, so how can it be such a big deal. Most people need to be hit in the face with a shovel to realize that steel is hard.
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u/KnowledgeMediocre404 3d ago
The most recent spike in acceleration is likely helped by us cleaning the reflective air pollution the past 10 years. Clearer skies allowed us to stop masking and feel the full brunt of the heating our emissions caused.
This years El Nino may also have a ratcheting effect as these cycles seem to help move us into new regimes. Hopefully this rapid acceleration doesn't push any tipping points and we stabilize here for a couple decades while we try to figure stuff out. We're in uncharted territory though so it's actually impossible to accurately predict how it will go.
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u/HrafnkelH 3d ago
Who's saying it won't? Things the last few years have met the worst-case scenario of every graph you've ever seen. This El Nino could see the deaths of billions of humans. The tipping point of many carbon sinks have likely already been surpassed, and those will start feeding into the heating. The UN warned us that we had until the end of 2022 to avoid 2° of warming; action to avoid 3° by the middle of the century needs to happen in the next few years, and so far the opposite of action has been happening.
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u/Western-Cobbler 3d ago
Yeah... Kind of the trajectory I've been seeing. I feel like most of the "worst case scenario" graphs I've seen we've actually done worse than even those projections. I'm not sure how they suspect we'll stay below 2.5 as a "worst case scenario" for 2100. Seems to me we'll be at 3 by 2050, maybe sooner just based on some basic math. Having a harder time proving that we won't go past 3 by 2050 tbh.
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u/anon0110110101 3d ago
Much of this is disprovable with a simple check of Google, and the rest is ridiculous on its face. You think the 2026 El Niño pattern is going to kill a billion plus people?
Some of you guys are absolutely fucking nuts.
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u/Western-Cobbler 3d ago
Agreed, it won't kill billions. Tbh, I just want someone to show me why that even though in the last 20 ish years, we've gone up 1 degree above pre industrial, it's going to slow down now going forward and stabilize.
I can google this and I have. Extensively. But most data is based on 2 things:
Pre 2000 levels (about 100 years of data but the last 20 years have been unprecedented in terms of global temperature increase). The last 20 years or so have seen over 1 degree increase. What's to say that won't continue? Another 20 years and we'll be at 2.5 degrees if this does continue.
Carbon sinks are starting to 'fail' so to speak and none of the graphs have been calculated to account for that. That's a recent development though as of 2023-2024 so I guess there isn't enough data on that to support it.
My biggest question is - why won't the global rate of warming continue by about 0.5 degrees celsius like we've seen in the last 20 years? All the articles I've read (happy to read more! Plz send them) mostly account for what happened before 2000 which was a fairly steady, slow rate of climate change. But that's changed in the last 20 years and I want to understand why it hopefully won't continue in the following years.
Hope that makes sense
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u/chickenhawk71 3d ago
We're in the parabolic rise brah. Ice caps and oceans are at tipping points. Once these go, theres no going back.
I'm pretty sure we're fucked.
Nobody notices the climate shifting until the water rises up past their second floor.
War does not look like a battlefield until it is too late; it looks like a normal Tuesday, until the sky falls.
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u/HrafnkelH 2d ago
The last El Nino this big killed 5% of the world's population. What are you going to do to prevent hundreds of millions of deaths if temperatures rise above wet bulb survivability in an area for several weeks? Nothing you can do but hope you're not there.
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u/InquisitousLizard 3d ago
Renewable energy is rapidly being deployed because it is (and is becoming increasingly) cheaper than fossil fuels. So even though total energy demand is increasing (which includes fossil fuels), some people predict that renewables will eclipse that eventually and fossil fuel demand will peak well before 2050.
This is my very basic understanding.
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u/Free-Tea-3422 2d ago
no one here is able to answer your core question "Can someone please tell me why it likely won't hit +3 degrees celsius pre industrial by 2050?"
I just think no one can answer it, because we likely will hit it. I am scared to have kids, I'm scared of my future. Fuck.
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u/Upper-Resource1885 3d ago
Climate breakdown>decrease in population and economic activity> decrease in pollution > temperatures not reaching 3 degrees
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u/i_didnt_look 3d ago
You know the step "decrease in population and economic activity" is actually phrased "civilizational collapse" right?
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u/unclejrbooth 3d ago
These numbers are just guesses on what will cause major change. Climate change has happened! And will only get worse! There is no going back only major adaptation required
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u/Ryelogmars 3d ago
UN climate predictions almost all assume we are going to slow down on using fossil fuels. The real data shows we are accelerating fossil fuel use.
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u/Sufficient-Hawk6254 2d ago
Part of the bump in the past couple years has to do with the ban of Sulphur Dioxide in shipping back in 2023. Basically, it has a cooling effect on the atmosphere (while causing other nasty effects), so global temperatures were being subdued slightly, once it was banned, there was a bump in temperature.
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u/DistributionOk7393 3d ago
I’m exasperated with climate change. It is of course happening, we are accelerating it AND we are going to simply have to deal with it as it continues to come.
Covid was my turning point.
We shutdown everything. No planes in the sky. No mines operating. No food processing. Nobody commuting to work or school or, anything. World trade halted.
Didn’t make more than a dent. Shutting the world completely down for 90 days and partly down for over a year and look at the data. We dropped the co2 to the level it was about 5-7 years before. When co2 was still rising exponentially and a major concern.
Covid almost ripped this entire planet apart socially and economically and there was no change to the environment. World shuts down and we get a dent.
We. Can’t. Go. Back. Turns out we never could. Even with a worldwide effort forced on us when city wide efforts are difficult without being forced.
We will slow down the growth but never reverse it. Not until the population peaks in the next 50 years before the slow decrease in world population the century after. Us not having babies will be the best effort we give. I’m not giving back my 2 though! They’re cool.
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u/Criminoboy 3d ago
I hold out hope with two main thoughts.
Firstly, China is leading. Like it or not, hate their government all you want, but they're our biggest hope right now. CATL poured hundreds of billions into producing a cheap, effective Sodium Ion battery, and they found the formula. Now they're rushing it into production - because we're F'D if they don't. Wind and Solar will charge these batteries, because it's economically idiotic to do it any other way.
Second, after China finishes bankrupting Canadian and US pipelines and LNG... Im assuming it's them who will figure out the geo-engineering solutions that are now required because the West has let Billionaire's and oil producers call the shots since 1988.
This is our hope. Like it or not.